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bywolfheart111 ( 2496796 ) writes:
This Shits Looking all to real... :)
byAighearach ( 97333 ) writes:
I just wish they'd hurry up and start recruiting space miners to go to the asteroid belt.
A few million miles, a robot sidekick, and a cargo hold full of gold, what more do you need?
bySique ( 173459 ) writes:
There will never be much space mining in the Asteroid Belt.
●The whole mass of the asteroid belt is rather small, smaller than that of the Earth Moon.
●The asteroid belt consists mainly of the same stuff than the Earth Moon and the Earth's crust anyway, and the later have more of it.
●The energy required to move something from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth is so high that the cost will by far outnumber the possible revenue for selling the stuff. Even if you mine an asteroid consisting of pure gold or platinu
byK. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) writes:
The asteroid belt consists mainly of the same stuff than the Earth Moon and the Earth's crust anyway, and the later have more of it.
Just a simple comparison of 16 Psyche with our recoverable mineral reserves betrays your deception. Just because Earth has considerable amounts of iron, nickel and siderophiles in its core doesn't mean that they're easily accessible - they're in the fucking core! You're *never* getting to the core.
The energy required to move something from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth is so high that the cost will by far outnumber the possible revenue for selling the stuff. Even if you mine an asteroid consisting of pure gold or platinum, you will pay more for the fuel to get there and back than you can possible sell the gold and platinum for on Earth.
I would love to buy me some platinum from where you're buying it. Apparently it must be super cheap compared to the price of some methane and oxygen. I would, however, not wish to buy any of your math or physics t
bySique ( 173459 ) writes:
A quick back-on-the-envelope calculation reveals:
6 percent of the Earth's crust is iron (and another 0.3 percent is Nickel). That means that just in the Earth's crust, there is 500*10^15 tons of iron (and another 25*10^15 tons of Nickel). The whole mass of 16 Psyche is just 27*10^15 tons.
We have twenty times more iron and nickel within the first 20 km of the Earth's crust than the whole of 16 Psyche.
byK. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) writes:
More accurately, you have twenty times more widely dispersed low-grade oxides that would require fucking up the whole crust and atmosphere that we live on/in to get to than 16 Psyche has 90% pure metallic material. How much of your stuff is practically recoverable?
byreligionofpeas ( 4511805 ) writes:
We don't need that much iron and nickel that would require us to fuck up the whole crust or the atmosphere. Also, if you're going to invoke magical mining technology that you can get on 16 Psyche, we get to invoke magical mining technology that can cleanly extract metals from seawater, or a from a piece of useless desert.
byK. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) writes:
You mean the magical technology of picking up chunks of almost pure metal from the ground? :D Our distant ancestors had that. That's where they got their first iron, actually.
bySique ( 173459 ) writes:
Lets say, we managed to create one piece of the magical technology and managed to build the Space Elevator. From there, the escape velocity is 4.3 km/s. As the Space Elevator rotates with the Earth, we already have 3.0 km/s of that. So we need to accelerate our transport ship to an additional 1.3 km/s to get to 16 Psyche, and a returning transport ship has to decelerate from 4.3 km/s to 3.0 km/s to land on the Space Elevator. If we use the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, we get that ln (m_o/m_f) ~ 0.3 if we us
bySique ( 173459 ) writes:
Today's price is about $300 per kg of UDMH (rocket fuel). We need 500 kg per ton of iron, or about $150,000. The price for steel is $700 per ton. So the prices have to change about 200fold to make Asteroid Belt mining at least break even -- given all the magic of the Space Elevator, and vessel-less transport of propellant and mined iron.
bygodefroi ( 52421 ) writes:
Delta rockets run on hydrogen and oxygen. Atlas uses kerosene and oxygen. Falcon uses kerosene and oxygen. Blue Origin's smaller engine uses hydrogen and oxygen, and the big one under development uses methane and oxygen. SpaceX's new engine under development uses methane and oxygen. Soyuz uses oxygen and kerosene. Long March (other than 2) uses oxygen and kerosene.
Methane is somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.0025 per kg. NASA's numbers from 2001 say hydrogen was $3.66 per kg and oxygen was $0.16 per kg. Kerosene is $0.79 per kg.
UDMH is not a common rocket fuel. Other than Long March 2F and Proton, you don't see a lot of UDMH outside of upper stages (because it's ridiculously nasty stuff, expensive, hard to work with, and doesn't provide very good specific impulse. Really the only redeeming quality of the stuff is that it's hypergolic with various oxidizers.
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