Oolite Bulletins

A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.

http://www.space.com/15395-asteroid-min ... urces.html

Alternative topic title:

James Cameron and Larry Page looking into new careers as rock hermits!

About time someone started looking into this seriously.

Having worked in a company making welding machines and the consumables, I am aware that the world is facing a serious metals shortage. Asteroids are a potential near-unlimited source of metals that the world needs desperately.

Plus it would kick-start humanity's move into space, and hopefully push us into the path of colonising Mars in the medium to long term. We as a species need to become multiplanet, in order to avoid being wiped out by some catastrophe.

JazHaz wrote:

About time someone started looking into this seriously.

I was born two weeks before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, 42 years later, what have humanity done in space? Yes, lots of exploration by robots, and built the ISS. But no colonies on the Moon or Mars. Humans have not left low-Earth orbit since Apollo.

The space race has stagnated. This venture could be the kick up the pants that the space race needs!

I've posted this link before, but there's a similar venture planning on mining the Moon.

http://www.gizmag.com/gas-stations-in-space/20557/

Here's a thought

How do billionaires get to be billionaires? Being greedy. Is greed evil? Most people who aren't would say yes.

So a small group of evil people with the resources to do what they want to is going to bring a near earth asteroid into lunar or earth orbit...to mine it? Nice cover story Mr Drax. Is the group of companies named S.P.E.C.T.R.E? Is it April 1 today? Or is this the best cover story you can come up with to explain why that dense metals rich asteroid is being moved into proximity with the earth in a few years...and why is that asteroid on a collision course? Oops! Guidance thruster malfunction. How did that happen? I smell a new James Bond movie idea here.

And there's even an actual space station for Hugh Hefner and the playmates to hang out in until the chaos is all over.







Reality is often stranger than fiction...

I found this link on the Space.com website, think it's quite interesting, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Find out about how mining the asteroids could work, in this SPACE.com infographic.

Fixed the link for you there, JH... it was missing the l from html.

Oddly, mining on the moon has prospect. Helium-3 is fairly prevalent in lunar soil after heating the soil and capturing the gas. It would pay it's own way since it has several uses including lung imaging in the medical industry. Unfortunately, it's not really going to be put to good use because the countries with the technology to actually go and do, they're more interested in spending money on handouts to the lazy and governmental wage increases rather than actually *doing* scientifically beneficial things.

We've got a billion years on earth before the sun eventually boils off all the water on earth and all life dies, and there is absolutely nothing we could do to stop it. Yeah, it's a great big long time, but as is, we're doing jack squat to actually make use of that span of time. It might take every year we've got as a species to come up with and implement a viable solution. Apollo Era stuff, or even shuttle era tech, that's not going to cut it; any method that requires propellant fuels is going to immediately become massively overpriced. While we do have an almost unimaginably long time, we also have a truly unimaginable amount of problems to solve. Prob 1; How do we generate enough lift to move massive amounts of weight? To be viable, we'll need to fire off more than 3 or 7 people at a time. Prob 2; we're going to have to also simultaneously send foodstuffs, medicines, building supplies, etc. otherwise our people are going to be sitting there starving and freezing to death waiting on beans and boards. Prob 3; you'll have to convince probably two or three billion people who would rather see the money thrown towards people who haven't any reason to improve their situation since their situation gets them free government money. Don't count on it being an easy sell; most people in those situations feel it's all star wars hype because of small mindedness and stupidity about the facts at hand.

That's just the first three. Anyways, we've got bigger problems than we know as Mars isn't what I'd call habitable. I'm just an amateur (Galileo dropped out of the University of Pisa, thus making him an amateur too!) but something tells me, if there were enough water on Mars to sustain substantial life, the lake or ponds would be visible from long range, likely from Hubble. Rather than a place to live, it'd be more like the middle of the Atacama desert, only there are no lush areas at the perimeter. Just hot, dry, cold, dry and nothing much else. It's an island, and if we don't take it there, we aint gonna find it there. Unfortunately, unless we come up with a viable solution, only the very wealthiest could potentially survive, stockpiling a lifetime of supplies in lunar orbit and then 'moving house' to live with said supplies in lunar orbit. As of now though, the lunar prospect is risky as well as no scientist is sure how the moon would be changed by the sun growing up and dying to a white dwarf. In the end, it'd come down to individual action where a person desiring to live 20 years longer than the rest of his race would have to make it happen for himself, and even then, supplies dwindle, technology glitches, and it's a temporary solution. We need to start looking more than two or three elections or appointments ahead. We really need to start looking at what we're doing 500 generations down the road. Otherwise our accomplishments, small they may be, will have been wasted effort. Why venture to other planets, develop medicines, develop luxuries, if in the end it's all wasted because we lacked the vision to make other plans when our unofficial contract with the sun runs out and we're forcefully evicted?

Mining asteroids is a step, but I really have to wonder how long it'll last. Cameron is a bona fide explorer but with only his wealth and a couple more, it's not going to take long before the diminishing returns have him making second thoughts. I'm 26 and thus far, it seems that every day I have a new reason to doubt the intelligence of fellow humans. How can anybody of supposed intelligence, faced with the hard facts we have about the future of our own planet, still be against space travel?

Jaz, the saddest part of it all is that I read Andrew Chaikins Man on the Moon several years ago and that's what got me interested and intrigued by space flight, and when I got to the end of the book I was like "how stupid could we be to have made such tremendous discoveries and still abandon the project?" Little did I know a couple years later, the same morons would pull the plug on the Shuttle Program, leaving us in a position so that when a micro-meteoroid strikes one of our many satellites, or hits Hubble, we have to ask the Soviets to help us fix it. The Soviets. Nothing personal against anybody from the former USSR, but for cryin' out load, we need to be able to fix things on our own, so that other countries don't hold control over us. If we go back to war with the Soviets, or Japan, all they'll have to do is make a simple launch, dock with any of a dozen key satellites, and turn the damn thing off. No GPS for troops, no wireless internet for the troops, no radio contact beyond citizen band, troops be totally cut off because we (and other nations) have forgotten how to make a good war without the gadgets. Unfortunately, we've given the keys to our GPS control satellites to countries that we may be fighting in the next ten years. Theoretically, the GPS satellites could be reprogrammed quite simply to, instead of just going offline, hand in false information; telling ground troops they've traveled ten miles when they've only gone six, tell them they're heading west when they are actually veering north towards ambush, etc.

I don't try to live in the future, but I do see that for a job to be done tomorrow, we've got to start today. Waiting for a visionary to get the ball rolling isn't going to cut it. We've got to get moving towards solutions now while we're still not under heavy pressure to get it right on the first shot. As is, we're, to quote John Wayne, we're burnin' daylight.

And with that, I've gotten my rant out of my system. Thanks for listening, lol. Seriously though, I'm massively interested in all things related to space from simple LEO rendezvous techniques all the way to solving the biggest problems of Earth and the universe. I'm restricted from going through the university studies that I'd need to complete to be taken seriously by the fact that my work ethic is sucky and I'd rather get down the real problems rather than sitting in an English core class, lol. It is funny, Galileo was a drop-out, nowadays being a drop-out makes your words only slightly more credible than a drunk.

CapnSkweek wrote:

two or three billion people who would rather see the money thrown towards people who haven't any reason to improve their situation since their situation gets them free government money

We certainly do enjoy a good rant here, but it's advisable to be careful with inserting pieces of political ideology, especially if that ideology is ignorant, bordering on the non-sensical.

Try to inform yourself about the living conditions of two or three billion people who have no idea what the term "free government money" even means and how it is used in the ideological debate mainly in the US (which is a small country, compared to the rest of the world; and which has an ideological domestic political debate that is rather insignificant for the majority of the world population). They have no idea because they're struggling very hard to get by every day; and nobody—not their own governments, and not the US population which is far too busy with silly arguments—gives a damn about them; and certainly they have never received any "free government money".

(And by the way, even in the US and the rest of the developed world, "free government money" isn't "free"; it's tax money, it comes from taxes that are paid—among others—by the very same people who are receiving benefits, whether they're farmers, oil companies (although those don't pay a lot of taxes, or so I've heard), folks that have been screwed by their banks, the working poor, or jobless people.

And just as an aside, in some parts of the developed world outside the US what you're referring to isn't even "government money", but social security money; the social security system being an insurance system outside of the government.

And as a final aside, the "governmental wage increases" you're lamenting about are paying all the government employees at NASA and all the other places (universities, research institutions) that have been researching and developing the exploration of space in the first place. Are you suggesting that they should have been doing this work, which seems very important to you, without being paid their wages? So again, your argument seems a little non-sensical.)

Also, I used to think that we have rather five billion years ahead of us before the Sun turns into a red giant?

Having said that, I'm all for exploring the possibilities of space travel.

I wouldn't worry overmuch about the sun boiling off the earth: thanks to the trillions of dollars, pounds, euros, whatever we hose away every second on supporting the endless manufacture of weapons, it's much, much more likely that we'll moth ourselves long before the sun gets a chance to do it. If you want to cut back on wasted taxes, start there.

You're right, though, CapnSkweek, about the need to develop a better system of getting off-planet. Probably the best bet which doesn't involve any radical rewriting of the laws of physics is a space elevator. If NEA mining can be made commercially viable than that might give the impetus to start developing the technologies needed. Of course, the arguments about the dollar value of the metal contents of the average asteroid are slightly spurious: if one of these was successfully harvested, the price of nickel, platinum, rare earths etc. would plummet. But the availability of all those resources might provide enough economic incentive for further development.

As for colonisation of other planets, I think it'll probably be easier to adapt people to environments than to try to adapt environments to people. That said, there does seem to be a good chance that there's a lot of water on Mars, locked up as permafrost under the surface. Terraforming though is very long-term, and we're not, as a species, good at thinking long-term.

The universe, generally, is not a friendly place. We've had billions of years of evolution adapting us to life on this one little rock, with this particular atmosphere, soil chemistry, biosphere, etc. I think our best bet is to hope that some day we might be able to make some sort of other life adapted for living off-world, and send them out, and hope they remember us with fondness. Barring radical overhauls of physics I don't see that humanity has a future as a spacefaring species.

Disembodied wrote:

The universe, generally, is not a friendly place. We've had billions of years of evolution adapting us to life on this one little rock, with this particular atmosphere, soil chemistry, biosphere, etc. I think our best bet is to hope that some day we might be able to make some sort of other life adapted for living off-world, and send them out, and hope they remember us with fondness. Barring radical overhauls of physics I don't see that humanity has a future as a spacefaring species.

Which is a rather depressing thought, as it probably also applies to any other sentient species out there. This paints a picture of perhaps thousands or even millions of isolated pockets of intelligent life, all tied to their own planet or system, and never likely to venture any further.
There will never be a Star Trek/Babylon 5/Oolite? type Universe where species trade, mingle, fight. We are all alone in the dark.
</grim, miserable mode>

Smivs wrote:

Which is a rather depressing thought, as it probably also applies to any other sentient species out there. This paints a picture of perhaps thousands or even millions of isolated pockets of intelligent life, all tied to their own planet or system, and never likely to venture any further.
There will never be a Star Trek/Babylon 5/Oolite? type Universe where species trade, mingle, fight. We are all alone in the dark.
</grim, miserable mode>

Well, basically, the universe is not here for our convenience. But that's not to say we could not, using our brains, devise some other forms of consciousness – life, if you will – which is adapted to exist between the stars. They might not be our genetic children but they'd be our offspring nonetheless. We might hope that they could take those best parts of us, and leave the rest behind: could any parent really hope for more?

Smivs wrote:

Which is a rather depressing thought, as it probably also applies to any other sentient species out there. This paints a picture of perhaps thousands or even millions of isolated pockets of intelligent life, all tied to their own planet or system, and never likely to venture any further.
There will never be a Star Trek/Babylon 5/Oolite? type Universe where species trade, mingle, fight. We are all alone in the dark.
</grim, miserable mode>

Or perhaps we've already been contacted and told to get our planet in order to be eligible for the Galactic Cooperative membership drive...or face the imperial threat on our own.

http://youtu.be/QK-XATA-5gs

Disembodied wrote:

You're right, though, CapnSkweek, about the need to develop a better system of getting off-planet. Probably the best bet which doesn't involve any radical rewriting of the laws of physics is a space elevator.

Or perhaps a teeter-totter thruster?(Part 2)

http://youtu.be/9-tkxnYm-KU (Part 1)

http://youtu.be/3fRg9DiUaEo (Part 2)

Funnily enough, the BBC reported today on another possible solution to the costs of getting into space. The Skylon spaceplane project. This is an spaceplane that can use standard airports, taking off and flying like a normal plane, but with a hybrid air-breathing engine that acts like a jet and switches to rocket power at higher altitudes/speeds. If developed, it promises travel to anywhere in the world in four hours or to orbit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17864782