I wasn’t dodging anything. I read your position as saying that we don’t need to consider whether the benefits outweight the costs. According to you we should just dismiss the costs, dismiss the benefits (I saw you flipping the bird at ROI, don’t think I didn’t), and just throw our hands in the air and shout “What the hey, let’s just go into space already!”
xtime’s argument that space stuff invariably is worth the cost (and it won’t cost much anyway) is weak, but your argument is flipping unhinged.
Well, that was a definitive argument. Can’t debate those facts.
Look, we’re not going to have a sustainable presence in space by flying modules and provisions up in multi-stage rockets. There is no question in this. Nor will we be sending the Shuttle out to Io to mine for unobtainium. But there are plenty of resources in space that are readily extractable (i.e. you fragment small asteroids, and smelt and sift the debris for useful minerals) once you have an infrastructure to support such operations and the mature technology to perform mineral extraction in a freefall vacuum environment. There is nothing about doing so that is any kind of violation of physical laws. The cost and risk of doing so with extant technology is, of course, prohibitive…which is the entire reason to develop the basic tools and methods that will make this feasible.
It was once prohibitively expensive to extract aluminum from bauxite ore; the amount of energy required was enormous, and the metal was considered more precious than gold. (The Washington Monument actually has a cap of aluminum, it being regarded as so valuable even as late as the 1880s.) Today, we drink soda out of aluminum cans, then crush them up and throw them in the recycle bin where they are recycles at pennies a pound. (It’s still cheaper to recycle aluminum than to extract it.)
The same is true for resource extraction in space. Right now, to get a single ounce of iron from an asteroid would be ridiculously expensive; it would cost more than several pounds of gold. But once you have the capability to process hundreds of tons of iron, and send it downhill to Low Earth Orbit or to the Earth’s surface (cheap, if you don’t mind going slow and having a meteoric landing in an unoccupied desert or shallow ocean water away from a tsunami zone), it becomes very cost effective; you’ve paid the capital investment in tools and technology. Much of this, as with most space exploration, is probably done with a high degree of automation–you’re certainly not going to have guys in pressure suits hacking away at an asteroid with pickaxes–but that is true of conventional mining as well. And as terrestrial resources become scarce or inaccessible, the value of having resources that are essentially limitless and extracted without environmental impact increases.
The Spanish and Portuguese colonies were insanely profitable.
What on earth makes you think the colonies were not profitable from the get go? Pay off on such ventures was amazing.
Yeah, that landmass just south of Europe - Africa - it’s trade routes to the land of gold were controlled by a hostile power, the Islamic states, that was viewed as draining the Europeans dry. As were the trade routes to Asia. The Iberians were hopping here and there trying to find ways around the Islamic states monopolies.
Thus the age of exploration, of which the New World was only an accident.
I would think that meteoric landings will never be an option, insofar as anything big enough to be worthwhile will also create a nasty kinetic impact, and one mistake and one wipes out a town or a city.
You shape the payload into a large cone of the approximate OML of the Apollo capsule, and then use some of the slag to form an ablative heat shield. With some modest control surfaces and a cheap ACS system, you perform reentry just like you would with a manned capsule, save that instead of deploying parachutes to arrest the fall, you just let it impact at terminal velocity; say, about 200 mph. Since the payload is just a mass of crudely refined metal, its post-impact integrity isn’t critical, and the flight is completely controlled, on a trajectory that places it in a low hazard category (doesn’t have any flydown or debris patterns that make it likely to impact an inhabited area).
It is dirt cheap to bring stuff down from space, and a ready extrapolation of extant technology. The hard part is actually getting to it and developing the technology and methods to extract it in space.
What happens to all the bits you’re blowing/carving off the payload to make it the right size and shape? Gonna make it awful difficult to keep satellites in orbit if they’re constantly being peppered by bits of asteroid mining detritus.
For one thing, the US has a lot more people than 15th century Spain did, so I’d argue that it’s apples to oranges to compare the cost as a % of budget. I think a much more fair comparison is to determine how many average middle-class yearly salaries it would take to fund the mission. For Columbus’s three ships, how many salaries? I think 200 people is probably pushing it. For a $100 billion Mars trip, how many? Assuming a middle class salary of $50k, you need **2 million **people funding it. Was there even 2 million people in spain at the time?
For another thing, the Columbus expedition was considered to be an economical investment. There is no expected short term (or even a projected long-term) investment payout for a Mars mission. None.
Which is why you do the extraction and smelting in situ, and only send back the usable mass, using solar powered low constant thrust ion engines. (Since you are getting energy from the Sun and you aren’t in any particular hurry to get material back to Earth, the low efficiency is not a problem.) You can use water extracted from ice, or even finely ground left over slag as propellant, and build a reentry heat shield from reinforced silicates. The return intercept trajectory is shaped to place the load well ahead of Earth’s orbit, so if for some reason control is lost it will harmlessly pass ahead of the Earth, and then go collect it with purpose-designed space tugs to bring it to a reentry trajectory.
I think you missed my point - what happens to the non-usable mass? If we’re talking about near earth objects then some of the stuff will be captured by earth’s gravity, no?
It stays more or less where it is at. At worst, if it does remain in the sphere of influence of the Earth-Moon system, it will collect at the libration points. More than likely, any small amounts of mass that approach the Earth will be caught in a couple between the gravity forces of the two masses and be flung out into interplanetary space. It is no more of a hazard to satellites than the existing NEOs and debris. In fact, one of the technologies that would need to be developed is means to protect against impact while operating spacecraft in areas where dust concentrations are high.
Unless the pieces have precise thrust vectoring control…for the most part yes it is a strong NO.
NEO’s just get close to earth, they generally don’t have even remotely the correct time/space/velocity vector to get captured by Earth. The Earth has NO natural satellites besides the moon, despite being around for BILLIONS of years to aquire some NEO’s.
Unless you MOVE an asteroid INTO an Earth orbit before mining it, it aint going to be a problem. And even IF you did that, I suspect, the problem would not be nearly as bad as you would think offhand. Space is fracking big.
While Luna is the only significant real natural satellite, there are a number of “quasi-satellites” that are in resonance orbits, the largest and most famous of which is 3753 Cruithne, which is in a “horseshoe orbit” (i.e. it is in orbit of the Sun and “slingshots” ahead of the Earth and then falls behind). However, none of this accumulates in close orbit of the Earth in clouds or rings, owing to the interactions between the Earth and the oversized Luna, which tends to cause debris to either accumulate at the previously mentioned L4 and L5 libration (also called Lagrangian) points, or be flung out of the Earth’s sphere of influence. Stuff doesn’t just fall into Earth orbit naturally; as it comes closer, it picks up momentum that causes it to be thrown back out. In order to capture a body, opposing forces are required.
The discussion seems to be moving away from this, and really it’s kind of a hijack anyway. I’ll just say that I disagree with you that a ‘fair comparison’ would use compare the costs to the number of ‘middle-class yearly salaries’ needed to fund each mission. That’s, simply put, a ridiculous comparison, considering that I doubt Spain HAD much of a ‘middle-class’ in the 15th century. The expedition was funded by the crown, so a fair comparison would be to look at the total wealth of the crown vs the cost, and compare that to the total wealth of the US vs the projected cost of sending such a mission to Mars. What difference that there are more people in the US today?? The point is the relative costs.
So…unless it’s an investment with a potential future profit, it’s not fair to compare? Fine (though I think it’s a silly thing to state, frankly, and I also don’t agree that the investment payoff of going to Mars would be ‘None.’). Then use Strangers idea of setting up an outpost on a mineral rich asteroid with the intent of an eventual profit. Spend the same $100 billion on developing the necessary technology to send an expedition to a promising asteroid (or asteroids) with an eye to eventual exploitation. The $100 billion (or even $1 trillion) is still going to be comparable to what it costs to outfit Columbus’s expedition. As to the return, I’d have to say that, off the top of my head, there are going to be a bit more resources in, say, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, than there was in the new world…yes?
It cost a lot for Spain to explore the new world (they sent more than one expedition, for one thing…and not all of the ships came back). It took time for them to develop the things that were necessary for them to begin really exploiting those resources (including subduing the native populations, setting up colonies, setting up the trade infrastructure, lining up the labor, building the mines in some cases, and the other myriad things that they had to do to start working on repaying the initial investments, etc). It didn’t happen overnight…or in a year. Or 10. This would be the same. It would take years before such a large investment would start to pay off…which is why no one has done it yet. It’s not that it’s impossible…it’s that making such a long term commitment in capital is difficult to justify. And we don’t have a Queen to just reach into the royal treasury and make it happen.
Anyway, I don’t want to get in the way of where the discussion is heading.
Unsurprisingly, this topic is really in the news the past couple days. On the “manned mission” side of the argument, Neil Armstrong wrote a letter critical of the new plan, co-signed by James Lovell and Eugene Cernan. Related to the other side, my wife emailed me a link to NASA’s announcement about R2, the next-gen humanoid robot (of interest to me because I was in grad school for intelligent mobile robotics).
From what I can tell, this CBS news article, saying Obama’s plan is (eventually) to have a manned mission to Mars, is really a balanced overview for such a short piece. Of particular note to those worried about human-cargo rockets:
Which is consistent with what I said earlier – my understanding is that the Constellation project was a boondoggle. While we’ll have to wait to see how this pans out in the future, the new course seems to be the right one to me.
Oh, and I just wanted to explicitly say: Stranger On A Train – as always, thank you for your extremely informative posts.
Relative costs don’t quite capture the magnitude-of-effort to fund a mission.
Say my neighbor Bob is able to personally design, build, and pilot a spacecraft to Europa on his own. It costs him 120% of a years worth of personal salary to do so. Is this a big level of effort or a little one? It’s relatively big (for Bob), does that mean he shouldn’t do it? Does that mean it isn’t worth it? Obviously not. Bob’s risk / reward ratio is greatly in his favor. So was Spain’s. A hypothetical $100 billion manned mission to mars isn’t even close to the same level. As a country, the U.S would be risking $100billion, so the overall reward should be worth $100 billion. Relative costs are meaningless.
Yes, because if the investment pays out, the “cost” tab turns to “profit”.
And if the economics are there (or can reasonably expected to be there at some point in the future), I agree, it’s a good idea. We just need to do our homework first (robotic asteroid surveys) and I think the Obama NASA budget is probably going to give better tools & infastructure to do so.
The point is that Spain RISKED a lot more as a percentage of it’s total wealth on such a venture than a similar program to explore Mars would be a risk to the US. A hundred billion is, relative to the US’s total wealth, a drop in the bucket, especially stretched out over several years (as such a program would be). Spain didn’t KNOW that their venture would pay off…in fact, they didn’t know it would even come back. We don’t KNOW that an exploration of Mars would have zero financial benefits to the US. Besides, I conceded the point and pointed to a mission that WOULD put black ink eventually on the balance sheet.
The thing is, you seem to feel that I’m making a case that Columbus’s explorations have some kind of one for one parity with a possible Mars mission. I’m not making that case. I’m saying the costs would probably balance out (in fact, my WAG is that the US would spend less, as a percentage of our total wealth on such a venture than Spain did on their explorations and expeditions to the new world). Personally, I think that even if we never made a penny on such explorations to Mars, they would STILL be worthwhile, for the jump in knowledge and experience they would give us.
Maybe. As with a lot of things, I guess we’ll see. Personally, I won’t be surprised if this is just the first step on the road to eventually gimp NASA even more, and cut into the longer term unmanned projects as well as the manned one’s. I hope you guys are right, and that this will refocus NASA and set real goals that move us forward.
