Author Topic: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?  (Read 38205 times)

Offline Andrew_W

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #20 on: 08/20/2011 03:06 am »
I'd be happy to send you to Mars Mick, but I'll at least need some indication that there's a possibility of untold mineral wealth before we put feet on the ground, even if Mars is littered with gold, even at it's heady price these days, we probably wouldn't cover the costs. We need something there that cannot be obtained on Earth at a lower cost, anything spring to mind?

A resource that can be found on Mars that cannot be obtained on Earth at a lower costs: land that does not belong to any government, and is safe from sovereign intervention.

As for the need for this "resource":

A week ago I heard about some millionaires giving money to a group planing to found an independent libertarian floating island society.  (Insert Andrew Ryan joke here) And if one of these "plans" has surfaced to my attention un-looked for, there must be many groups that wish to found their own society according to their own rules, and could take advantage of this resource Mars has to offer.

But haven't you just refuted your own claim that land cannot be obtained on Earth that does not belong to any government by pointing out that floating islands can be constructed at sea that do meet that criteria?
« Last Edit: 08/20/2011 03:10 am by Andrew_W »
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Offline Andrew_W

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #21 on: 08/20/2011 03:18 am »
I'd be happy to send you to Mars Mick, but I'll at least need some indication that there's a possibility of untold mineral wealth before we put feet on the ground, even if Mars is littered with gold, even at it's heady price these days, we probably wouldn't cover the costs. We need something there that cannot be obtained on Earth at a lower cost, anything spring to mind?

Peace and quiet springs to mind.

Back to the OP.  If "Building" means the construction of infrastructure then you cannot beat a planetary surface for the sole fact that the human species evolved and grew in gravity.  That is what we know and live with every day.  If, on the other hand, you mean growth and profitability then I think that would depend on the type of business being "Built ".

Mick.

Mick, I think natural gravity sucks! Far better off with the artificial gravity of a rotating habitat, have it as weak or strong as you like. Heck, you can even have a lower gravity in the attic while you have higher gravity in the basement, or have it lower in the morning and higher at night. Whatever rocks your boat!
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.
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Offline Warren Platts

I'd be happy to send you to Mars Mick, but I'll at least need some indication that there's a possibility of untold mineral wealth before we put feet on the ground, even if Mars is littered with gold, even at it's heady price these days, we probably wouldn't cover the costs. We need something there that cannot be obtained on Earth at a lower cost, anything spring to mind?

Peace and quiet springs to mind.

Back to the OP.  If "Building" means the construction of infrastructure then you cannot beat a planetary surface for the sole fact that the human species evolved and grew in gravity.  That is what we know and live with every day.  If, on the other hand, you mean growth and profitability then I think that would depend on the type of business being "Built ".

Mick.

Mick, I think natural gravity sucks! Far better off with the artificial gravity of a rotating habitat, have it as weak or strong as you like. Heck, you can even have a lower gravity in the attic while you have higher gravity in the basement, or have it lower in the morning and higher at night. Whatever rocks your boat!

The problem is, you'll still need to build industry on planetary surfaces, unless you can figure out a way to convert solar energy into matter....

Thus, you're not gaining anything by moving your industry off the surface.

Since space transportation is so expensive, it doesn't make sense to ship unrefined raw materials. Therefore, you're stuck with industry on planetary surfaces.
"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."--Leonardo Da Vinci

Offline DarkenedOne

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #23 on: 08/20/2011 06:44 pm »
The problem is, you'll still need to build industry on planetary surfaces, unless you can figure out a way to convert solar energy into matter....

Thus, you're not gaining anything by moving your industry off the surface.

Since space transportation is so expensive, it doesn't make sense to ship unrefined raw materials. Therefore, you're stuck with industry on planetary surfaces.

It will always be most efficient to have refine raw materials as close to their source as possible.  If one is getting a resource on Mars then it makes sense to refine it there.

However the same goes for asteroids.  Asteroids have many heavy elements in far greater abundance than planet surfaces.  Iridium for example is 1000 times more prevalent in asteroids than it is on Earth.  Gold, Uranium, and etc are likely going to come from asteroids.

However the thing is that mining and refining machines do not necessarily require gravity, whereas people do. 
« Last Edit: 08/20/2011 06:45 pm by DarkenedOne »

Offline Warren Platts

The problem is, you'll still need to build industry on planetary surfaces, unless you can figure out a way to convert solar energy into matter....

Thus, you're not gaining anything by moving your industry off the surface.

Since space transportation is so expensive, it doesn't make sense to ship unrefined raw materials. Therefore, you're stuck with industry on planetary surfaces.

It will always be most efficient to have refine raw materials as close to their source as possible.  If one is getting a resource on Mars then it makes sense to refine it there.

However the same goes for asteroids.  Asteroids have many heavy elements in far greater abundance than planet surfaces.  Iridium for example is 1000 times more prevalent in asteroids than it is on Earth.  Gold, Uranium, and etc are likely going to come from asteroids.

There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

Quote
However the thing is that mining and refining machines do not necessarily require gravity, whereas people do. 

Planets have gravity. It helps with the plumbing. Whether people require gravity or not isn't the thread topic, but if I was an old lady with osteoporosis and heart trouble, 1/6 g or zero-g would probably result in an improvement in living circumstances.
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Offline Jim

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #25 on: 08/20/2011 07:31 pm »
However the thing is that mining and refining machines do not necessarily require gravity, whereas people do. 

Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

Offline Andrew_W

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #26 on: 08/20/2011 08:18 pm »
There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

I thought is had been established through examining meteorites that some asteroids do have exceptionally high concentrations of these elements. 

However the thing is that mining and refining machines do not necessarily require gravity, whereas people do. 

Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

I don't think space industry would be practical without artificial gravity, but I don't see providing it as an obstacle.

« Last Edit: 08/21/2011 01:34 am by Andrew_W »
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Offline UncleMatt

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #27 on: 08/20/2011 10:46 pm »
Planetary surfaces like Mars, definitely. You have a huge amount of resources available (tons and tons of free metal just within walking distance of any spot), you have an atmosphere that takes care of radiation shielding for you plus easy ISRU anywhere on the planet, you have frozen water, you have regolith that is rounded by aeolian processes instead of resembling broken glass (and thus can serve as a good growing medium, etc), the atmospheric pressure can be increased to high enough to not require pressure suits by increasing the surface temperature slightly through sprinkling carbon black powder strategically over the surface (the higher pressure also allowing liquid water and maybe even plants to grow on the surface, possibly), etc.

All at rest with respect to you, as opposed to moving in different directions at different delta-vs.
Uh, no, since Mars has no magnetic field to deflect high energy particles and radiation from the sun, it won't matter how thick you make the atmosphere on Mars. Mars is constantly losing its atmosphere to solar wind as well. You can make the atmosphere as thick as you want on Mars, and it still won't protect unshielded organisms from radiation/high energy particles.

Offline Hop_David

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #28 on: 08/20/2011 11:46 pm »
A week ago I heard about some millionaires giving money to a group planing to found an independent libertarian floating island society.

I believe you're talking about Peter Thiel

He founded Paypal. And he's an early investor in Facebook. So I'd expect he's a multi-billionaire.

There's a Seasteading website. That website has a forum.

At this point, NASA human spaceflight seems preoccupied with building large rockets to nowhere. On the other hand NOAA seems to be investing in advancing the state of the art for telerobotics. Since I believe telerobotics and ISRU are better investments to move space settlement forward, I favor NOAA funding over NASA funding.

To get back to the topic of the thread, I believe building industry on the sea and on the moon's surface is easier than building industry on asteroids.

However building industry on asteroids is less implausible than building industry on Mars.



« Last Edit: 08/20/2011 11:47 pm by Hop_David »

Offline savuporo

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #29 on: 08/21/2011 05:39 am »
There are only 2 ways to settle the gravity question.  One is build a test station and spin up to your required G level and the other is put feet on Mars.

Actually there are cheaper ways to make leaps of progress. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite

Or landing mice on moon/mars and keeping them alive long enough.
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Offline DLR

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #30 on: 08/21/2011 11:05 am »
Planetary surfaces, because space is just vacuum. On planetary surfaces, you have everything available where you need it and construction should also be easier (look at what a pain it was to bolt the ISS together ;))

As for gravity, we don't know whether humans require 1g. There's simply no data on that. I may even be that a low-g (not zero-g) environment is beneficial to human health and longevity because reduced gravity also means reduced strain on bones, joints and muscles (such as the heart).

Offline Warren Platts

There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

I thought is had been established through examining meteorites that some asteroids do have exceptionally high concentrations of these elements.

Not gold and uranium. I've looked extensively WRT gold, and it appears that gold is only found in minute quantities in meteorites. The reference below from the 1930's has the highest concentrations I've been able to find, and even its results are ambiguous.

http://www.minsocam.org/ammin/AM19/AM19_370.pdf

As for uranium, it is found in meteorites at an average concentration of 0.008 ppm; since it is a so-called lithophile, it gets concentrated in continental crust.
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Offline Hop_David

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #32 on: 08/21/2011 04:42 pm »
However the same goes for asteroids.  Asteroids have many heavy elements in far greater abundance than planet surfaces.  Iridium for example is 1000 times more prevalent in asteroids than it is on Earth.  Gold, Uranium, and etc are likely going to come from asteroids.

There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

This conversation has just freed me of a misconception I've been carrying for years.

I had thought copper, silver and gold were platinum group metals. Some quick Googling has freed me of that error.

How about PGMs in meteorites? Does the premise of Bill White's novel have merit?

I will add my 2¢ -- the moon's low escape velocity can permit meteorites to hit the lunar surface at a lower velocity, allowing some meteorites to remain intact rather than vaporizing. The lack of lunar weather or active geology allows meteorites to remain at the impact site. So if there are asteroids with very valuable ore deposits, it's likely some of these have found their way to the lunar surface over the eons.

Arguments for asteroidal resources are also arguments to do prospecting at the basins of lunar craters.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #33 on: 08/21/2011 05:04 pm »
Planetary surfaces like Mars, definitely. You have a huge amount of resources available (tons and tons of free metal just within walking distance of any spot), you have an atmosphere that takes care of radiation shielding for you plus easy ISRU anywhere on the planet, you have frozen water, you have regolith that is rounded by aeolian processes instead of resembling broken glass (and thus can serve as a good growing medium, etc), the atmospheric pressure can be increased to high enough to not require pressure suits by increasing the surface temperature slightly through sprinkling carbon black powder strategically over the surface (the higher pressure also allowing liquid water and maybe even plants to grow on the surface, possibly), etc.

All at rest with respect to you, as opposed to moving in different directions at different delta-vs.
Uh, no, since Mars has no magnetic field to deflect high energy particles and radiation from the sun, it won't matter how thick you make the atmosphere on Mars. Mars is constantly losing its atmosphere to solar wind as well. You can make the atmosphere as thick as you want on Mars, and it still won't protect unshielded organisms from radiation/high energy particles.
That's just plain false. A thick enough atmosphere works just fine for radiation shielding.
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Offline Jim

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #34 on: 08/21/2011 05:07 pm »
There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

I thought is had been established through examining meteorites that some asteroids do have exceptionally high concentrations of these elements. 

However the thing is that mining and refining machines do not necessarily require gravity, whereas people do. 

Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

I don't think space industry would be practical without artificial gravity, but I don't see providing it as an obstacle.



Mining an asteroid will have those obstacles

You so easily dismiss anything that does support your POV

Offline mmeijeri

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #35 on: 08/21/2011 05:24 pm »
Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

Couldn't you use centrifugal settling?
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Offline Warren Platts

However the same goes for asteroids.  Asteroids have many heavy elements in far greater abundance than planet surfaces.  Iridium for example is 1000 times more prevalent in asteroids than it is on Earth.  Gold, Uranium, and etc are likely going to come from asteroids.

There's no evidence whatsoever that gold and uranium etc. are likely going to be found in higher concentrations than the Earth's or Moon's or Mars' crusts.

This conversation has just freed me of a misconception I've been carrying for years.

I had thought copper, silver and gold were platinum group metals. Some quick Googling has freed me of that error.

How about PGMs in meteorites? Does the premise of Bill White's novel have merit?

I will add my 2¢ -- the moon's low escape velocity can permit meteorites to hit the lunar surface at a lower velocity, allowing some meteorites to remain intact rather than vaporizing. The lack of lunar weather or active geology allows meteorites to remain at the impact site. So if there are asteroids with very valuable ore deposits, it's likely some of these have found their way to the lunar surface over the eons.

Arguments for asteroidal resources are also arguments to do prospecting at the basins of lunar craters.

All over the internet, I keep running into this figure of "up to 100 ppm", which is apparently for all six PGM metals, and not just Pt. (Conveniently, ppm translates directly to "grams per tonne".) There are impact deposits on Earth e.g. in Canada and South Africa, but the concentrations when mining don't often get better than 5 grams per tonne for platinum itself. The following reference looked at 24 iron meteorites and the metal fraction of 5 stony meteorites: the average concentration from an actual meteorite found on Earth is around 11 grams per tonne, with the range being 0.5 to 29.3 grams per tonne.

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/8787/1/NICprl62.pdf

So as to the premise of Platinum Moon, I can't really see it being economically viable. Realistically, you need to be grossing on the order of $10B/year at least. If the price were to get up to $100,000/kg, then you'd need to recover (and refine!) 100,000 kg of platinum.

Thus, a chunk of meteorite at the maximum level of plausibility might consist of 100 gm of Pt/tonne, thus for one year's production, it would have to be 1,000,000 tonne chunck of meteorite. The kinetic energy of such a big rock must be huge, so it's going to hard to find such a large meteorite in tact. Thus, you'll be reduced to running all over the place trying to find and then transport much smaller chunks.

So in reality, you'll be going for conventional deposits where the ore is concentrated as a result of an impact, but you're not really mining visibly large chunks of meteorite.  Thus the Lunar platinum deposits could be expected to be similar in concentration to Earth deposits, although they may be easier to find and more of them due to the lack of erosion on the Moon. So then you're back to 10 grams per tonne, and so to get 100 tonnes of Pt, you'll have to mine and process 10 million tonnes of rock. This would be about 3.3 cubic kilometers of feedstock. Per year.
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Offline Warren Platts

Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

Couldn't you use centrifugal settling?

When mining a practically weightless asteroid? Centrifugal forces will only make it harder to find a purchase on the asteroid, and it would likely cause the asteroid to fly apart if you spin it too much.
"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."--Leonardo Da Vinci

Offline Hop_David

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #38 on: 08/21/2011 06:35 pm »
The kinetic energy of such a big rock must be huge, so it's going to hard to find such a large meteorite in tact. Thus, you'll be reduced to running all over the place trying to find and then transport much smaller chunks.

Kinetic energy from an impact can take different forms. Shockwaves through the lunar crust. Thermal energy. Ejecta from the impact will have it's velocity and thus its 1/2 mv^2.

But the kinetic energy per gram relies only on velocity. 1/2 m * v^2. It seems to me two meteorites of different mass traveling at the same speed would acquire the same calories per gram.

The impact speed would be sqrt(Vesc^2 + Vinf^2). Lunar escape on the moon's surface is about 2.4 km/sec. So, depending on Vinf, impact could be as slow as 2.4 km/sec.

To be honest, I don't know if that's slow enough to let a metallic meteorite remain intact.

Offline Hop_David

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Re: Which is easier, building industry on planets, or in space?
« Reply #39 on: 08/21/2011 06:42 pm »
Yes, they do.  For transport (to stay in buckets or conveyers) or for settling

Couldn't you use centrifugal settling?

When mining a practically weightless asteroid? Centrifugal forces will only make it harder to find a purchase on the asteroid, and it would likely cause the asteroid to fly apart if you spin it too much.

I believe Martijn is thinking of a centrifuge apart from the asteroid rather than spinning the entire body.

A sluice box as well as other gravity dependent mining processes might be done on such a centrifuge.

However, as Jim points out, a lot of the excavation and transportation methods also rely on gravity. Getting the ore to the centrifuge will require invention of new processes.

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