Author Topic: Reusability, Frequent Spaceflight and Economics of Space Resource Exploitation  (Read 16473 times)

Offline mfck

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I did think about just crashing the materials into a rural area like suggested,  but there are 3 things that would be (Very?) problematic, why i would think that spacemade capsules would be more feasible. 

1) the legal problems with firing tons of metal at earth would be huge i'd think.

Legal problems are solved with $ and lobbying.

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2) retrieving the projectiles depends on your landing elipse,  if its too big you might just loose your valuable goods.  And you would have to melt it down again, instead of picking up a capsule,  equiped with transponders and filled with refined ingots.

The Gobi Desert and 1.5B Chinese are your friends. BTW, there was a time in Chinese history, not so long ago, when chinese peasants was obliged to refine ore in their backyard furnaces :)

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3) a coilgun generates thrust that needs to be canceled,  so either you have a SEP firing into the opposite direction,  you are burning tons of fuel or you are putting even more potential satellite-killers into orbit.

There are several ways to recoup the recoil, mechanical as well as electromagnetic. I highly doubt recoil is a significant engineering challenge for a rail gun

 


Offline Cologan

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3) a coilgun generates thrust that needs to be canceled,  so either you have a SEP firing into the opposite direction,  you are burning tons of fuel or you are putting even more potential satellite-killers into orbit.

There are several ways to recoup the recoil, mechanical as well as electromagnetic. I highly doubt recoil is a significant engineering challenge for a rail gun

 

You propell a mass away from the asteroid, so you are generating thrust. you have to throw reaction mass into the opposite direction to cancel that thrust. The Asteroid would need Thrusters or Engines for Stationkeeping, SEP propably would be the best way to go. I wasnt talking about the transfer of that recoil from the coil/railgun to the rest of your mass (asteroid), but i do agree that that would be doable.

Offline Rei

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You propell a mass away from the asteroid, so you are generating thrust. you have to throw reaction mass into the opposite direction to cancel that thrust. The Asteroid would need Thrusters or Engines for Stationkeeping, SEP propably would be the best way to go. I wasnt talking about the transfer of that recoil from the coil/railgun to the rest of your mass (asteroid), but i do agree that that would be doable.

What "stationkeeping"?  We don't care about what orbit the asteroid ends up in - the whole point is to systematically tear it apart.  We just need to keep track of how its orbit changes so that we can keep targeting aligned.

In addition to what mfck wrote above:

 * There are large swaths of Earth with few to no people - and the people who live in them, if any, tend to be poor and thus readily "bought out".  The Gobi Desert is indeed probably a good choice - not only due to its area and sparse population, but its close proximity to huge raw materials markets in China and India, and not too far from Europe.  Better for Europe alone however would be almost anywhere in the Sahara not near populated areas.

 * Refining on Earth rather than in space is an advantage, not a disadvantage.  Refining will always be far easier here than up in space.  And your "waste" is nickel-iron, which is hardly a throwaway product.  Nickel-iron that you could probably sell at a premium due to its origin (ex: compare the marketing value of "This knife is made nickel-steel" with "This knife is made from nickel-steel FROM SPACE!").  Heck, you'd probably have a great deal of trouble saturing even the decorative stone market sufficiently to justify the cost of refining it, esp. if you were mining something with a nice Widmanstätten pattern or peridot (note: these would be destroyed by sintering, so "raw" state asteroid returns would have to be inside a sintered outer shell).  People pay crazy amounts of money for raw materials a lot less impressive than that (look at the pricing on, say, agate countertops... and agate isn't even all that rare)

Regardless, you want your mining process to be simple:

1) A "rover" gathers rocks and regolith (while anchored to the surface for counterpressure)
2) It returns and empties into a sinterer (probably requires a screw feed or centrifugal dispenser due to the low gravity)
3) The rock is sintered using the waste heat from generating the power needed for charging the coilgun (choose your power source; a quench gun approach would be appealing to avoid the need for large capacitors)
4) The projectile is fired directly from the sinterer

Complexity equals money.  Lots and lots of money.
« Last Edit: 04/27/2016 02:13 pm by Rei »

Offline mfck

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3) a coilgun generates thrust that needs to be canceled,  so either you have a SEP firing into the opposite direction,  you are burning tons of fuel or you are putting even more potential satellite-killers into orbit.

There are several ways to recoup the recoil, mechanical as well as electromagnetic. I highly doubt recoil is a significant engineering challenge for a rail gun

 

You propell a mass away from the asteroid, so you are generating thrust. you have to throw reaction mass into the opposite direction to cancel that thrust. The Asteroid would need Thrusters or Engines for Stationkeeping, SEP propably would be the best way to go. I wasnt talking about the transfer of that recoil from the coil/railgun to the rest of your mass (asteroid), but i do agree that that would be doable.

IMBW, but it seems to me that mechanical and electromagnetic decoupling would allow some of the momentum to be converted back to electric charge. You'd pass heat (conversion losses) to the asteroid, not kinetic energy,  assuming your projectiles are very significantly lower in mass than the asteroid (and the gun).
Alternatively, you could use the momentum to spin the asteroid up.


Offline asmi

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There is another factor to consider - if platinum costs 50k$/kg, it doesn't mean that you can bring in 100 tonnes of it and sell for 5B$. There simply isn't demand for such quantities, so the price will inevitably go down, seriously hurting ROI. Amounts and numbers above are for illustrative purposes only, to help explain my point.
« Last Edit: 04/29/2016 06:21 pm by asmi »

Offline Rei

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Actually, looks like the global market for platinum currently is about 150 tonnes per year.  100 tonnes over the lifespan of the mine (say, a few decades?) would realistically not have an impact on the price.  And the lead time to develop such a mine would mean that producers on earth would stop making investments in developing Earth-based mines that wouldn't be competitive.

Plus, platinum has a tremendous amount of uses - catalytic converters, fuel cells, industrial catalysts, electrical contacts, medical instruments, and countless other things - not just jewelry.  In fact, less than a third goes to jewelry.  World platinum production has grown 2-3 fold in the past three decades (depending on what start/end points you choose), and despite that,  the price has also grown about 3fold over the same time period (well outpacing inflation). 

And platinum is just one of a number of valuable resources found on asteroids.

And this all ignores the fact that if you want to talk about the jewelry market, the fact that it's materials that are "FROM SPACE!!!(TM)" is something product marketing will seize upon.   There is zero doubt in my mind that it would sell for a premium - the question is only how much of a premium, and how supply-sensitive the premium would be.

Offline Robotbeat

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Platinum is definitely the lion's share of the platinum group metals when it comes to market size. The market for platinum is much greater than the rest of the platinum group metals combined.

At the current $35/gram and 150 tons per year, the global market for platinum is currently like $4.7 billion per year. That's peanuts compared to the global satellite telecomms market.
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Offline mfck

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Platinum is definitely the lion's share of the platinum group metals when it comes to market size. The market for platinum is much greater than the rest of the platinum group metals combined.

At the current $35/gram and 150 tons per year, the global market for platinum is currently like $4.7 billion per year. That's peanuts compared to the global satellite telecomms market.

... so, the market can't grow because the resource is scarce and the market is too small to economically obtain the resource (from space)?

How much the demand would grow if the price dropped to, say, $0.35/gram?


Offline QuantumG

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In the mid-1800s aluminium was more valuable than gold and was used primarily for ornamental purposes. Now about 50 million tonnes a year is produced and it's used in a vast array of products. Extrapolation from existing costs and uses is a terrible way to think about anything. Ironically, this is wisdom Elon Musk often advocates.

Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline sanman

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And this all ignores the fact that if you want to talk about the jewelry market, the fact that it's materials that are "FROM SPACE!!!(TM)" is something product marketing will seize upon.   There is zero doubt in my mind that it would sell for a premium - the question is only how much of a premium, and how supply-sensitive the premium would be.

Gee, that's a good point I'd never considered. Imagine giving your spouse/significant-other a "Moon Crystal" for a ring, or some other piece of jewelry. I'm not sure how it would be authenticated or certified as non-counterfeit, but the exclusivity of such stones could make them very precious for ornaments.

I guess they still make class rings for engineering grads out of the scrap metal from that one same bridge that collapsed. Maybe SpaceX, Blue Origin and others should sell the scrap metal from their crashed rockets to make engineering rings for the new generation - just to modernize and update the tradition - and to show that there are newer bridges to cross these days.  8)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring
« Last Edit: 04/30/2016 04:14 am by sanman »

Offline Robotbeat

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Platinum is definitely the lion's share of the platinum group metals when it comes to market size. The market for platinum is much greater than the rest of the platinum group metals combined.

At the current $35/gram and 150 tons per year, the global market for platinum is currently like $4.7 billion per year. That's peanuts compared to the global satellite telecomms market.

... so, the market can't grow because the resource is scarce and the market is too small to economically obtain the resource (from space)?

How much the demand would grow if the price dropped to, say, $0.35/gram?
So you have to refine and harvest Platinum and return it safely from orbit for $350/kg to break even. Not impossible, but not likely.

I think demand would grow. I doubt it'd grow more than 100 times.

Point is that minerals is not the biggest market opportunity out there. It's not /nothing/, but we're likely to see telecomm still dominate in the future for a while. Only energy has a similar size. Until we have 10s of millions in space.
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Offline Lar

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I think the whole question needs to be looked at synergistically. Can a mix of things be extracted that forwards the aims and also generates revenue? What things are you likely to find by accident that are worth refining but not worth prospecting for as your only focus? What things are byproducts of one kind of extraction for ISRU that might be profitably retained and sold, even if you wouldn't have gone out purely looking for those? questions like that. It's an ecosystem I think.
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Offline mfck

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How universal is an ore refinery? How much different is aluminum ore processing from, say platinum or uranium ores? Could same physical plant process any kind of ore?

Offline sanman

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Are certain types of precious materials likely to be found in certain places in the solar system?

We can see that the Kuiper belt has a lot of light volatiles - not surprising, since it's farther out and colder - but of course light volatiles aren't really that scarce here on Earth. Some people have talked about hurling small Kuiper objects at Mars to help terraform it.

Conversely, heavier elements are more likely to be found inside gravity wells - eg. in the interior of planets, where gravity has pulled them - and since the asteroid belt represents a broken up planet, those elements are more exposed and detectable. Would even a lighter planet like Mercury be expected to have a relatively greater abundance of heavy elements, given that it's deeper inside the Sun's own gravity well?

Presumably there's lots of solar flux available around Mercury to make use of. whether for mining, SEP, etc.

Offline Rei

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Gee, that's a good point I'd never considered. Imagine giving your spouse/significant-other a "Moon Crystal" for a ring, or some other piece of jewelry. I'm not sure how it would be authenticated or certified as non-counterfeit, but the exclusivity of such stones could make them very precious for ornaments.

Authentication would be easy - among other things, the isotopic ratios would be off from those found on Earth.

And we know there are crystals in space.  Many types of meteorites are rich in peridot - to the point that, despite the high value of meteorites, some companies buy them and dissolve them in acid to extract the peridot for jewelry.  This is just from random rocks that happened to impact on Earth, let alone what you could find with a dedicated search for rock rich in large, high quality stones.

On Mars, Opportunity and Curiosity have been exploring regions with acidic hydrothermal modification - you can see cracks filled in by dissolved minerals (examples here and here).  This is the same sort of geology that occurs on land that I own, and it's associated with zeolite crystals, opal, calcite, quartz, and chalcedony (agate, jasper, onyx, botryoidal specimens, etc), among others.  They haven't found any large crystaline specimens, but it's the sort of environment you'd look for them if you wanted a dedicated search.  Other types of environments on Mars would likely be associated with other types of gemstones found on Earth.

On Venus, I can't even begin to imagine what sort of unusual minerals you might find on a surface like that.  Probably things that aren't found anywhere on Earth.  On top of the high temperature acidic environment, the rocks seem to be unusually rich in incompatible elements as well, many of which are associated with rarer minerals on Earth.  Then there's the metallic/crystalline snows/frosts in the highlands...

Io probably has some really crazy stuff of its own.

I don't hold out too much hope for the moon.  It's AFAWK mostly unaltered basalt, and you don't find much interesting from a jewelry perspective in basalt (maybe obsidian at the edge of a high-silica flow).  That said, even just a piece of polished lunar basalt would still go for a massive premium when it comes to jewelry, or maybe polished breccia slabs for decorative use.

Mercury, Ganymede, Calysto, etc, etc.... there's a lot of unknowns.


Really, the luxury market on Earth, with its 7,4 billion people, would be pretty hard to saturate for a long time.  That said, you need to diversify, or you might saturate one part of it.  Gemstones of different types, decorative stone, spices / long-lasting food items in an off-Earth greenhouse (have you seen what they pay in Japan for "luxury fruit" to give as gifts?  ;)  ), honeyfrom off-world bees in such a greenhouse, off-world mined metals, caviar harvested from an off-world fish farm ... so long as the list of exports stays diverse and no single substance is overexported, you'll always have a luxury market looking to buy for 4-6 figures per kilogram.

It's easy to make fun / dismiss the luxury market... but people really do pay these sorts of things.  It's like the restaurants that serve food with gold flakes in it.  There's no point to it whatsoever except for the ability to be able to experience some "luxury" that ordinary people can't.  That said, more "traditional" luxuries, such as gemstones, are also consumed by much broader populations, and thus represent a harder market to saturate.
« Last Edit: 05/02/2016 05:58 pm by Rei »

Offline oldAtlas_Eguy

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One thing that is overlooked is the use of a rock crusher that pulverizes the regolith to a fairly uniform powder. Then put this powder in a box. Then vibrate the box. The powder over time will stratify based on the powder particles density just like if it was a liquid. Now the box has one side transparent/simi-transparent for detection of the stratification layers (color variations). Another side can be slowly pulled down so that a specific layer can be "swept off" into a bin. The result is that the regolith is now sorted into higher specific ore type bearing powders ready for further processing or even just simply shipment. The bottom layer would contain the PGM powder. This system could increase a specific ore bearing a specific mineral by a factor of up to 10 or more.

If you create a turntable then the system could be highly automated and have a significant mass throughput without having to be very large or even complex.

Offline Rei

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One thing that is overlooked is the use of a rock crusher that pulverizes the regolith to a fairly uniform powder. Then put this powder in a box. Then vibrate the box. The powder over time will stratify based on the powder particles density just like if it was a liquid. Now the box has one side transparent/simi-transparent for detection of the stratification layers (color variations). Another side can be slowly pulled down so that a specific layer can be "swept off" into a bin. The result is that the regolith is now sorted into higher specific ore type bearing powders ready for further processing or even just simply shipment. The bottom layer would contain the PGM powder. This system could increase a specific ore bearing a specific mineral by a factor of up to 10 or more.

If you create a turntable then the system could be highly automated and have a significant mass throughput without having to be very large or even complex.

Problem with the above: that won't happen in microgravity.
Solution to the above: Do the same thing, but in a centrifuge  :)

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