Talking bollocks thread

KomissarBojanchev wrote:
And most asteroids have a very large amount of water ice in them. Your point is invalid.

No, untrue. AFAIK the only asteroid on which hydrated minerals have been found is Ceres. The others are all small dessicated rocks as they formed in the hot inner solar system and their small size means they have lost their volatiles.
Larger bodies like Ceres have retained some water, but likley had their water replenished from impacts of cometary-type bodies, which do contain a lot of water, but they orbit at greater distances in the cold outer solar system, and appear to be loaded with nasties such as carbon monoxide ices and cyanides. Using such contaminated local water sources is not going to be like throwing a bucket into a clear mountain spring...

Actually, the asteroids are the only sensible mining targets in the space.

The planets contain oxides and light elements in the crusts. Every heavy element melted into the core, like the best part of the iron, and the 99% of the heavy metals.

Each planet require enormous amount of delta v to descent and climb up onto/from it ( except the descent phase in the case of mars/earth/venus due to aero breaking) .

But anyway, to reach an asteroid is cheaper than to reach the moon surface.


Example a 10 km diameter asteroid ( considered as medium sized ) contain as much gold/platinum as the upper 10km of the earth surface.

There are asteroids out there that contain better quality iron than the 99% that you can found on earth .

Example the 16 Psyche is nothing else just a 160km big nickel-iron piece.



Additionally in the space it is possible to use solar furnaces, not the toy like ones that can be used in gravity and atmosphere, but kilometre big ones.

A huge, km big solar furnace weight no more than 30 -100 tons, and generating as much heat as a nuclear reactor.


The only problem is the hydrogen / nitrogen, sadly the inner part of the solar system has 1.4 kw/sqm heat flux at the Earth orbit , means that the any sun facing ice evaporated billions of years ago from the asteroids. But in worst case the Ceres my have enormous amount of ice, but the solar flux is only 0.2 kw/sqm over there.

http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Space/Solar_Constant.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget
https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.html

Big_Gazza wrote:You haven't got a clue...

Any minerals of economic value on asteroids are going to be in the from of trace quantities distributed through the bulk asteroidal materials.  You won't find "nuggets" of iridium lying close to the surface patiently waiting to be be picked up, or within easy reach of a strip mining vehicle.  Asteroids are mostly undifferentiated primitive bodies. To get the useful minerals you will need to process VAST quantities of useless dross, just like we do here on Earth.  You think an automated processing plant for the extraction of rare earth metals is going to be cheap or lightweight?  What about the vehicles required to gather up the soil/dust/rocks and transport it to the refinery?  What about the energy requirments for the extraction process (metals processing nearly always involves high temperatures, ie furnaces)?  What about disposing of the resulting slag?  What about living quarters for the workforce, and food/water etc?  What about the vast expense of designing, building, testing, launching, flying and assembling all this infrastructure on a tiny distant near-gravityless rock in the middle of nowhere?  What about the enormous energy requirements to achieve the deltaV needed to returns the 1000s of tons of valuable minerals that would be required to even have a chance to make the venture economically justified?

How valuable is iridium?  How much do we need?  Are we really prepared to go to the extraordinary difficulty of mining asteroids to get it?  

The bottom line is that their is NOTHING in space that is so valuable that it justifies the enormous cost of acquiring it. This ain't Hollywood sonny, it's hard cold reality...

Actually, it is not make so much sense to mine gold in the space to make say nice rings.


But it makes sense to make say airplanes or ships in the space.

Example the biggest cost these days to make semiconductors is the air purification.

Of course the initial investment is prohibitive, but purely theoretically that could be the wet dream of any engineer : )

Singular_Transform wrote:

Big_Gazza wrote:You haven't got a clue...

Any minerals of economic value on asteroids are going to be in the from of trace quantities distributed through the bulk asteroidal materials.  You won't find "nuggets" of iridium lying close to the surface patiently waiting to be be picked up, or within easy reach of a strip mining vehicle.  Asteroids are mostly undifferentiated primitive bodies. To get the useful minerals you will need to process VAST quantities of useless dross, just like we do here on Earth.  You think an automated processing plant for the extraction of rare earth metals is going to be cheap or lightweight?  What about the vehicles required to gather up the soil/dust/rocks and transport it to the refinery?  What about the energy requirments for the extraction process (metals processing nearly always involves high temperatures, ie furnaces)?  What about disposing of the resulting slag?  What about living quarters for the workforce, and food/water etc?  What about the vast expense of designing, building, testing, launching, flying and assembling all this infrastructure on a tiny distant near-gravityless rock in the middle of nowhere?  What about the enormous energy requirements to achieve the deltaV needed to returns the 1000s of tons of valuable minerals that would be required to even have a chance to make the venture economically justified?

How valuable is iridium?  How much do we need?  Are we really prepared to go to the extraordinary difficulty of mining asteroids to get it?  

The bottom line is that their is NOTHING in space that is so valuable that it justifies the enormous cost of acquiring it.  This ain't Hollywood sonny, it's hard cold reality...

Actually, it is not make so much sense to mine gold in the space to make say nice rings.


But it makes sense to make say airplanes or ships in the space.

Example the biggest cost these days to make semiconductors is the air purification.

Of course the initial investment is prohibitive, but purely theoretically that could be the wet dream of any engineer : )

Sure, we could assemble spacecraft in space, but that is using pre-fabricated modules built planet-side. Actually manufacturing in space is several levels of magnitude harder. How difficult and expensive and time-consuming is it to build a relatively simple ferry for humans/cargo (eg Soyuz/Shenzhen/Dragon) or station modules (eg the MLM fiasco..)? Now consider buildingn them in orbit.... Try building a Soyuz in a workshop that is a hard vacuum using robots and workers in EVA suits, and see how the cost & schedule soars into the exosphere.... Now try manufacturing the sub-components as well....

We don't seem to have any problems here on Earth in mass-producing RAM chips or microprocessors, so why build them in space? What is to be gained? materials fabrication experiments have been conducted for decades, first in Salyut 6/7/Mir and now in ISS, and we STILL haven't figured out any cost effective way to manufacture useful quantities of "ultra-pure" semiconductors.

initial investment is prohibitive??? Try absurd and utterly unrealistic.

I dont want to piss on people parades, but somewhere along the line we need to be realistic aboit what it is possible to achieve, and why we should want to do it. I'm all for robotic exploration of the solar system, but putting meat-sacks in space craft isn't particularly productive or effective. We should be concentrating on robotic technologies and lowering the cost of expensive robotic spacecraft by serial production of standardised spacecraft bus designs and kitting them as needed for specific missions. The current approach (completely new design each mission), even when HIGHLY successful (like what NASA & ESA does) is at a premium cost and they don't reuse the proven solutions for new missions because the manufacturers are private aerospace entities that are in competition and are driven by profit. NASA proved the 2x MER rovers, but did they then build another 3-4 and launch them to other areas? No, they threw away the engineering legacy and went for an entirely new and FAR more expensive design, and only launched one. While the Soviets could never hold a candle to NASAs sophistication, they leveraged their tech with each misison and built on what had succeeded before (or fixed what failed...). The Veneras were essentially a production line, with evolutionary improvements in cameras and soil samplers, and were a huge success.

Forget meat-sacks in space and build robots, lots of them. Build a number of standard designs and start to mass produce. Send them everywhere, and if they fail, just send another one (and tweak the mission package accordingly).

Big_Gazza wrote:

Sure, we could assemble spacecraft in space, but that is using pre-fabricated modules built planet-side. Actually manufacturing in space is several levels of magnitude harder. How difficult and expensive and time-consuming is it to build a relatively simple ferry for humans/cargo (eg Soyuz/Shenzhen/Dragon) or station modules (eg the MLM fiasco..)? Now consider buildingn them in orbit.... Try building a Soyuz in a workshop that is a hard vacuum using robots and workers in EVA suits, and see how the cost & schedule soars into the exosphere.... Now try manufacturing the sub-components as well....

We don't seem to have any problems here on Earth in mass-producing RAM chips or microprocessors, so why build them in space? What is to be gained? materials fabrication experiments have been conducted for decades, first in Salyut 6/7/Mir and now in ISS, and we STILL haven't figured out any cost effective way to manufacture useful quantities of "ultra-pure" semiconductors.

initial investment is prohibitive??? Try absurd and utterly unrealistic.

I dont want to piss on people parades, but somewhere along the line we need to be realistic aboit what it is possible to achieve, and why we should want to do it. I'm all for robotic exploration of the solar system, but putting meat-sacks in space craft isn't particularly productive or effective. We should be concentrating on robotic technologies and lowering the cost of expensive robotic spacecraft by serial production of standardised spacecraft bus designs and kitting them as needed for specific missions. The current approach (completely new design each mission), even when HIGHLY successful (like what NASA & ESA does) is at a premium cost and they don't reuse the proven solutions for new missions because the manufacturers are private aerospace entities that are in competition and are driven by profit. NASA proved the 2x MER rovers, but did they then build another 3-4 and launch them to other areas? No, they threw away the engineering legacy and went for an entirely new and FAR more expensive design, and only launched one. While the Soviets could never hold a candle to NASAs sophistication, they leveraged their tech with each misison and built on what had succeeded before (or fixed what failed...). The Veneras were essentially a production line, with evolutionary improvements in cameras and soil samplers, and were a huge success.

Forget meat-sacks in space and build robots, lots of them. Build a number of standard designs and start to mass produce. Send them everywhere, and if they fail, just send another one (and tweak the mission package accordingly).

Your view about a space industry is pretty much like the above picture, showing a robotic machining centre, operated by a humanoid robot.

You can say that " it is not possible to make robot controlled machine, because it is so complicated to make humanoid robots ! " : D

You can't make space industry without humans.

Simply not possible. Humans can make decisions that lead to valuable results, the robots are nothing else just remote operate machines, with limited scope of usability.

Are you aware what kind of challenges are in the semi industry?
It is not about to make pure silicon - that is easy.

It is about to make a clean environment, and generate hard vacuum in the machines .

Two third of the investment of a modern semi fab is to be able to generate clean air, big part of the leftover third is for cleaning .Small potion is required for the actual manufacturing.

So, per definition a space bound semi fab cost fraction compared to the earth one.

Same to make soyuz in the space.

Why you want to do that?

A space capsule is a pressure chamber, that can be manufactured by blowing , spiral welding , or centrifugal casting.

All of them is easy and cheap in the space.

But if you don't want to go that far, the easiest and most demand stuff is the fuel.

And actually you can use as fuel (reaction mass) anything.

Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Asteroids can easily be influenced by gravity of a larger object making mining unpredictable.

Viktor wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Asteroids can easily be influenced by gravity of a larger object making mining unpredictable.

That is good, because it means that relative small delta V required to capture them to earth orbit.

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Asteroids can easily be influenced by gravity of a larger object making mining unpredictable.

That is good, because it means that relative small delta V required to capture them to earth orbit.

The deltaV to break away from the asteroid may be small, but you still need to shed solar orbit velocity to fall into the suns gravity well and head back to Earth, and that won't be trivial with 100s or 1000s of tonnes of processed minerals onboard. Additionally, heading to Earth means picking up velocity as the suns gravity accelerates the vehicle and payload. You then either need to rendezous with a space tug to de-accelerate the payload to bring it in into EO, or rely on aero-braking (you probably can't use the vehicle engines as its not feasible to carry sufficient fuel). Due to the size of the cargo load, the former requires a huge vehicle and fuel load, while the later requires an unfeasibly large braking heatshield.

Chemical propellents would be useless for any such endeavour, so we would need something like thermal nuclear propulsion to acheive the deltaV requirements of such huge vehicle/payload masses, and this just adds to the cost and complexity (and risk), which makes it even more difficult to justify such an enterprise on economic considerations.

Big_Gazza wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Asteroids can easily be influenced by gravity of a larger object making mining unpredictable.

That is good, because it means that relative small delta V required to capture them to earth orbit.

The deltaV to break away from the asteroid may be small, but you still need to shed solar orbit velocity to fall into the suns gravity well and head back to Earth, and that won't be trivial with 100s or 1000s of tonnes of processed minerals onboard.  Additionally, heading to Earth means picking up velocity as the suns gravity accelerates the vehicle and payload.  You then either need to rendezous with a space tug to de-accelerate the payload to bring it in into EO, or rely on aero-braking (you probably can't use the vehicle engines as its not feasible to carry sufficient fuel).  Due to the size of the cargo load, the former requires a huge vehicle and fuel load, while the later requires an unfeasibly large braking heatshield.  

Chemical propellents would be useless for any such endeavour, so we would need something like thermal nuclear propulsion to acheive the deltaV requirements of such huge vehicle/payload masses, and this just adds to the cost and complexity (and risk), which makes it even more difficult to justify such an enterprise on economic considerations.

Are you serious? The precious metals will be refined IN space. No more than a few kgs of refined material will reenter earth, and that is assuming we don't move high tech industry in space.

In the near to mid future the following minerals absolutely vital to high tech industry will dissapear:

-titanium
-palladium
-tungsten
-platinum
-iridium
-silver
-gold
-uranium 235

The costs to extract them from earth's crust will grow exponentially with no lowering in sight. While it is exactly the opposite with mining them from asteroids and other celestial bodies.

Sure, we could assemble spacecraft in space, but that is using pre-fabricated modules built planet-side.  Actually manufacturing in space is several levels of magnitude harder.  How difficult and expensive and time-consuming is it to build a relatively simple ferry for humans/cargo (eg Soyuz/Shenzhen/Dragon) or station modules (eg the MLM fiasco..)? Now consider buildingn them in orbit....  Try building a Soyuz in a workshop that is a hard vacuum using robots and workers in EVA suits, and see how the cost & schedule soars into the exosphere....  Now try manufacturing the sub-components as well....

Who says it needs to be in hard vacuum and there should people i space all the time. Large components will be produced in vaccuum with drones, making the assembly much easier, and subcomponents inside or imported from earth.

Besides space craft built in space can be made much more survivable since we won't need to make them ultra thin skinned to save weight when leaving earth. Since we don't need ultralight spacecraft anymore, we can produce them with things simple as iron.

I dont want to piss on people parades, but somewhere along the line we need to be realistic aboit what it is possible to achieve, and why we should want to do it.  I'm all for robotic exploration of the solar system, but putting meat-sacks in space craft isn't particularly productive or effective.  We should be concentrating on robotic technologies and lowering the cost of expensive robotic spacecraft by serial production of standardised spacecraft bus designs and kitting them as needed for specific missions.  The current approach (completely new design each mission), even when HIGHLY successful (like what NASA & ESA does) is at a premium cost and they don't reuse the proven solutions for new missions because the manufacturers are private aerospace entities that are in competition and are driven by profit.  NASA proved the 2x MER rovers, but did they then build another 3-4 and launch them to other areas?  No, they threw away the engineering legacy and went for an entirely new and FAR more expensive design, and only launched one.  While the Soviets could never hold a candle to NASAs sophistication, they leveraged their tech with each misison and built on what had succeeded before (or fixed what failed...).  The Veneras were essentially a production line, with evolutionary improvements in cameras and soil samplers, and were a huge success.

Not serially producing spacecraft is capitalism's own idiocy, that does not mean that we shouldn't strive to overcome new challenges.

Forget meat-sacks in space and build robots, lots of them.  Build a number of standard designs and start to mass produce.  Send them everywhere, and if they fail, just send another one (and tweak the mission package accordingly).

The whole point of space exploration is for HUMANS to EXPLORE space. Sorry but I'm not prepared to live my entire life knowing that we can send only probes to space. Stop thinking in profit.

Big_Gazza wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:

Viktor wrote:Asteroids are to unstable to be mined. The Moon seems perfectly ok.

It is just a simple statement about the information / understanding that you have about the topics.

Asteroids can easily be influenced by gravity of a larger object making mining unpredictable.

That is good, because it means that relative small delta V required to capture them to earth orbit.

Chemical propellents would be useless for any such endeavour, so we would need something like thermal nuclear propulsion to acheive the deltaV requirements of such huge vehicle/payload masses, and this just adds to the cost and complexity (and risk), which makes it even more difficult to justify such an enterprise on economic considerations.

What makes you think nuclear engines are more feasible than orbital assembly and ion engines?

Big_Gazza wrote:

The deltaV to break away from the asteroid may be small, but you still need to shed solar orbit velocity to fall into the suns gravity well and head back to Earth, and that won't be trivial with 100s or 1000s of tonnes of processed minerals onboard. Additionally, heading to Earth means picking up velocity as the suns gravity accelerates the vehicle and payload. You then either need to rendezous with a space tug to de-accelerate the payload to bring it in into EO, or rely on aero-braking (you probably can't use the vehicle engines as its not feasible to carry sufficient fuel). Due to the size of the cargo load, the former requires a huge vehicle and fuel load, while the later requires an unfeasibly large braking heatshield.

Chemical propellents would be useless for any such endeavour, so we would need something like thermal nuclear propulsion to acheive the deltaV requirements of such huge vehicle/payload masses, and this just adds to the cost and complexity (and risk), which makes it even more difficult to justify such an enterprise on economic considerations.

Not the delta V from the asteroid surface to free solar orbit, but the difference between the earth and asteroid.

From asteroid you can use the dust as reaction mass, or you can do aerobraking in the atmosphere.
But in reality no one wants to bring industrial equipment down to the LEO or MEO, the tidal forces would tear into pieces the solar furnaces.


Nuclear engine needed to launch mass from the surface of earth, that is 9-10 km/sec delta V ,every other manoeuvre needs less dV than that, and can be done with low force/high efficiency thrusters.

But I don't think that anyone would be happy to see orion/nerva taking off from the earth, unless to avoid asteroid impact : )

KomissarBojanchev wrote:
Are you serious? The precious metals will be refined IN space. No more than a few kgs of refined material will reenter earth, and that is assuming we don't move high tech industry in space.

A few hundred kgs of refined material isn't going to cover the cost of the venture...

KomissarBojanchev wrote:In the near to mid future the following minerals absolutely vital to high tech industry will dissapear:

-titanium
-palladium
-tungsten
-platinum
-iridium
-silver
-gold
-uranium 235

The costs to extract them from earth's crust will grow exponentially with no lowering in sight. While it is exactly the opposite with mining them from asteroids and other celestial bodies.

Sigh... again, I'll repeat the issue. You will not find asteroids with concentrations of these valuable minerals as they are primitive undifferentiated bodies. No ore bodies, no mother lodes, no nuggets, just lots of mundane dust and rocks with no more than a tiny trace quantity of the highly valuable materials. Plenty of iron, titanium, chromium, aluminimum etc etc but they won't pay the bills.

No matter how scarce these materials become on Earth, it will always be easier and cheaper to find and process their ores than it will be to mine asteroids.

[quote="Singular_Transform"]

Big_Gazza wrote:
Nuclear engine needed to launch mass from the surface of earth, that is 9-10 km/sec delta V ,every other manoeuvre needs less dV than that, and can be done with low force/high efficiency  thrusters.

But I don't think that anyone would be happy to see orion/nerva taking off from the earth, unless to avoid asteroid impact : )

Nuclear thermal engines don't use controlled fission bombs - you're thinking of muclear pulse engines. Thermal engines work by using nuclear reactors to heat the working fluid (eg LH2, but they could pratically use almost anything volatile, eg water) to extreme temperatures and venting it to produce thrust. They are potentially very efficient (with ISP >900), but are difficult to build as the reactor core needs to run at incandescent temperatures, and any interruption to the flow of the working fluid (which also acts as a coolant) can result in catastrophic burn-thru or fuel element meltdown. Both the US and Soviets performed ground tests on nuclear engines in the 60s & 70s, but no-one has ever flown one.

If we are ever going to see practical interplanetary flight, the development of reliable and SAFE nuclear thermal engines is an absolute must.

KomissarBojanchev wrote:
The whole point of space exploration is for HUMANS to EXPLORE space. Sorry but I'm not prepared to live my entire life knowing that we can send only probes to space.  Stop thinking in profit.

I'm not thinking about profit, simply being realistic about human motivation.   We need a good reason to allocate the tremendous resources needed to become a space-faring civilisation, and given the infantile, tribalistic, puerile, small-minded, short-sighted, and downright primitive nature of 99% of the semi-evolved simians on this rock, I can't see humans agreeing to divert the resources away from satisfying our primal and selfish urges.  Instead of coming together to be more than we are, Humans would rather fight and kill and strive to dominate each other over ancient blood-fueds, ideological differences, or just plain old-fashioned "we hate you because you are different, and won't give me what I want...".  Not trying to be an uber-pessimist, but I'm a realist and any youthful idealism I may have had in my early years has been ground out of me by watching the absurd antics from the inmates of this planetary lunatic asylum we inhabit.

Robotic probes allow us to explore the solar system at lowest cost, and minimal risk. Humans could fly to the Moon and Mars, but the outer solar system is likely impractical.  Jupiters radiation environment is UTTERLY LETHAL, and anything beyong Jupiter is simply too far away, so robotic exploration is going to be the only practical way to explore the vast majority of the solar system.

PapaDragon wrote:

BKP wrote:ISIS collapsing. Rest of the year will be a race w/ NATO to fill the void. And then?

Lavrov's crew will put the screws on Kurds to reconcile with the reminder of what lies beyond the North if they play dumb

Idlibistan gets shredded\reconciled along the road

Of course the selfdescribed "main pro-Israel mod" of this forum, leaving the pro-Israel intoxication. This is the real pollution here.

eehnie wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:

BKP wrote:ISIS collapsing. Rest of the year will be a race w/ NATO to fill the void. And then?

Lavrov's crew will put the screws on Kurds to reconcile with the reminder of what lies beyond the North if they play dumb

Idlibistan gets shredded\reconciled along the road

Of course the selfdescribed "main pro-Israel mod" of this forum, leaving the pro-Israel intoxication. This is the real pollution here.

FFS leave it alone.

Are you trying to get yourself banned by slandering people on every thread you can? You saw Garry's reaction on the other Syria thread.

If you had tried this stunt over on good old MP.net and many other forums you would have been gone by now. The Mods there got really pissed off at having to monitor and then delete posts, the guys here are pretty. many would so too, patient.

eehnie wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:

BKP wrote:ISIS collapsing. Rest of the year will be a race w/ NATO to fill the void. And then?

Lavrov's crew will put the screws on Kurds to reconcile with the reminder of what lies beyond the North if they play dumb

Idlibistan gets shredded\reconciled along the road

Of course the selfdescribed "main pro-Israel mod" of this forum, leaving the pro-Israel intoxication. This is the real pollution here.

Did someone say KOSHER?