There’s been little in the way of details from the announcement last week of a new company, Planetary Resources, AKA the asteroid miners. There will be a news conference or some type of event this Tuesday in Seattle where the fledgling firm will unveil some of its plans:
(WSJ) — Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.
Louis Friedman, a former NASA aerospace engineer who also was involved in the study, said he supports this strategy but noted that it would take “hundreds of millions of dollars” to get started and that Planetary Resources would “need to find a lower-cost way to access space” in order to succeed.
If you pitch this as a technology that can also be used to divert asteroids on an earth collision course (as long as you detect them early enough) they might garner more interest.
You know, the world is lucky the guys interested in making what could be ballistic missiles with a global range carrying large payloads are intent on peaceful exploration. Think what an unscrupulous company could do with one of Musk’s Falcon 9’s for example, I’m sure North Korea would pay handsomely for one.
I wonder where they intend to use the material from the asteroid. I guess it must be for space applications. If it is to be used in manufacturing space structures, then they get to compute the value by comparing with the cost of bringing up manufactured items from the ground. But then they need to assume and/or create a whole new capability for space manufacturing that doesn’t exist yet, and applications to feed into. Perhaps spacebased solar power for beaming to earth fills the bill.
I wish them the best in their endeavour, in any case.
I don’t think they’re figuring in the cost of the R&D that NASA has done over the last several decades. I assume that will just be a gift, right?
Yes, R&D will be a gift. My guess is they’re looking at filling up a fuel depot with H/LOX some companies and NASA are talking about creating in LEO from material taken from space.
There must be some analogue to Godwin’s Law regarding the probability of any discussion involving technology eventually evaluating said technology on the basis that it can be used as a weapon.
Well, they say they are. But they would, wouldn’t they, even if they actually intend to blackmail Earth’s political leaders with a threat to bring it down on their heads?
There was a time I was enamoured of Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1976 book The High Frontier, which proposed beaming satellite solar power down by microwave, but I doubt it’s really feasible, given safety and cost considerations. If the beam contains much power per unit area, it will surely fry anything in the way, and if it’s spread out to avoid this, you’d need a vast ground-based infrastructure to collect it. Given the huge costs of doing anything in space, it also seems doubtful it could compete with ground-based solar power in the forseeable future.
As I said on the earlier thread on this topic, I think literal gold-mining is the most likely intention.
@KG
At the Earth’s surface, a suggested microwave beam would have a maximum intensity at its center, of 23 mW/cm2 (less than 1/4 the solar irradiation constant), and an intensity of less than 1 mW/cm2 outside of the rectenna fenceline (the receiver’s perimeter). These compare with current United States Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) workplace exposure limits for microwaves, which are 10 mW/cm.
Rectennas would likely be multiple kilometers across which compares favourably with solar and wind arrays.
The microwave beam intensity at ground level in the center of the beam would be designed and physically built into the system; simply, the transmitter would be too far away and too small to be able to increase the intensity to unsafe levels, even in principle.
A commonly proposed approach to ensuring fail-safe beam targeting is to use a retrodirective phased array antenna/rectenna. A “pilot” microwave beam emitted from the center of the rectenna on the ground establishes a phase front at the transmitting antenna. There, circuits in each of the antenna’s subarrays compare the pilot beam’s phase front with an internal clock phase to control the phase of the outgoing signal. This forces the transmitted beam to be centered precisely on the rectenna and to have a high degree of phase uniformity; if the pilot beam is lost for any reason (if the transmitting antenna is turned away from the rectenna, for example) the phase control value fails and the microwave power beam is automatically defocused. Such a system would be physically incapable of focusing its power beam anywhere that did not have a pilot beam transmitter.
(all from wikipedia)
@sailor1031
Well, that money has been spent so the alternative would be to not use the R&D at all which seems wasteful.
Phil Plait – Bad Astronomy
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/21/this-is-why-we-invest-in-science-this/
steve oberski,
Thanks for that – I should have checked wikipedia myself. I’m not convinced of the practicality of the scheme, given other points in the wikipedia article on satellite solar power, notably the short predicted lifetime of the space-based infrastructure.
@KG
I tend to take a (perhaps naive) optimistic viewpoint on the ability of science and technology to solve problems.
Given the basically unlimited supply of power and material in the space environment I would think that the problems posed by a hostile space environment are resolvable.
Then again fusion power has been 20 years away since the 1950s …
For an interesting treatment on the long term detrimental effects of microwaves on humans and the use of lunar based elctro-magnetic mass drivers as high energy kinetic weapons in a science fiction genre I recommend “Waldo” and “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” respectively, both by Robert A. Heinlein.
I know the R&D money has already been spent but that’s no reason why new companies shouldn’t have to pay for it if they plan to use it. I’d like to see us taxpayers getting something back. Plus I am categorically against handouts to corporate welfare bums!
Stephen D Covey has a modest proposal:
Capture the asteroid Apophis and build a dozen Solar Power Satellites (SPS). Total Cost: $30 Billion. Annual revenue upon completion of the project (8 years): $16 Billion
At the end of eight years, 90% of the asteroid remains, and you can continue building SPS units until the asteroid is consumed.