Some thoughts on Mining Asteroids vs the Moon

> First off I want to state that in the long term I see Asteroid Mining
> and O'Neill colonies as the way to go.
>
> > Wouldn't it be a lot more economical to get this material from a
> Near
> > Earth Asteroid located at about 0.25 AU from Earth?
> >
> > The Moon has a gravitation well and this costs money to get
> materials
> > on and off. We will need heavier and stronger crafts to mine there
> as
> > we would need doing the same on an asteroid.
> >
> Agreed the Moon does have a steeper gravity well than an Asteroid
>
> > Doing the same with robotic crafts would save costs and masses
> needed
> > to support human life.
>
> Robots are good for exploration, if all we want to do is to just
> explore space, robotics are far more cost effective.
> But what you are talking about is "Mining & refining", even on Earth
> it is difficult & dirty work and equipment breaksdown.

In the beginning I would just start with strip mining and transporting
the ore back
to the ISS, refining would be added later.
Just simple crafts which touch down and scoop off some of the asteroids
dusts
and rubble, the "landers" would (smoothly) accelerate against the
asteroids ground.
Other landers would collect the rubble with sample arms and place it in
their sample
container.

> You might be able to develop a robotic sample return system of a few
> kilos, but not a full scale automated mining operation.
I am not sure about the "few" kilos you mention.
If such a lander had a container of one cubic meter size, it could take
in materials which
could have a mass of about one or more tons. Those tons could have an
asteroid weight
of perhaps 100 grams on a small asteroid.

If ore collection (because of the low asteroid gravity) is that easy as
I imagine, collecting and transporting
it back to the mother unit with the same prospector landers should be
possible.
The mining operation is just the mother unit along with the prospector
and satellite units it carries.
No mining equipment, which has to be installed on the asteroid.

When the mother-unit returns with the landers returns, it gets served at
the ISS and can start again
for the next operation with new thruster units and new solar panel rolls
if necessary, even with
updated new prospector landers which have been built using the insights
gained at the mining
operation.

> So you are
> going to need people on site to run & fix the equipment. So for each
> mission, you are still going to have to budget for humans and
> lifesupport.

No, I would not need humans in situ. We would have operation teams which
operate from Earth using remote control and fiddle on the mining and
navigation
software. If a get's stuck, we return with what is left, if a mother
ship fails, it is lost.
We would just use and launch a swarm of motherships and their chance of
successful
return will improve with the experience gained.

> >
> > The best of all we could do that now, not having to wait on
> > developments in human life support.
> Wait on what? For a Closed Life Cycle System is my guess. Worst case
> is that you bring all your 02 & water with you that you need, you
> still may want to bring along excess water anyway, it can double as
> radiation shielding.
I think, you cannot launch humans now, letting them work for month on
the Moon.
You have to take care, that they can live and work for those month and
that needs
development which will take a lot of time. I guess most of development
costs
and time would go into human life support; time and money which could be
spend
better in a robotic asteroid operation.

>
> > Betting on the Moon card only would cost humanity not only money but
> > time also, years of development were nothing other is done.
> >
> > I would start to set out to the asteroids first and getting back to
> > the Moon later when we are able to support Moon operations with
> > materials and technology (especially in space construction and
> > fabrication as well as tele-operation) gained at the asteroids.
> >
> Teleoperations from an Asteroid? The Moon is always the same
> distance from Earth and I've seen postings here and in other NGs
> stating that the time lag for Teleoperations on the Moon are
> managable, with the Asteroids it would be lags of at best Minutes!
No my suggestion would be tele-operations from Earth.
As you, I think, that the time lag is manageable. There are already
tele-operated
robots on Mars which is far more away than a near Sun asteroid.

One more serious problem would be bandwidth to get video-data back to Earth
for the operators.
To explain that I would like to quote a message, I posted on another
newsgroup:

> > If you had $1 billion that had to be spent on space development, how
> > would you spend it? What projects would you fund?
>

If I had a billion I would fund a fleet of say 6 solar sail carrier
ships like that of the Solar-Sail-Launch-System shown at
http://solar-thruster-sailor.info/figs/fig19-21d.html .

Four of them would carry several daughter units with at least two
different prospector landers and say four communication/observation
daughter-units.

Two others would carry a fleet of communication units which would set
out into orbits around Sun to provide bandwidth to receive and relay
those data back to Earth.
They would orbit close to Sun and enhance the weaker signals being sent
from the prospector units and relay them backwards to Earth.
For instance I would have one circle at 0.33 AU and one at 0.66 AU each
with 6 communication units.

If we had a lander at an asteroid at say 0.5 AU on the other (seen from
Earth) side of Sun the data would be sent to a relay-satellite at 0.33
AU and from there forwarded through the chain to the satellite Nearest
to Earth. From there the data would get forwarded to a 0.66 AU
satellite and from there forwarded backwards to Earth.

We have already robots on Mars which are remote controlled, the robots
on asteroids inside the orbit of Earth feature considerably less time
lag and more bandwidth even without relay satellite chains.

As the bandwidth diminishes with the inverse square of distance those
relay chains would enhance the possibility to send even video data back
to Earth which are used for remote controlling the prospector fleet.
They would enable communication also in situations were the Sun is
between Earth and the asteroids being prospected.

As there are at least 6 satellites in one chain several communication
lines for different operations could get opened up. As those satellites
would circle NEAR SUN a lot of energy would available to power their
solar cell arrays (or the arrays could get somewhat smaller).

Hayabusa which nearly did blind landings on the asteroid, has shown us,
that independant observation satellites which film the operation of the
landers are essentially.
Those observation satellites would send their data backwards to the
mother ship which serves (having ample solar cell arrays) as a relay
satellite during the prospecting operation.

If backward observation capacity would be available those satellites
could spot further Near-Sun- Asteroids inside 1 AU of Sun also since
observation outwards from near Sun will be a lot better because of
reflecting the reflecting Sunshine off the asteroids.

Now to the prospector operations.
They would operate remote controlled, for each operation would be one
team with operators
available (I would call them Robonauts since they are operating flying
robots).

They would get sent out, say every month each to a different asteroid.
At least two different prospector-landers would be available.
One prospector lander which just picks stony/ore materials of the
asteroids ground and puts it into it's ore collector-container until it
is full.

The other prospector-lander type would be a push-down scoop prospector
which accelerates downward into the dusty asteroid cover.
Deep Impact has shown to me, that asteroids with those light-weight
covers are possible/ likely
were just pushing down and scooping materials would be a viable
prospecting option.
Those scoop-materials will probably hold already more platinum, gold,
he3-materials better than those mined on Earth-mines.

Say each of the two prospectors per mother-ship would extract 1 ton of
materials, each
operation could bring two tons of that materials back to Earth orbit.

After the prospectors would be filled up with material they would
re-dock into the mother ship which starts the journey backwards to Earth
Orbit delivering the materials to the ISS were they would get
investigated and in space processing capabilities have to be developed.

For the financing part.
I think one billion should be enough to finance the initial deployment
and operation of the fleet.
This fleet would be low cost and every part of it has to be developed once.

So we would have to develop the launcher-unit, the carrier-ship-unit ,
the observation daughter units, the communication-daughter units and two
kinds of lander-prospectors first.

To finance the later operation and development of further refining and
prospecting possibilities
I would try to sell out the publication rights to large publishing
networks in public auctions for each
single operation of a mother ship.

I would try also to sell the data relay capacity of the two
communication chains to provide data services to space agencies, like
NASA and ESA. NASA might be interested to have that capacity at hand,
when they try their Mars operations.

I would concentrate onto the prospecting and development of prospecting
and mining operations and sell out the materials to different sides like
space agencies or large mining companies probably in public auctions too.

Those mining companies have already billions available and the knowledge
of material prospecting operations on Earth.
So I would try to work closely together with them.

As the returning prospecting units are easily upgrade- and repair-able
at NEO-space-stations, using them several times would be possible.

As the space prospecting operations would improve, refining capabilities,
space fabrication techniques would emerge were fuel and parts for
spacecrafts are gained directly in space.
This would improve costs of space operations considerably.

I would forgo direct human space operations as long as those
capabilities are not available to save the resources of humanity until
the rich space supply of NEAR Earth asteroids can be used to facilitate
direct human involvement.

I would forgo heavy gravitation wells also and I would go Sun-wards
because of the ample energy supply available according to the inverse
square increase when shortening the distance to Sun. This increase works
for energy-supply, so we need smaller solar cell arrays , but it works
for solar sails as well, were the returning motherships can bank onto
the ample radiation pressure available near Sun.

All these could reduce the costs of material-mining operations orders of
magnitude compared to Moon operation for instance.
We would just need smaller much cheaper gear.

It would take somewhat longer to get this gear out, but development of
it would be a lot shorter than that of Moon mining operations, so that
the first profits of those NEO-mining operation could get basked in much
sooner.

For me to supply Earth with materials and getting mining, energy
production and environmental pollution of fabrication off Earth is one
more target for those operations besides building a space habitat :-) .

Frank