Yesterday a meteoric fireball exploded over the West coast, sending shock waves ...

[GreyGeek]

up and down the land, rattling buildings and shaking the earth.

Today, another fireball exploded over Bellevue, Washington, His name is Eric C Anderson. He was the primary driving source and fount of knowledge for the Planetary Resources press conference. An amazing and dynamic fellow. He wants to make Bellevue, WA, the "silicon valley of space".

I've been listening the the Planetary Resources pep rally/public announcement for the last two hours, it just ended, about their intent to mine the asteroids.
Here is their website: http://www.planetaryresources.com/

When I first heard of it I was skeptical. Now that I have heard their plan, I am not. It is doable. The man landing on the Moon took ten years and the resources and talent of the most advanced nation on the Earth at the time. Now, a group of billionaires and the creme'-de-la-creme' of our space scientists and engineers are going to build robot satellites no bigger than your family car, using water extracted from asteroids as fuel for unannounced engines. (Solar energy to break them into H₂ & O₂ and then burn them?).

I read one estimate that Platinum, for example, was present in asteroids at one ounce per ton. I am curious now to see how they plan to use satellites no bigger than cars to extract that one ounce from that ton of dust.

I remember listening to JFK as he announced that he was committing the USA to "to put a man on the Moon by the end of this decade". It gave me goose-bumps listening to him and he instantly raised the excitement level around the country to a fever pitch. I got the same goose bumps listening to this announcement. They will be launching a swarm of Arkyd 100 series space telescopes to search for near earth objects (NEO) during the next two or three years. Then they place to launch Arkyd 200 series robotic miners to the objects they discover that are close enough to reach with on board fuel. Using water extracted from those objects as fuel the robots will visit other objects, etc.... Currently it takes $20,000 to put a liter of water into low earth orbit. ($10,000 per pound). Using water found in space (IF they can find it and extract it) is one way they plan to reduce the cost of exploration and mining by and order of two or more.

Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer of Planetary Resources: "Science fiction is fiction right up to the point that it becomes fact". (Lewicki was the flight director for the Mars Rovers.)

I may live to see the first robot mining launches, if I make it to 80! :cool:

[GreyGeek]

These folks apparently have been operating under the radar since 2010 !! I was watching one of the videos about the Arkyd 100 and noticed a device similar to what I used to own, a Meade LX-200 10" (that like is to the 8") telescope. It was given to me by a client as a gift after I concluded the work he contracted for me to do. A couple of years before I retired I donated it to the Prairie Astronomy Club.

That is "off the shelf" for sure!

They'll probably not purchase the mount or the yoke, because they'll use gyroscopic stabilization of the Arkyd 100 itself to point and stabilize the scope.

[woodsmoke]

Hi GG fascinating post.

A coupla comments.

There is also the magnetic accelerator for putting stuff into space.

The navy's "railgun" is quite possibly the closest that is being done to ironing out the kinks to it. Asimov, or Heinlein, did the basic calculations about thirty years ago

A railgun launcher could literally launch as soon as a "thing" is placed on the rail in proper configuration, that means probably multiple launches per day.

The space shuttle lands itself, using I think, the equivalent of an old Atari computer, all that is needed is ballistic calculations.

When one is going to plop the thing in the ocean it is a rather rudimentary calculation.

The only REAL impediment to doing ANY of this was, to me,

a) imagination
b) a change in the financial models so that the companies that now extract from the ground would extract from underwater. And, if enviornmental "concerns" could be assuaged, they could be plopped onto Terra firma.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

I don't usually like to be the nattering nabob of negativity. And I'm always in favor of technological advancement. But human space travel past the moon? I just don't see the value. The time scales are ridiculous. The distance between interstellar objects is just too great. I know I've mentioned this here before...I wish the governments on this planet would take a portion of what they spend on space research and instead divert it toward learning more about the 70% of our own planet that's still mostly a mystery.

[GreyGeek]

Neither does Planetary Resources. When asked about sending up men to do the mining, Eric C Anderson said "sending men is too expensive for the returns it gives". He then said, in a conciliatory manner, that maybe, "someday, we'll send men, but not for the foreseeable future."

My first criticism of the project was that there are modules of manganese and other minerals littering the floor of the Pacific, there are mineral deposits around vent holes and old volcanoes. It would be a lot cheaper to mine the floor of the ocean than the asteroids. But, then, some group would find some minuscule crustacean and claim that mining threatened it existence, the poiticians would step in, and even if the right palms were greased the increase in costs, lawsuits, settlements, payoffs, etc..., would make the mining too expensive.

[woodsmoke]

LOL, minsicule crustacean!

Anywhoo......

I can't find the linky but NASA actually said, DECADES ago, in printed hardcopy matter, that they were going to "test" not bolting things together on the space station.

They actually tested "holding pices together" with clamps to see if DIFFUSION of the materials would "weld" them together. However the time scale didn't work.

It is a little known item, at least I couldn't find it, that the "government" did a mass weighing of all the gold in Ft. Knox to verify just what was there and they found that EVERYBODY had had some small amounts of gold BURGLED..... but no.... it turned out that the Gold DIFFUSED into the supposedly "inert" lead sheets that were on the tops of the wooden boards of the carts.

So.... if they are going to "squeeze" the asteroids, and there is water in them then this is really NOT rocket science. They just "enclose" one end of the asteroid in some kind of "shroud" within the "container", don't know what, but then apply "pressure" of some kind to that end, and the "stuff" then floats out through DIFFUSION, kind of a "forward osmosis".

The other thing to remember is that the time scale is not important, if it takes five years to DIFFUSE stuff from the asteroid then no biggie, start building hundreds of the devices, launch one every month, at the end of five years, then one at a time, each month, the device comes back to the earth and is harvested, and ...is re-launched.

Diffusion: the movement of particles from an area of high concentration to low concentration.

Osmosis: the diffusion of water across a memberane.

What is a membrane? A membrane does not need to be "alive". A cigarette celophane wrapper is an analogue. So, the movemnt of water from one end of the asteroid to the other, under pressure, would carry any "soluble" materials with it.

Also, one could easily put a solvent, such as weak sulphuric acid in the water and remove the acid through say electrolysis and store it, then run another solvent through it. Each solvent would carry a different chemical that will be seperated out later.

This is done on a daily basis in what is called "sequential" chemical processing, all that needs to be done is to scale it up and have just "one" tube, instead of many tubes.

just some thoughts and probably way off base.

woodsmoke