Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs. Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.
Why do you say that?
School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
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Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#22Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.
It costs $4k/lb to get something into orbit. Maybe mining for use in space is the way to go. I hear SpaceX might have some plans to build stuff in space in the coming years so there might be a ready buyer.
That makes anything you can “mine” out of orbit worth at least 4k/lb. pretty steep incentive for even the most basic resources.
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#23>[T]he class covered the Outer Space Treaty, a creation of the United Nations that governs outer-space actions and (in some people's interpretations) makes the legality of space mining dubious.
If this topic interests you, there's a whole category at your local library for Space Law (it's at the end, KZD1002-6715): https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_...
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#24Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.
Can you define what you mean by not spending a lot of resources on Mining?
A significant part of the world’s GDP is in mining and mining and its subsidiary industries (manufacturing for example could not exist without mining) contributes something like 60-70% of the world’s GDP.
We do not have vast excess supply. There are likely many deposits left to be found but it’s widely accepted that the easy resources have been found and we must go deeper to find more. Exploration over the last couple of years has not been invested in and the trove of known resources has been dwindling.
Mining space is impractical due to costs (there are a lot of cost savings to still be had on Earth).
Source: I work for one of the world’s largest suppliers of mining equipment and am heavily involved in the mining market in Canada and peripherally the rest of the world for hard rock mining.
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#25Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.
If it's not grown, it has to be mined!
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#26Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.
We're great at mining but bad at putting things in space. The main virtue of mining things in space is that the materials are already in space, sparing the vast expense of launching them up there. I guess I partially agree that having other things we want to do in space is prerequisite, but imagine the kinds of things we could do and build if we had unlimited raw materials already in orbit, or on the moon. Remember,…
We are not great at mining.
Fun fact: the manufacturing industry has been able to obtain machine utilization at nearly 100%. Mining is in the 40% range.
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#27Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs. Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.
Aerospace? You must be thinking of CU.
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#28Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs. Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.
A lot of Googlers in Boulder went to school of mines so it can't be that bad.
Googler from Mines. There were some fantastic courses and professors, but it definitely suffered from being such a small department at the time I was there. I recently visited to pitch Field Session projects (it's like a capstone project done between junior and senior year over the summer), and was blown away by how large it's become. They're also much better funded now it seems. :)
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#29Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.
It costs $4k/lb to get something into orbit. Maybe mining for use in space is the way to go. I hear SpaceX might have some plans to build stuff in space in the coming years so there might be a ready buyer.
SpaceX is planning on reducing the $/lb by a lot with a fully-reusable launch vehicle. That will make the economics of mining and building in space both better and harder at the same time.
Re: School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program
#30Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs. Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.
One of their two intro programming classes uses C++.
The real intro course is taught in Python (CS101), all bulletins after 2011 require CS101.
But you're correct, CS201 and 202 (numbers might be wrong, it's a long time...) were both C++ courses. Intro to Programming and Data Structures. IMO, C++ was appropriate for Data Structures, but perhaps not CS201.
Later, all instruction is more or less in Java, MIPS assembler, or Python. And a little Scheme/Racket.