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Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

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Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#81

Post by bserge »

082349872349872 wrote: post #49
bserge wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky He was considered one of the founding fathers of cosmonautics in the USSR.

Yes, I believe he's on the left in the pantheon: https://earth.google.com/web/@29.56025315,-95.08501348,28.52... but the english wikipedia article talks mostly about those of his ideas which had substantial impact, and doesn't mention his more science-fictional manifestos. (My guesses: Циолковский, Королёв, Гагарин, ??)

I believe the last photo is Alexey Leonov possibly with Pavel Belyaev (not really sure), of the Voskhod 2 mission. Leonov was the first person to do a spacewalk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Leonov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Belyayev (some interesting tidbits about the Voskhod 2 mission there)

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#82

Post by elihu »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #46
elihu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's just to bring back high-value metals to Earth, then that's probably the least complicated because the mass you have to move is low. I don't know the logistics of, say, gold mining in space, but you might not even bother with any on-site processing. Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That presupposes you know how to find such a rock. If your goal is…

> Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That's not how it works. Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like material…

16 Psyche is the sort of place I was picturing as a source of gold. I didn't know we knew enough about its structure to say that the gold (if present) would be difficult to get at, but that sounds like an interesting problem.

In retrospect I guess it makes sense that if 16 Psyche is a chunk of planetary core, then the sort of impact that created it would likely have turned it molten, and its internal weak gravity may then have caused all the heavy metals to sink to the middle before it cools.

At any rate, gold mining sounds like an easier problem than, say, trying to manufacture stainless steel in space in a way that makes economic sense. (We'll probably get there eventually if we're going to have any kind of real space economy, but bootstrapping is going to be hard.)

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#83

Post by elihu »

withinboredom wrote: post #54
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That's not how it works. Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like material…

Another problem with bringing big rocks back from space, is that you’d probably have a bunch of people trying to stop you either with words or force. Big rocks coming to earth could mean the end of life on earth with the smallest of mistakes or accidents.

Depends on how big the rocks are. The Tunguska event (not an end-all-life level of catastrophe but definitely not something we'd want to repeat on accident) is thought to have been caused by something that was about 100 meters or so [1]. Compared to light-weight spacecraft that's a lot more mass than we're accustomed to moving with the technology currently available. Also, the destructiveness of that event may have had a lot to do with the relative velocity of it with the Earth, which would presumably be a lot lower if you were just trying to aim a metal-rich boulder or bundle of processed metal into a parking orbit with Earth.

It would be reasonable to expect some level of concern from the governments of Earth that even relatively small metallic objects could be used as effective weapons if lobbed at specific cities or military installations. Perhaps heavy manufacturing will for that and other reasons be kept away from Earth orbit and instead be done in, say, lunar orbit or in one of the Earth-sun Lagrangian points where the gravity well isn't so deep and it's easier to move the product anywhere else in the solar system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#84

Post by Kim_Bruning »

evgen wrote: post #30
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid? I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic. I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots: process in orbit, drop parts down to…

I have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.

That's the interesting and confounding part of it. Going up to get them is expensive, sending them back rather less so.

(the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#85

Post by Kim_Bruning »

vkou wrote: post #20
red2awn wrote: post #14

Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?

The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity. The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical. And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal. I…

Yes and no, the problem is the initial infrastructure. Travel to and from the earth's surface are your actual major cost. (And to be honest, as we all know, the downward leg is almost free; so just the travel up the gravity well to low earth orbit is your actual bottleneck) .

If there was already a town/colony on the moon, they'd attract the entire current space industry, because it's simply cheaper to launch things into earth orbit from the moon.

Specifically from the moon, you can probably upgrade your launch options and get launch costs low enough to compete with earth-surface to earth-surface shipping, in some cases.

People somehow mis-estimate delta-v costs. Take a look at the Saturn-V for an intuition. Pretty much the majority of that towering machine was needed to get people to LEO + first leg to the moon (and most of it was fuel), but only the 2 tiny space-ships at the top were needed to get people back.

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#86

Post by Kim_Bruning »

vkou wrote: post #78
lopmotr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, there iron and nickel asteroids that aren't chemically combined with other substances like ore is on Earth. So perhaps the only processing required would be melting and reforming it.

A kilogram of iron currently costs ~40 cents. That's because iron makes up 6% of the earth's crust. A kilogram of nickel costs ~13$. And nickel makes up a mere 0.0009% of the earth's crust. It's completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of returning them to Earth. It's also completely pointless to mine them, with the hope of using them in space, for many, many reasons. 1. A spacecraft factory employs thousands…

If you're making a space-space spacecraft, you can probably cut the requirements for that vehicle factory down to a manageable size. Still big! But manageable. And some of the lightweight specialty parts (like computers) could still be imported from earth, further reducing the size.

I'm not saying it won't still be big. You basically need community in Low earth orbit, low lunar orbit, or on the moon. But it could well be worth it; depending on the demand for hardware in earth orbit to begin with.

If you get moon launch costs low enough (and they'd be low!) you might start competing with some traditional industries on earth.

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#87

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Symmetry wrote: post #77
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not shaping it into some sort of lifting body, made out of honey comb like structures, and have that land into the ocean near the coast, to be towed to the next factory complex on land and disassamble the refined raw materials there? Combine with maybe inner compartments for standardized space containers for whatever else? This could be completely passive and autonomous, where the attached engine modules for deor…

I was just talking about the minimal viable product. Yeah, metal foam is something you can make in space but not on Earth and it might be valuable to send metal down for that reason. Using a glider will increase uncertainty about where the results end up, though, compared to a simpler measure of decent. I think accepting some ablation as the price of accuracy is probably the way to go.

Depends on if you put some control software on the glider. Generally a controllable aerodynamic shape gives you a good amount of cross-range ability to pick your landing ground, and a good amount of accuracy to land there with precision.

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#88

Post by Kim_Bruning »

nine_k wrote: post #28
lettergram wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale? If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent. However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way. Assuming we…

Mining an asteroid far away and then spend fuel to shuttle material from it to GEO or Moon seems rather uneconomical. I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it…

The fuel cost to shuttle the materials back would be fairly negligible. The main cost to getting anything into space at the moment is the initial launch to LEO. (This equation changes if you're not actually launching your mining vessel from the earth's surface)

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#89

Post by RangerScience »

superkuh wrote: post #6
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #2

I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining

Daemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.

Suarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)

Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

#90

Post by RangerScience »

Symmetry wrote: post #51
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #2

I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining

I appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the bo…

Which engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?
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