Just like we don’t use process on Earth that require gravityless conditions , we will not use process in gravityless conditions that require gravity.

Or, to put it another way.
On Earth we have invented some processes which require&use gravity, and other process that do not require or use gravity. Likewise, we will. and already have in some cases, invented other processes that work in space, that also do not require or use gravity.

There are numerous technologies, many of which would create substantial demand increases, waiting for a relative increase in abundance. The cost of the materials -will- go down as the supply increases, yes, and that’s what will drive demand and new uses in technologies as they become competitive. However, it will likely be done in a controlled fashion to avoid destroying the market.

I love your point about reducing cost of materials in space as well. That is definitely a good idea and something they apparently plan to do. Hey, the I.S.S. needs water? No problem!

We need to reduce the cost of materials in space first, as everything there is now worth $10,000 /Kgm (anything, even dirt for cosmic-ray shielding), and then we can think about delivering an economic bonanza in materials for surface use.

But I am ignorant about the geology and chemistry of mining, especially under low g (< 0.1% Earth) circumstances. We will need to burrow down a few meters to shield the habitat from galactic cosmic rays, and how can we dig w/ no gravity? And how can we get a centrifuge, which we will likely need for habitation, down under the surface?

It seems to me that with the administration's Beyond Earth Orbit ideas, we could combine the asteroidal objectives with big steps towards Mars exploration if these problems can be solved, as I am sure they can, if the carbon, H2, etc are there to make it all worthwhile. NB at $10K/Kgm to get stuff off Earth, we do not need to mine Pt or rare earths to be competitive for materials to be used in space — propellants and silicon, in particular. A Base Camp on Phobos could also address many of the purely scientific objectives driving interest, as well as the technology and economic issues that interest those most interested in space exploration.

Thanks –

Internet Billionaire Ponies Up More Cash for Physics Prizes

By John Matson | October 1, 2012 |

Tech investor Yuri Milner, who shook the physics world two months ago by dishing out $27 million to the nine inaugural awardees of his Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation’s namesake award, has just sweetened the pot.

Milner’s organization today announced the addition of a new award, the Physics Frontiers Prize, which will place three individuals in the running for the $3-million Fundamental Physics Prize and bestow $300,000 on those who do not win it. This latest program, plus the $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize for young researchers, makes three big-money awards that the Milner Foundation promises to bestow.

The prizes are meant to recognize major achievements in fundamental physics—primarily theoretical physics, if the first batch of Fundamental Physics Prize laureates is any indication—with a preference for recent advances.
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So there it is, Nancy. If we don’t like your old laws of Physics, we’ll go out and discover all new laws of Physics.

I just can’t live by your laws, man…

Once they figure out how to get around those minor details, its clear sailing!! Significant research and development indeed … Not in my lifetime, not in my grandchildren’s lifetime.

With a port to launch the platinum capsules through iris shutters, the enclosed asteroid would look like the Death Star.

They can call it the Coleridge Mission. The robotic ship will voyage to the asteroid Xanadu where it will grapple itself to the surface and drill out the matter to print the first Kubla Khan robot. Then the robot can assemble a mini-plant named Alph to extract water from the deepest, darkest, hidden recesses of the living rock, then:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pressure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

(The sunless sea will be the comets of the Oort Cloud which will one day be shipped back to Mars.)

I suspect that by the time we’ve explored the asteroid belt enough to be mining extremely rare elements like platinum, the space elevator will be a reality. If I’m wrong, then possibly something like what you propose would become feasible.

“Initial space resource development will focus on water-rich asteroids. Water is the essence of life and exists in plentiful supply on asteroids. Access to water and other life-supporting volatiles in space provides hydration, breathable air, radiation shielding and even manufacturing capabilities. Water’s elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used to formulate rocket fuel. Using the resources of space – to explore space – will enable the large-scale exploration of the Solar System.

Recovery and processing of materials in a microgravity environment will occur through significant research and development. Planetary Resources will lead the creation of critical in-situ extraction and processing technologies to provide access to both asteroidal water and metals. When combined with our low-cost deep space explorers, this represents an enabling capability for the sustainable development of space.”

So they are working on all the problems we have discussed here, Nancy.

The real enabling technology for all this will clearly be a space elevator, if we can ever get the kinks worked out of that.

I’m not at all sure that it’s worthwhile to make traditional rocket fuels like LH2 and LOX from carbonaceous asteroids just for transporting bulk materials to LEO or the Earth’s surface. They would probably be more useful for last-minute course maneuvers and takeoffs and landings on planets, where you need the short bursts of large amounts of power. (Though not for takeoffs on the Moon, since it doesn’t have any gravity – a railgun or something similar ought to work better. Not sure it would work as well for landings though, because of the need for precise alignment during the approach, although it’s certainly not out of the question – it’s obviously possible, but the question is whether it’s energetically practical to attain the proper alignment if you’re coming from various points in space like the asteroids rather than common origin points like Earth). Additionally their relatively large mass would mean that they’d be an expensive commodity in the early stages of space development (Expensive because you have to transport them somehow from where you refine them to where you need them – which takes a lot of energy in and of itself).

I think for bulk transport, solar sails and ion drives are clearly the ways to go.

Cameron is good at getting publicity, but publicity does not process ore.

The minerals have to be mined and preprocessed in situ.
The critical part is to move back the cargo into the atmosphere.
For the final miles of the flight a solution like what has been used to land the Curiosity rover is quite possible but not economical.

This is yet another reason to have the space elevator.

This is the kind of projects for which we really need U.N.S. (United Nations of Science) as this is a gigaproject with several huge milestones to be achieved before it becomes economically profitable and only global public funding can achieve that.

But what other choices do we have? Degrowth? Mining Earth’s crust under the pressure of 4000m of water? This would be suicidal IMHO.

The (political) world is lacking of ambitious and useful common projects, this is one.

The biggest problem is getting any materials from a near-Earth orbit onto the ground – you don’t want to just drop it in the atmosphere, it’s either going to burn up if it’s a small amount of material, or make a dangerous impact if it’s too large. Ideally you’d need the cost of getting from LEO to the ground via some controlled descent to be very low – a space elevator, perhaps? At any rate, current technologies are just simply too expensive for this to be able to make a significant contribution to Earth-based mining, at least for materials that were destined for use on Earth. Hopefully at some point this will become practical, but not in the immediate future.

But for materials destined for use in space – in LEO, for example, or perhaps even more likely the Lagrange points or in deep space (which are energetically more expensive destinations than LEO for missions originating on Earth). It might well be possible to produce raw materials for such uses at a competitive cost to sending them up from Earth, at least until technologies like the space elevator are perfected. In fact, in the long run if we’re going to do very much in space we’ll need to mine most of the raw materials there in any event; there just won’t be enough on Earth.

Now is time for prospection with very small probes whose unique mission will be to fetch the data about the asteroids to mine.

Maybe some target candidates can be found from Earth. I’m assuming good candidates would be the most dense asteroids (i.e. those with the highest kg/m^3 ratio). This could be inferred from their orbits, provided we already have access to this kind of data with enough resolution.

The main objective is to cut a despairing dependency on Earth alone, leaving us no choice except “degrowth” with overwhelming pollution in between (one example among many others: rare earth elements extraction is among the most polluting industry, inasmuch as U.S.A. left it to China with the military dependency it incurs).

It is time to make Earth an open system, so yes, let’s mine the asteroids and the moon!

Nobody should laugh but everybody should donate, and if a majority don’t understand why, every nation should tax the (dumb) citizens to have them participating, nolens volens!

I’m skeptical of Planetary Resources doing any actual mining for quite a while, if ever, but those private space telescopes they’re selling will be a great thing all by themselves regardless of how the space mining pans out for them.

(Or didn’t you read before knocking it down? You think asteroid miners will be guys with hard hats with a light on them, right? Uh, no. These will be remote robotic missions. The miners will remain here on Earth.)

2) This looks sort of awesome. I’m glad to see they’re already hiring. I’d have guessed that to take another 2 years.

Editor; could you please, please, ask Ray if he feels that his timeframes might not have been optimistic enough? Both me and Singularity Utopia feel Mr. Kurzweil might have been a bit… conservative, in his estimates, if you can believe such a thing. xD