Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin' (opens in new tab)

I found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.

I've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.

Funny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.

Just read it off your recommendation here. It's not a hard scifi unless you'd think Transformers also are. Some really far fetched sysadmin fiction.

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

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

I found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.

I thought they were fairly enjoyable books but I didn't find the initial scenario at all plausible.

> 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 materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball.

The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it.

The feasible options are either:

1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder.

2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer.

The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.

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.

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.

So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic.

In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but I find it interesting that one of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla) has a huge demand for nickel and another one of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX) won a contract with NASA to explore 16 Psyche, an asteroid essentially made of nickel, and is working on a completely reusable rocket...

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 on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).

I suspect the value in asteroid mining will be for building things in space that will remain in space, due to the high cost of trying to launch material out of Earth's gravity well.

One theory in favor of space mining is that (and I personally believe this is wishful thinking) one asteroid might have a lot of titanium in it that would be worth trillions (and probably crash the titanium market).

But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.

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 earth, or some combination.

100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.

What Mars lacks is a source of power. The solar incidence may be too weak to support much of anything. No fissile materials have yet been discovered there.

The Moon has plenty of solar to harvest.

Mars might not be worth the effort if you have good asteroid mining - you could say build a O'Neil type cylinders inside an asteroid from local resources and spin them up. Some of the Tech you need for mining might transfer directly into tech or building structures like this. For instance refining metals in zero-G via rotating smelters to separate materials might serve as system to spin up and control the cylinder rotation.

You might even get most of the stuff aside from metals as byproducts of the metal refining process (water, oxygen(from oxids) and carbon mostly). Nitrogen and Phosphor might need importing.

Most of the leftover asteroid serves as Protection against small collisions.

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, ??)