Cheap Astronomy - Dear CA Ep. 132: Mining Again

Hosted by Steve Nerlich.

Bringing it home. Cheap Astronomy digs in to asteroid mining.

Dear Cheap Astronomy – Are rubble pile asteroids easier to mine?

Rubble pile asteroids are a collection of rocks that have accreted together under their mutual gravity, but the object they form isn't massive enough for gravity to compress it into one unified object. Instead, the rocks that gather together remain as individual rocks. So, from a mining perspective there's an advantage in that you can just pick up those individual rocks without needing drilling or explosives. 

 

Dear Cheap Astronomy – How do we get mining products back to Earth?

The current narrative on space mining seems to go in two directions. One direction is about in situ resource utilization (ISRU in NASA speak) where there's no doubt it's a lot cheaper to source water from space than to launch it from Earth – and a similar principle applies to most building materials: steel, concrete and glass. Of course, the mathematics of in situ resource utilization makes perfect sense but begs the question of what the economic incentives are to build dwellings in space and source space water to support the people in those dwellings, as well supporting agriculture and making rocket fuel. If we can't identify those incentives, we're just saying that we're going to go into space so we can go into space.

 

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