4 ms·

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’

by rlt 6y ago

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...

elihu 6y ago
I was just thinking about posting a comment about 16 psyche... I hadn't heard about the exploration mission, that should be pretty interesting. Iirc, 16 psyche is thought to possibly be a fragment of a planetary core and so it might contain a completely different proportion of metals than what you might find on the Earth's surface.
evgen 6y ago
The problems with this theory (and with asteroid mining in general) is that it is extremely unlikely that anything you mine in space will be economical to get back down. Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place -- if something was not worth the cost to launch it into space it is unlikely to be worth landing. The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place Doesn't that depend on how you get it down. Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Metal anything dropped from orbit at the speeds we are talking about would either burn up in the atmosphere or else hit the ocean surface and become lots of small chunks of something that is now sinking to the ocean floor. You need to shed a huge amount of delta-V just to get to the point where the landing site is described using any term other than 'impact crater.' Most of the mechanisms for dumping this energy tend to be a bit tricky to pull off and I am not sure, but there might be an upper limit after which ablation stops being a viable option.
    - Symmetry 6y ago
      Meteorites that arrive on the Earth from outer space are most certainly a thing that happens sometimes, that's wear all our existing Mars rocks come from for instance. Whether something survives reentry depends on a lot of factors including the size of the object, the angle of re-entry, its composition, etc.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      When you have the ability to make it into foam in space, why not use that to make lifting bodies out of it, and let them glide down, instead of crashing like a stone? Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
      - evgen 6y ago
        You can't 'glide down' from orbit. You need to dump your delta-V somewhere. Stop thinking of orbit as though this chunk of metal is suspended from some big balloon out there. _Everything_ in space is moving, 0.0% if it is moving at the right speed and direction to enter the atmosphere and soft land without a lot of external assistance.
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        I know that. I've written elsewhere how I imagine that. With modular thrusters which initiate the deorbiting, detaching when it is en route. Could be autonomous, could be 'tugboats' with human crew, I don't care. Doesn't really matter, as long as the lifting body of refined raw materials has the right weight to surface ratio, and therefore rarely even peaks above 400°C for a short time.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  The thing is... we could outsource much of our current heavy- or other polluting industries 'up there', to finally remake the Planet of the Apes into the Garden of Eden, like it should be. Wouldn't that be a nice goal?
azernik 6y ago
Nickel is so common and cheap it is unlikely to be profitable to ship it to Earth. It's more likely that nickel and iron would be used as construction materials in space, to make satellites and stations cheaper by reducing the launch mass required. The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.

by rlt 6y ago

elihu 6y ago

I was just thinking about posting a comment about 16 psyche... I hadn't heard about the exploration mission, that should be pretty interesting. Iirc, 16 psyche is thought to possibly be a fragment of a planetary core and so it might contain a completely different proportion of metals than what you might find on the Earth's surface.

evgen 6y ago

The problems with this theory (and with asteroid mining in general) is that it is extremely unlikely that anything you mine in space will be economical to get back down. Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place -- if something was not worth the cost to launch it into space it is unlikely to be worth landing. The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.

noir_lord 6y ago
> Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place Doesn't that depend on how you get it down. Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
- evgen 6y ago
  Metal anything dropped from orbit at the speeds we are talking about would either burn up in the atmosphere or else hit the ocean surface and become lots of small chunks of something that is now sinking to the ocean floor. You need to shed a huge amount of delta-V just to get to the point where the landing site is described using any term other than 'impact crater.' Most of the mechanisms for dumping this energy tend to be a bit tricky to pull off and I am not sure, but there might be an upper limit after which ablation stops being a viable option.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    Meteorites that arrive on the Earth from outer space are most certainly a thing that happens sometimes, that's wear all our existing Mars rocks come from for instance. Whether something survives reentry depends on a lot of factors including the size of the object, the angle of re-entry, its composition, etc.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    When you have the ability to make it into foam in space, why not use that to make lifting bodies out of it, and let them glide down, instead of crashing like a stone? Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
    - evgen 6y ago
      You can't 'glide down' from orbit. You need to dump your delta-V somewhere. Stop thinking of orbit as though this chunk of metal is suspended from some big balloon out there. _Everything_ in space is moving, 0.0% if it is moving at the right speed and direction to enter the atmosphere and soft land without a lot of external assistance.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        I know that. I've written elsewhere how I imagine that. With modular thrusters which initiate the deorbiting, detaching when it is en route. Could be autonomous, could be 'tugboats' with human crew, I don't care. Doesn't really matter, as long as the lifting body of refined raw materials has the right weight to surface ratio, and therefore rarely even peaks above 400°C for a short time.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
The thing is... we could outsource much of our current heavy- or other polluting industries 'up there', to finally remake the Planet of the Apes into the Garden of Eden, like it should be. Wouldn't that be a nice goal?

azernik 6y ago

Nickel is so common and cheap it is unlikely to be profitable to ship it to Earth. It's more likely that nickel and iron would be used as construction materials in space, to make satellites and stations cheaper by reducing the launch mass required. The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.