12 ms·

AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission

101 points by LorenDB 2y ago

ahazred8ta 2y ago
It's a prospecting flyby of 2022-OB5, an 8m/25ft metallic asteroid in a 1 year orbit. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2022-OB5 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2022-OB5 Past mentions of AstroForge: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=astroforge&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- MattExSci 2y ago
  Size estimates are really really hard to be clear. But we do have additional data that says this should be a little bit larger. That all being said, were gonna find out this year!
yk 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sebzim4500 2y ago
  There are a lot of new space startups that operate this way, trying to replicate SpaceX's success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
  - Retric 2y ago
    SpaceX also came really close to failure. High risk strategies always look better after they have already paid off.
  - fluorinerocket 2y ago
    It fails more often than works
    - sebzim4500 2y ago
      Sure but that's true of startups in general.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That's how the original successful space program, the Soviet one, worked. Test-driven development is traditional in the space launch space. Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization. If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Every successful program is test-driven.
  - tliltocatl 2y ago
    The soviet space program stalled on N-1 because this approach (*integrated* move-fast-break-things testing) turned out to be unviable once there are too many failure points. And the engineers were well aware of that and proposed to do static fire tests, but that was not in the budget.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      It fell apart a bit after Korolev died.
- MattExSci 2y ago
  Have you heard of Astra...
- dang 2y ago
  "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hi 2y ago
I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company. I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record. My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this? Overlapping Investors: - 776 - Y Combinator - Initialized Capital - Caladan Ventures
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  I don’t know if that is what is happening here, but it is a common occurrence — both to juice numbers but also for special pricing (as mentioned in article) or mutual flexibility (dedicated launch), because the founders know each other, etc.
- numbsafari 2y ago
  verY Common…
- foobarbecue 2y ago
  Do they have a plan for reentry? Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space? (Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)
  - grey-area 2y ago
    Couldn’t you make an ablative heat shield possibly from waste materials on the same asteroid? Then lob your metal toward a shallow sea on earth? Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there? Do we know what their reentry plan is?
    - Loughla 2y ago
      I am not super comfortable with a company whose purpose is figuring out pinpoint meteor strikes. That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
helpfulContrib 2y ago
[dead]
_fat_santa 2y ago
Massive props to the founders for having the stones to even enter this space. I couldn't imagine the difficulties and setbacks these guys will encounter. But I think humans figuring out how to effectively mine stuff outside of our planet will be one of the great leaps forward for humanity and will likely become a proficient industry in our lifetimes.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  I think it's sad that our entire economy is designed around infinite growth to such a degree that we can say with a straight face astroid mining is the way to go. We have everything we need, it's power that is the problem and always has been.
  - MattExSci 2y ago
    We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
      Running out of metals like "we can't build critical infrastructure and spoons are like diamonds" or running out of metals like Apple might lose a billion next quarter? Running out of metals in what context? I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.
    - primax 2y ago
      We're running out of critical metals at the price point we want to mine them. There are more that will become viable when the price goes up.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      We are only running out of critical metals because all industries are accustomed to design only how to make a product that they can sell from raw materials, expecting that it will be dumped as garbage in the future. All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life. The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies. Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product. Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals. In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.
PaulHoule 2y ago
The surface of the Earth is an economically hard market for space mining; sure there is demand there, but there is already the most competitive supply in the solar system. It's no so clear that precious metals would be precious if you got more of them, see the short story that is titled the same as this book. [1] I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like. I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas. You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS [3] https://www.dakotagas.com/ https://www.dakotagas.com/ [4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source
cannonpr 2y ago
So much of the conversation is about profit and economic viability of landing raw materials on Earth under current market conditions... While I don't begrudge that, I think the true game changer for orbital mining is how greater material availability can open brand new frontiers, in other words, make the pie larger, not just compete and change the balance of the existing pie. I long for arcologies, orbital elevators, orbital habitats. Things that only become truly possible with automated manufacturing and a plunging of energy and material costs by orders of magnitude.
floppiplopp 2y ago
Space is way more difficult and expensive than people like to believe. While I wholly support the waste of venture capital and other dumb money for space things, I don't expect the company to come close to returning anything from an asteroid.
- MattExSci 2y ago
  You will never meet a hater doing more than you.

101 points by LorenDB 2y ago

It's a prospecting flyby of 2022-OB5, an 8m/25ft metallic asteroid in a 1 year orbit. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2022-OB5 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2022-OB5 Past mentions of AstroForge: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=astroforge&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

MattExSci 2y ago
Size estimates are really really hard to be clear. But we do have additional data that says this should be a little bit larger. That all being said, were gonna find out this year!

yk 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sebzim4500 2y ago
There are a lot of new space startups that operate this way, trying to replicate SpaceX's success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
- Retric 2y ago
  SpaceX also came really close to failure. High risk strategies always look better after they have already paid off.
- fluorinerocket 2y ago
  It fails more often than works
  - sebzim4500 2y ago
    Sure but that's true of startups in general.
HPsquared 2y ago
That's how the original successful space program, the Soviet one, worked. Test-driven development is traditional in the space launch space. Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization. If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  Every successful program is test-driven.
- tliltocatl 2y ago
  The soviet space program stalled on N-1 because this approach (*integrated* move-fast-break-things testing) turned out to be unviable once there are too many failure points. And the engineers were well aware of that and proposed to do static fire tests, but that was not in the budget.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    It fell apart a bit after Korolev died.
MattExSci 2y ago
Have you heard of Astra...
dang 2y ago
"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hi 2y ago

I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company. I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record. My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this? Overlapping Investors: - 776 - Y Combinator - Initialized Capital - Caladan Ventures

aaronblohowiak 2y ago
I don’t know if that is what is happening here, but it is a common occurrence — both to juice numbers but also for special pricing (as mentioned in article) or mutual flexibility (dedicated launch), because the founders know each other, etc.
numbsafari 2y ago
verY Common…
foobarbecue 2y ago
Do they have a plan for reentry? Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space? (Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)
- grey-area 2y ago
  Couldn’t you make an ablative heat shield possibly from waste materials on the same asteroid? Then lob your metal toward a shallow sea on earth? Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there? Do we know what their reentry plan is?
  - Loughla 2y ago
    I am not super comfortable with a company whose purpose is figuring out pinpoint meteor strikes. That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?

helpfulContrib 2y ago

[dead]

_fat_santa 2y ago

Massive props to the founders for having the stones to even enter this space. I couldn't imagine the difficulties and setbacks these guys will encounter. But I think humans figuring out how to effectively mine stuff outside of our planet will be one of the great leaps forward for humanity and will likely become a proficient industry in our lifetimes.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
I think it's sad that our entire economy is designed around infinite growth to such a degree that we can say with a straight face astroid mining is the way to go. We have everything we need, it's power that is the problem and always has been.
- MattExSci 2y ago
  We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    Running out of metals like "we can't build critical infrastructure and spoons are like diamonds" or running out of metals like Apple might lose a billion next quarter? Running out of metals in what context? I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.
  - primax 2y ago
    We're running out of critical metals at the price point we want to mine them. There are more that will become viable when the price goes up.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    We are only running out of critical metals because all industries are accustomed to design only how to make a product that they can sell from raw materials, expecting that it will be dumped as garbage in the future. All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life. The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies. Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product. Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals. In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.

PaulHoule 2y ago

The surface of the Earth is an economically hard market for space mining; sure there is demand there, but there is already the most competitive supply in the solar system. It's no so clear that precious metals would be precious if you got more of them, see the short story that is titled the same as this book. [1] I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like. I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas. You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS [3] https://www.dakotagas.com/ https://www.dakotagas.com/ [4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source

cannonpr 2y ago

So much of the conversation is about profit and economic viability of landing raw materials on Earth under current market conditions... While I don't begrudge that, I think the true game changer for orbital mining is how greater material availability can open brand new frontiers, in other words, make the pie larger, not just compete and change the balance of the existing pie. I long for arcologies, orbital elevators, orbital habitats. Things that only become truly possible with automated manufacturing and a plunging of energy and material costs by orders of magnitude.

floppiplopp 2y ago

Space is way more difficult and expensive than people like to believe. While I wholly support the waste of venture capital and other dumb money for space things, I don't expect the company to come close to returning anything from an asteroid.

MattExSci 2y ago
You will never meet a hater doing more than you.