The SpaceShipOne Thread

[Perinquus]

This is possibly the first, tentative beginning of real, sustained, commercial exploitation of space, and space exploration. We'll never get the large orbital bases, lunar colonies, and other exploration missions we all dream about as long as space remains the province of the government. It's only when private enterprise gets involved, and finds a way to make it pay that we'll really get the ball rolling.

Shove one -- one asteroid from the asteroid belt into Earth orbit and the entire endeavor will pay for itself dozens of times over. The raw materials available in the asteroids would be well worth any private expenditure, as I understand it.

Assuming, of course, that the luddites, and the nutcases, and the alarmists, don't scream and get court ordered injunctions against you, fearing that you'll screw up the attempt and send the asteroid crashing down onto the earth itself. Admittedly, you would need to be sure your plan was well conceived and properly executed, but I hope I live to see the day when such ventures as this are commonplace.

[sketerpot]

Assuming, of course, that the luddites, and the nutcases, and the alarmists, don't scream and get court ordered injunctions against you, fearing that you'll screw up the attempt and send the asteroid crashing down onto the earth itself. Admittedly, you would need to be sure your plan was well conceived and properly executed, but I hope I live to see the day when such ventures as this are commonplace.

They will. I'm sure they will. Perhaps in time, though, this can become government regulated---and therefore condoned.

How would you bring an asteroid into earth orbit, anyway? Nuclear missiles? MADMEN ion-drive rockets? (As a bonus, we get the ability to defend the earth from asteroids almost for free!)

And what would happen if it went wrong? This has been discussed before, but I just can't get the picture out of my head: a huge blast on impact, a great streamer of fire behind it (doing lots of damage itself), the usual Deep Impact stuff, and, if we want to make this into a movie, the Kefka theme in the background.

[HemlockGrey]

And wouldn't the raw materials available on this asteroid cause their prices to plummet?

[Col. Crackpot]

And wouldn't the raw materials available on this asteroid cause their prices to plummet?

depends on how much it would cost to safely bring them down to earth. You cant just toss chunks of space rocks and aim for what vaguely resembles Texas. That may sound tempting sometimes, but it really isn't a good idea.

[TempestMagister]

Most of the asteroids in the belt I believe are made out of nickel-iron ores. That is the same stuff you can find on earth. Honestly, its alot cheaper just to mine those minerals down here, rather than setting up the infrastructure to mine in space. There is plenty of ores to be mined on the earth, so basically, its not that great of an idea. It may be good for self-sustaining colonies in the outer solar system, but it is not a very profitable source of ores.

[Burak Gazan]

It makes sense if the asteroids are used for construction on-orbit or on site -- you dont have to haul the raw materiels out of the earth's gravity well then (although the tech for large-scale on orbit constuction gotta get invented yet ) Maybe set up something at L4 or L5 that one day resembles something from SW shipyards

[kojikun]

Asteroids are nice, tho, because the iron-nickle ones are not mixed with rock so theres less refining needed. And the things are just solid iron-nickle, rather than having to dig to get to the ore. For space construction its useful.

[BlkbrryTheGreat]

Asteroids are nice, tho, because the iron-nickle ones are not mixed with rock so theres less refining needed. And the things are just solid iron-nickle, rather than having to dig to get to the ore. For space construction its useful.

Except for the fact that the fuel needed to melt the stuff needs to be brought up from Earth... (Unless there are electic furnaces out there capable of melting iron/nickel.... but I've never heard of them).

[Temjin]

Assuming, of course, that the luddites, and the nutcases, and the alarmists, don't scream and get court ordered injunctions against you, fearing that you'll screw up the attempt and send the asteroid crashing down onto the earth itself. Admittedly, you would need to be sure your plan was well conceived and properly executed, but I hope I live to see the day when such ventures as this are commonplace.

Their fear is understandable. Hell, I even share it.

If you are just a little off, you can send it crashing down. You would be risking alot of lives that you have no right to risk.

I don't care how safe you say it is. The chance is still there.

[Crayz9000]

Except for the fact that the fuel needed to melt the stuff needs to be brought up from Earth... (Unless there are electic furnaces out there capable of melting iron/nickel.... but I've never heard of them).

You could use giant Fresnel lenses...

[Sarevok]

This is not a qualifying flight because there is only one person onboard SS1. You need three.

They also need to make two flights within two weeks to win the X-Prize.

[Sarevok]

And wouldn't the raw materials available on this asteroid cause their prices to plummet?

The raw materials still need to be extracted from their ores. It is going tio take a minimum of same amount of energy as refining on Earh. If a material is found in higher concentrations than Earth based ores than it is going to be profitable to mine it from asteroids.

[kojikun]

To melt the rock, you could to a number of things. You could focus light to generate heat using large milar reflectors similar to what will be used on solar sails, you could use such reflectors to focus light onto electricity generating elements (use it to boil a liquid, etc) and use the resulting electricity to melt down the iron-nickle, or you could use collected fuel from iceteroids (which have huge quantities of ammonia and methane conveniently frozen). The same fuel could also be used as rocket fuel for ships, or as the working fluid in the afformentioned electrical planet. There's a host of possibilities, really. It will only become an issue, however, when we start colonizing space far enough out to make import from Earth prohibitively expensive.

Besides, space elevators will make premanufactured craft launched from earth the mainstay until we get serious population centers out in space with such huge demands that some local manufacture and supply needs to be devised.

[Iceberg]

It makes sense if the asteroids are used for construction on-orbit or on site -- you dont have to haul the raw materiels out of the earth's gravity well then (although the tech for large-scale on orbit constuction gotta get invented yet ) Maybe set up something at L4 or L5 that one day resembles something from SW shipyards

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED shows a giant O'Neill Island III space colony (called Heliopolis) built onto an asteroid as a resource mining satellite (and also a Gundam factory, but we won't go there ).

[Iceberg]

We'll never get the large orbital bases, lunar colonies, and other exploration missions we all dream about as long as space remains the province of the government.

Exploration is only possible with extremely wealthy backers - typically a mix of government and private investors (NASA is setting up a series of space prizes, the Centennial Challenges). SpaceShipOne, let's all remember, is basically a repetition of the suborbital portion of the Mercury program 40 years ago - what it proves is that space technology is robust and economical enough to put a man into space and return him safely to Earth on a private company's budget.

It's an extremely important step, but it is only a step, and there are many steps to come. Let's not be hasty about burning the staircase that's gotten us this far...

[Perinquus]

We'll never get the large orbital bases, lunar colonies, and other exploration missions we all dream about as long as space remains the province of the government.

Exploration is only possible with extremely wealthy backers - typically a mix of government and private investors (NASA is setting up a series of space prizes, the Centennial Challenges). SpaceShipOne, let's all remember, is basically a repetition of the suborbital portion of the Mercury program 40 years ago - what it proves is that space technology is robust and economical enough to put a man into space and return him safely to Earth on a private company's budget.

It's an extremely important step, but it is only a step, and there are many steps to come. Let's not be hasty about burning the staircase that's gotten us this far...

I don't think you quite get my point. I don't for a moment denigrate what NASA has done so far, but the problem with space being strictly the province of the government is that its continuation depends on the vagaries of politics and public support - and we have a large segment of the population which thinks we're "wasting all that money on a bunch of useless moon rocks and stuff when we've got so many really important problems here at home". Consequently, we went to the moon, and lots of people back in 1969, right after the Apollo 11 landing, thought surely we'd have lunar bases by 2001, like those pictured in the movie of that title. But we stopped going in 1972, and in fact, even cancelled the last few sheduled Apollo missions due to waning public support for the venture, and we haven't been back in over 30 years.

Also the government will never be as efficient or as determined to make space pay the way private enterprise will. And that's what's really important. Space will not be explored and exploited until it becomes profitable to do so. Period. There has to be economic gain for sustained effort in space. Think of the voyages of discovery Europeans made starting in the 15th century. It's no coincidence that they ocurred at that moment in history. The technological capability to cross the Atlantic, for example, existed centuries earlier - Leif Ericsson visited North America five hundred years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic - but it wasn't till the end of the fifteenth century that the first permanent European settlements got made in the Americas. A major reason for this (not the only one, to be sure, but a major one nonetheless) was that the Byzantine Empire was finished off by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the old trade routes to the east were either closed off, or in the hands of new, higher charging middlemen. One of the primary motivations, if not the primary motivation of those Renaissance era European explorers was economic. They were looking for new trade routes in order to access the wealth of the Orient.

In a similar way, until space exploration is made into a profit making venture, our efforts in space will be fitful, sporadic, and subject to waning public support.

[Chardok]

Carve off large chunks of the 'roid. Set it on an ablative platewith parachute packs on it, calculate trajectory, lob it into the earth, let it parachute down into the ocean ala Gemini. repeat several times a day. Reuse plates. Refine on earth. Lather, rinse, repeat, have a nice day.

[The_Nice_Guy]

It's still not as simple to think that the private market could have done as well as the government, especially just after Apollo. Many of the technologies used right now in Rutan's project had their origins in government projects, and some of these technologies were initiated solely for the purpose of waging war(like guidance systems for ICBMs).

I am not convinced that private companies or any combination of investors back then could afford the sheer amount of funds to research the thousand-and-one possible engineering paths to space back then, even considering the immense profit. The replication of effort by different units could perhaps be as wasteful as the government's own efforts(probably not though).

Getting to space is a very big and incredibly expensive hump. Sadly enough, if the technologies and scientific expertise isn't readily available or cheap enough, the state is often the only agent capable of amssing enough funds(through coercive power) to push the whole thing through, for whatever reason you can think of, some of them silly as hell.

Now that the technologies and science is there, and pretty cheap enough, the government can step out. But let's not forget the state made it possible first.

TWG

[kojikun]

Carve off large chunks of the 'roid. Set it on an ablative platewith parachute packs on it, calculate trajectory, lob it into the earth, let it parachute down into the ocean ala Gemini. repeat several times a day. Reuse plates. Refine on earth. Lather, rinse, repeat, have a nice day.

Only problem is that it'll release lots of heat, and its too costly for the metal. Plus, you don't need the ablative shields because the entire rock is effectively an ablative shield (its iron, afterall). And you cant reuse ablative shielding. Because ti ablates.

[Darth Wong]

Shove one -- one asteroid from the asteroid belt into Earth orbit and the entire endeavor will pay for itself dozens of times over. The raw materials available in the asteroids would be well worth any private expenditure, as I understand it.

Yes, because there are no natural sources of carbonaceous material, silicates, or iron-bearing ores here on Earth

[Crayz9000]

Shove one -- one asteroid from the asteroid belt into Earth orbit and the entire endeavor will pay for itself dozens of times over. The raw materials available in the asteroids would be well worth any private expenditure, as I understand it.

Yes, because there are no natural sources of carbonaceous material here on Earth

Amazing how people forget the whole point so quickly, hmm?

The whole point of mining asteroids is so that we can build vehicles and structures in space -- so that we DON"T have to waste fuels lifting all that mass out of our own gravity well! Asteroid mining really serves little to no other purpose.

[The_Nice_Guy]

We'll only exploit asteroids for resources when the cost of extracting earthbound resources is more than that of extracting from asteroids.

It's a pretty long way off though, so it's probably not our problem.

TWG

[Darth Wong]

Amazing how people forget the whole point so quickly, hmm?

The whole point of mining asteroids is so that we can build vehicles and structures in space -- so that we DON"T have to waste fuels lifting all that mass out of our own gravity well! Asteroid mining really serves little to no other purpose.

And those vehicles and structures in space produce profit ... how? Or is this a case of the means justifying the means?

[Crayz9000]

Amazing how people forget the whole point so quickly, hmm?

The whole point of mining asteroids is so that we can build vehicles and structures in space -- so that we DON"T have to waste fuels lifting all that mass out of our own gravity well! Asteroid mining really serves little to no other purpose.

And those vehicles and structures in space produce profit ... how? Or is this a case of the means justifying the means?

One obvious use would be the upper structure for a space elevator. Every conceived elevator design requires a fairly massive ballast at the top, and it would be rather prohibitively expensive to assemble it on the ground and rocket it up. Hell, even building it on the Moon would probably be cheaper once the infrastructure is in place.

Another use would be in building Earth-Mars, or even Earth-Moon shuttles (as in ships that only go back and forth between the two planets, never landing on either). We would pretty much need to have those if we wanted a stable Mars colony, or a telescope facility on the far side of the Moon.

The only problem is that most of those applications are a long way away. Society has too much ground-based momentum... as long as we don't see a real need to go to space, we won't.

Although a Mars Mariott (or something like that) would be an interesting idea.

[Darth Wong]

And those vehicles and structures in space produce profit ... how? Or is this a case of the means justifying the means?

One obvious use would be the upper structure for a space elevator. Every conceived elevator design requires a fairly massive ballast at the top, and it would be rather prohibitively expensive to assemble it on the ground and rocket it up. Hell, even building it on the Moon would probably be cheaper once the infrastructure is in place.

You seriously think it would be cheaper to go to the asteroid belt (which is reeaaallly far away), knock an asteroid back this way, capture it, mine it, construct refining facilities in space, and then refine it than to simply use existing spacelift technologies to lift refined materials into orbit? Are you on drugs?

Another use would be in building Earth-Mars, or even Earth-Moon shuttles (as in ships that only go back and forth between the two planets, never landing on either). We would pretty much need to have those if we wanted a stable Mars colony, or a telescope facility on the far side of the Moon.

And the idea of travelling out to the asteroid belt and knocking a large asteroid back this way would make this cheaper/easier ... how?

The only problem is that most of those applications are a long way away. Society has too much ground-based momentum... as long as we don't see a real need to go to space, we won't.

The only real need to go to space is a collective societal one; the corporate profit motive that Perinquus mentioned earlier is simply nonexistent. And McC's notion of generating commercial profit from asteroid-mining is beyond absurd.

Although a Mars Mariott (or something like that) would be an interesting idea.

Interesting, yes. Made cheaper by flying out to the asteroid belt and pushing an asteroid toward the Earth, no.