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[mainiac]

Well, on a large scale you'll probably need a few highly skilled people working a control station/processing near the mining sites, since there's a several minute signal delay between Earth and the asteroid belt. Those robots will be much busier and need more supervision than a rover.

It would take FAR less energy to just send the processed materials back than to drag the asteroid all the way. That and you risk slamming it into the Earth.

Most of the proposals I have read about involve using a small object with a very low delta-v as a source of water or oxygen for an earth orbiter.  In that context, bringing the whole thing back with a fully automated craft could make a lot more sense because the fuel spent on the excess materials would be less than the fuel spent on sending mining equipment that far.

[10ebbor10]

Well, on a large scale you'll probably need a few highly skilled people working a control station/processing near the mining sites, since there's a several minute signal delay between Earth and the asteroid belt. Those robots will be much busier and need more supervision than a rover.

It would take FAR less energy to just send the processed materials back than to drag the asteroid all the way. That and you risk slamming it into the Earth.

Nope, you don't need more supervision. The robots have the benefit of operating in zero-g (or close enough to make almost no difference), making maneuvering much easier. Additionally, their task is also easier. The robot doesn't have to look for interesting areas, danger avoidance or any of that. It just needs to break up the asteroid, and throw the pieces in a refining installation*. Easy.
Besides, many mining vehicles on earth are already operated, little problems with that.

*After all, the main resources looked for a various rare earths, which are spread thorough the asteroid. Don't need to teach your droid to be smart enough to actively look for them. Cheaper to just process everything into a semiprocessed package, and then send it for additional, complicated further processing.

Additionally, the dragging into orbit system only works for near miss planetoids. Of which there're enough for a mediocre mining operation. Additionally, we're pretty good with moving stuff around now. (Also, highly eccentric orbit is good enough)

Sure, that makes sense, but it depends how big the processing plant is. For any given asteroid, we're probably talking about a human-controlled drone operation, bringing what's necessary to set up a factory and then expanding the facility with in-situ materials.

That means you'd have to get the right materials on site. Some asteroids might have those, but the majority 90% + is rather metal poor. Also, humans are more of a problem than an aid to an operation that far out. For comparison, each person/day on the ISS costs 7.5 million dollars. For psychological reasons, you need to send at least 3. Also remember that costs increase exponentially as time and distance increases, so I honestly doubt your operation will be profitable.

I mean, the Beagle II lander (while unsuccesfull) cost only 60 million dollars. I'm confident that we can make succesfull fully automated mining rovers for less than 100 million. Sure, a significant amount of rovers will fail before the end of the mission, but they're replaceable, especially at that cost. ((Really, that's been a proposal. Mass Manafacture Beagle II landers, each at less than 4% of the cost of the Curiosity, and send them everywhere interesting. Quite a few will fail, but the rest will still give a best cost/return ratio.))

Well, on a large scale you'll probably need a few highly skilled people working a control station/processing near the mining sites, since there's a several minute signal delay between Earth and the asteroid belt. Those robots will be much busier and need more supervision than a rover.

It would take FAR less energy to just send the processed materials back than to drag the asteroid all the way. That and you risk slamming it into the Earth.

Most of the proposals I have read about involve using a small object with a very low delta-v as a source of water or oxygen for an earth orbiter.  In that context, bringing the whole thing back with a fully automated craft could make a lot more sense because the fuel spent on the excess materials would be less than the fuel spent on sending mining equipment that far.

Yup, it depends on the asteroid. Some contain quite a lot of ice, which can easily be transformed into quality rocket fuel. If you run that through a high specific impulse engine, you can get quite  a long way.

[WillowLuman]

Robots need supervision because they'll be doing a lot more work than mere probes. They'll need to be repaired and maintained, and people will need to make quick corrections if they start doing something wrong.

Bringing back Asteroids is risky. Not to mention it would take a massive amount of delta-v to move a "relatively small" (1 km) asteroid, and smaller, boulder-sized asteroids are hardly worth the trouble of tracking down and bringing back. Better to just latch onto a decent-sized one and send back the stuff you want. You don't even need to go to the asteroid belt, there's plenty of huge, convenient NEO's.

[i2amroy]

Robots need supervision because they'll be doing a lot more work than mere probes. They'll need to be repaired and maintained, and people will need to make quick corrections if they start doing something wrong.

Sure you might be able to do some overall monitoring, but the simple fact of distance communication delay makes what we think of as "normal" supervision virtually impossible. Assuming you are at the asteroid belt and earth the amount of time it takes to send a signal is between 8.3-19.2 minutes. Assuming you wait for confirmation after each command doubles this time, meaning you need to wait 30 minutes to an hour after every command you send. At that amount of delay it's basically impossible to "monitor" anything more then basic diagnostic checks. I mean sure you might be able to note a robot doing something wrong, but even if you send the signal the instant the warning appear to fix the problem it's going to be at least 30 minutes before the robot receives the command to stop or do anything.

And that delay assumes that earth and the asteroid mining operation are directly next to each other. If they are off by 90^o in orbit then that number shoots up to 18.6-28.7 minutes one-way (37.2-57.5 cumulative), and if you have some way to send signals through the sun by the time you are off by 180^o the number goes up to 25-35.8 one-way (50 min-1.2 hours). Or if you more realistically relay your signals from mining station to mining station the time goes to around 2 hours one way, 4 hours with backtalk.

This does mean you can set up a partial monitoring system though, where the system is able to be monitored and adjusted while it is close to earth (which is when you would be launching any return products back to earth anyways) and then as it drifts farther away more and more of the system works automatically while the drones cut chunks of material off the asteroid and move them to the packaging plant, which boxes them up and loads them into cycling rockets, which launch from earth and dock at the mining station, are filled with asteroid chunks, and then launch using their remaining fuel and return to earth to be resupplied/unloaded. Said cycling rockets would also provide you with a way to repair/remove essential mobile robots, as you could send them back to earth for essential maintenance and then return them to the asteroid (costly, but possible, will most likely only be done for things that absolutely can't be fixed on site and also aren't so serious that it would be cheaper just to send up another drone).

[WillowLuman]

That's why I've been saying you need to send an astronaut with them on some kind of control station.

[10ebbor10]

That's why I've been saying you need to send an astronaut with them on some kind of control station.

Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. It's simply way too expensive.

Robots need supervision because they'll be doing a lot more work than mere probes. They'll need to be repaired and maintained, and people will need to make quick corrections if they start doing something wrong.

Bringing back Asteroids is risky. Not to mention it would take a massive amount of delta-v to move a "relatively small" (1 km) asteroid, and smaller, boulder-sized asteroids are hardly worth the trouble of tracking down and bringing back. Better to just latch onto a decent-sized one and send back the stuff you want. You don't even need to go to the asteroid belt, there's plenty of huge, convenient NEO's.

Probes execute quite a lot of tasks, and generally traverse much more dangerous/unexplored terrain than a standard mining robot will. Importance of repair and maintenance are overstated. (Besides, the ability of humans to repair things in space is very limited*, and can be entirely replaced by a robotic hand, a 3d printer and a high bandwith connection.) After all, almost all probes that didn't fail immediately or short after launch lasted way longer than expected.

A mining mission also has much more redundancy than a normal mission. Multiple drones and all that. You can afford to loose a few.

And well, droids have time. A spacebased mining operation will often be limited by energy, so it can work at lower speed. Implement numerous failsaves and redundancies, and the system will work fine.

*Essentially limited to switching out spare parts.

[i2amroy]

That's why I've been saying you need to send an astronaut with them on some kind of control station.

Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. It's simply way too expensive.

Pretty much this. Keeping a human at any sort of mining station (well, several humans, since you need to have multiple for psychological stability) ends up costing a huge amount more then throwing a few extra redundant robots up there, not even accounting for the fact that you now need to maintain a breathable atmosphere/food/water supplies.

Also there is a key difference between serious failures when you have humans or with robots. If you have a problem and you have humans present you almost certainly have to implement a solution within hours, a rather difficult thing to do with a 1 hour delay on any communications (a pressure leak, for example, is a serious problem if humans are present). With robots, on the other hand, in the event of a problem that isn't easily fixable immediately you can simply send a "shut-down and wait" command for the majority of problems, wait until the mining station orbits closer and you can send up new parts/etc. and then fix it then. Unless a broken robot is actively impairing mining production you can simply turn it off until such time that fixing the problem becomes more convenient and more easily done. People, on the other hand, tend not to survive for very long in the event of a serious problem.

[WillowLuman]

Except there's also a 1-hour delay for that "shut-down and wait" command, during which time the robot might finish, say, drilling through the solar panel. You wouldn't need a human for every single operation, just have a single large comms station within range of several sites.

[10ebbor10]

Why would the robot even start drilling into the solar panel? I mean, that's a serious software glitch just there. Nothing that redundant security system can't fix either. (Central program that can, for example, shut down any robot that exits it's designated area. Probably with simultaneous copies running at once, so that a central glitch doesn't kill the entire system. I mean, as soon as it detects that damage occurs to a certain part of the mining station, it could just deactivate everything nearby.

Additionally, redundancy (more than one solar pannel) and security can be much cheaper than a communication station. Also more reliable, because a fairly heavy mining robot can destroy a solar panel, and associated module, within seconds, not minutes. Bumping into it can be enough. Doubt the human crew would be fast enough to react to that, especially if they have to spread out over multiple stations. (Good, resourceful asteroids are quite few and far between, and have widely different orbits. A minute or more delay is to be expected.)

Additionally, a central command station for multiple asteroids eliminates the repair and maintenance benefits. Meaning that you're going to send 6 people*, with supporting equipment, into interplanetary space just to press the off button.

*2 shifts of 3. Assuming you want to work 24/24, and have a somewhat sane population.

[mainiac]

Assuming you are at the asteroid belt and earth the amount of time it takes to send a signal is between 8.3-19.2 minutes.

That is a pretty big assumption to make.  Getting to the asteroid belt and matching orbits is gonna be hella expensive for your delta-v.  AFAIK, any advocate of going to the asteroids is talking about starting with the NEO asteroids.  Eventually you want to move to the asteroid belt, but serious exploitation of that is a project for after you have hundreds if not thousands of people living in space and are starting to mature interplanetary propulsion methods.

Although there could be something to be said for sending a very long term manned mission to the belt.  If you were willing to send a crew on something like a three year mission, you could potentially produce very large amounts of propellant at the belt itself and return a massive cargo.  It bears consideration.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I think we need to figure out mining the Mun before we go on tangents about NEO [let alone actual celestial objects] mining, honestly.

[mainiac]

I think we need to figure out mining the Mun before we go on tangents about NEO [let alone actual celestial objects] mining, honestly.

Why?

Dont just assume that it's easier to mine the moon because it's more similar to earth.  Arguably it's a lot, lot harder than a NEO.

NEO mining in a nutshell:
1) Find water
2) Send rocket to water
3) Bring object that is half water, half gravel back
4) Melt water, filter out gravel
5) Profit

The underlying technical details are very simple.  The only thing needed is good propulsion, something we are need for any other mission, including lunar mining.  Whereas mining the moon involves inventing large amounts of very complicated equipment to operate in a foreign environment with maintenance being extremely difficult.

[GiglameshDespair]

Now that 3d printing has advanced, we could potentially print replacement parts to requirements when we need them at the location. A Moon colony would allow easy refuelling and launching, so so would a colony on one of Mar's moons. I remember reading about one of them being highly porous: underground caves provide both a location for a base and radiation shielding for any inhabitants. I wonder how much gravity mar's moons have? You'd have to supplement them with centrifuges, of course, but a little gravity is surely better than none.

Water can be mined and used to both refuel spacecraft, restock the Mars/Moon base and send it back to earth as pure water. We're going to need more water soon, and desalination isn't going to cut it.

Ores as well, of course.

The thing is, with enough investment, these things become cheaper enough they become worthwhile. With all the resources of space for us to take... what couldn't mankind accomplish?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Buzz Aldrin advocates for a Mars ISS as a gateway to the planet in his book. I haven't finished it yet, but that's part of the plan.

Mars' moons have very low gravity. They are essentially oversized asteroids captured by its gravity.

[WillowLuman]

I think we need to figure out mining the Mun before we go on tangents about NEO [let alone actual celestial objects] mining, honestly.

Old habits die hard, I suppose.

Just had a thought. Mag-lev trains on the Moon (or large asteroids) should be able to go extremely fast, due to lack of air resistance.