I think Planetary Resources is doing the right thing, focusing on mining water first, as an enabler for all future space operations.

Douglas Messier (above) speculated that Planetary Resources may plan to execute the KISS plan. But that was five days before PR’s website went live. There’s no support for that theory either on PR’s website or in the 4/24 press conference videos. PR’s website is actually pretty clear about mining water first, then metals. I don’t recall seeing anything about hauling entire asteroids around.

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Burke Burnett wondered, “… what would one do with a C-class (carbonaceous) asteroid? This thing is going to get everyone racing back to study John Lewis’ book.”

Google “volatile products from carbonaceous asteroids”. It will show you a chapter from John Lewis’ other book, “Resources Of Near-Earth Space”. It turns out you can make quite a lot of industrial commodities from carbonaceous ore.

Discussing the news with co-workers on our proposal for moving asteroid materials, it was noted that a big distinction between what the Keck Institute study looked at and what we were proposing was this: We concentrated more on main asteroid belt objects with low eccentricity and inclination and likelihood of aqueous composition, though NEOs were not excluded. The initial reports about Keck study and Planetary are talking about Near Earth Objects. Secondly, if the candidate was a bonanza, we would extract in situ and haul back.

For lunar applications, H20, H, C and N compounds would be the targets. They could be used for propellants and perhaps even for tether or polymer packaging. If lunar surface settlements were to be established, the size of a “colony” of 10, 100, or 1000, whether now or 500 years from now would be constrained by how much H2O, C, H and N compounds (volatiles) you had access to. You could drill for them on the moon, you could haul them up from Earth, search and retrieve them from NEOs or the main belt or even Phobos or Deimos, but there would be in each case trade parameters, risks and costs.

My own pre-analysis intuition is that ice concentrations increase with solar distance. You don’t want to go to Saturn’s moons which are practically orbiting glaciers, but NEOs are going to be dessicated. Even with Vesta data coming in, the volatile content is not really leaping out at us. Maybe Ceres will be a different story. But it is quite possible at this stage to return a NEO property to the lunar or terrestrial vicinity that is not worth the $/kg invesment.

Since none of my papers is mentioned in references, I write this comment to clarify where this all came from.
Thank you for the story.

On a related front, can Hall thrusters operate on gases other than Xenon (ie, water vapour?)

Some mainstream media have already been covering Planetary Resources’ announcement. And that’s without any hardware. I think they would cover a several stages of an actual asteroid capture and return. And if there are idiot-protests and lawsuits, that will obviously be covered as well. So I’ll think there’ll be a fair bit of public interest. (Well, for the first, then it becomes routine and boring.)

Remember, the closer we get to arrival of a captured asteroid, the more you’ll see media-friendly science-commentators (Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example) hyping the potential. And media loves hype.

Chuck,
It’s clear they are hunting for water first. That means fuel. Everything else follows from that. Once you have free fuel, each subsequent asteroid capture is also free.

I disagree. It will upset a few lunatics (probably the same kind that demonstrated in advance of Cassini’s flyby of Earth out of fear for radioactive material onboard…). For the large public it will be like anything space related: they won’t care at all.

GeoffT, the counterweight size is dependent on where it is placed above the stationary/synchronous point (roughly but not GEO), the weight of the cable beneath that point, and how much we want to lift. Keep in mind, though, that an asteroid is probably not entirely solid and structurally sound. So given the value of the counterweight position as a station and the equipment that will need to be there, I highly doubt an asteroid will be used _purely_ for a space elevator counterweight.

“Five general categories of benefits from the return of an entire NEA were identified:
1) Synergy with near-term human exploration;
2) Expansion of international cooperation in space;
3) Synergy with planetary defense;
4) Exploitation of asteroid resources to the benefit of human exploration beyond the Earth-moon system; and
5) Public engagement.”

Nothing there about actually going to the moon, though the possibility is implied in (1).

We did not get a go-ahead either time. In one instance, based on pre-submittal inquiries, we were informed that supplying H,C & N from off the surface of the moon was not in situ resource utilization and therefore not worthy of any evaluation. Perhaps we were contacting the wrong organization for research sponsorship of such nature?

That’s the estimated cost of the proposed *mission*. Much of that expenditure would go toward R&D to produce a design for an asteroid-capture-and-return craft. That craft should be reproducible for a fraction of the mission cost. If each of our computers cost the cumulative R&D cost to make them, a laptop would cost a lot more than $2.6B.

The bigger problem here might be the time value of money: 10 years to wait for a highly uncertain return on sunk costs is a lot of time, by the standards of financial markets, not to mention a lot of risk. IIRC there was an International Space University student paper that worked out just how bad an investment it would be ….

Still, it’s a great idea just for its scientific value, and at $2.6B, well, that’s like the cost of 2 or 3 Shuttle flights. Nor need it be a one-off. If they can pick a chunk of rubble off a C-2 asteroid, they might be able to pick one off Phobos, which would give people a head start on figuring out how to put a manned base there. They might be able to fund it just from selling samples …. and, as I mentioned earlier, it would provide a huge base for biomass for CELSS in Earth orbit, on the moon, and for interplanetary missions.

Bulk biomass elements, specifically H and C.

Carbon is in short supply on the moon, but not in C-2 asteroids. Carbonaceous chondrites are also H2O-rich (as high as 22%). And it’s long been understood that long-duration human space presence will require growing food in CELSS (Closed Ecological Life Support Systems.) That means: hydrocarbons and water. And water might be more easily gotten from C-2 asteroids than from the moon.

Apart from the logistical and psychological advantages of vegetable gardening on spacecraft and in bases, a sufficiently rich “biosphere” around the crew quarters would offer some added solar-storm shielding value. The crew could always keep eating from food storage while the CELSS “reboots” from seeds and better-shielded saplings, after a solar storm kills the garden. Any water from the C-2 asteroid in excess of what’s needed for plants could be used as additional solar-storm shielding, frozen between an IR-reflective coating facing vacuum and an insulating lining between the ice shield and the internal biosphere. This shield could also double as a food freezer, since frozen food is, to a good first approximation, frozen H2O. Solar storms aren’t very long, so there’s no danger that the crew would starve while waiting one out. The bigger starvation danger would be in the wait while the garden regrew. But if your food store is also part of the outer shield, and your biosphere is part of your inner shield, and if the outer shield can be easily recycled at the destination for other purposes (it’s a lot easier to melt ice than aluminum) ….

Space might be the best place, in the *very* long run, for metallurgical and (inorganic) chemical industries. But those industries will require lots of expensive, heavy equipment. Within the lifetimes of these Planetary Resource startup people, it’s going to be mostly about enabling government-funded manned missions and privately-funded space tourism. And that means growing food up there. ISRU-based food is probably the best deal, logistically. And C-2 asteroids are probably the best (known) ISRU base for CELSS.