Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
The moon is a great starting point to explore the rest of the solar system, doubly so if we found water on it.
I’ll quote JFK (probably more Ted Sorensen) on this one « we don’t do this things because they are easy but because they are hard […] »
… And we need to make sure we beat the Russians. Space travel is to a large extend an arms race.
And to provide a material reason to explore the solar system, if we can mine the asteroid belt, resource scarcity will be a thing of the past. A single 1-mile diameter asteroid can contain $20 trillion in metals.
This is why the billionaires are staging their own space race. Whoever can mine the asteroid belt first owns the world. It’s also why privatizing space exploration is such a terrible idea and why we must have a global socialist revolution before anyone reaches the belt.
Another reason privatization would be a disaster: there’s very little difference between hauling an asteroid back to Earth’s orbit and hauling one to collide with the planet. The latter is actually much easier due to not needing to slow down at the end.
I wonder how many decades or centuries it’ll take before the first megalomaniac demands a ransom to not drop a giant rock on Earth or another colony.
Once intrasolar travel becomes common, kinetic kill vehicles will be an omnipresent threat. Asteroid mining operations will need to have the kind of strict licensing and mandated observation that nuclear weapon decommissioning sites have today.
That’s a huge reason I believe, hope, that we will never do that. A more efficient and less catastrophic approach is to do some level of refining out at the source and only send back together refined, pure minerals.
…. Although I realize the irony of advocating for sending, say a rod of pure tungsten, back to earth
And more realistically, I have a hard time believing that will ever be cheaper to bring to earth than to mine locally. While there maybe a handful of elements worth it, more realistically you are mining for use in space
Hopefully if were at the point of being able to haul massive asteroids back to earth, we also have the technology to intercept it and move it, or destroy it, and we have that capability ready on demand.
Oh no I don’t think we would. Once an asteroid is earth bound and past its apoapsis there is very little you can do (even with near infinite propulsion) to make it not collide with the earth.
Destroying it turns one big problem into a billion small problems with the same velocity and trajectory, which is also a no win scenario.
Hopefully, but we’re not a very forward-thinking species. More likely we’d only give haulers just enough fuel to make gravity-assisted trips (which are only possible when orbits match up optimally) because it’s cheaper that way, making on-demand interception unlikely.
Destruction doesn’t always work either. If it’s struck close to Earth most of the fragments will still hit, and even if they’re too small to survive reentry they will still dump tons of heat energy into the atmosphere.
Physics is a harsh mistress.
I wonder how much heat energy fragments would actually dump and if it would be statistically significant. Somebody do the math!
I couldn’t find any hard values, but Wikipedia does have a chart displaying the energy asteroids of various sizes would release if they exploded before hitting the ground, as well as the total kinetic energy they’d have upon hitting atmosphere. All that energy would still have to go somewhere even if it’s fragmented.
I also found that a single 50 meter fragment is enough to destroy an entire city and surrounding metropolitan area, so even if the heat isn’t an issue you’d still have to somehow ensure zero large fragments survive interception.
doesnt seem like it was thier goal, its mostly space tourism.
Space tourism is something that can happen now for the ultra-rich, and would be an interesting medium term goal to make that reachable by more people. If we pursued that, we could see yearly progress
Asteroid mining is still far in the future, and we need to take our first baby steps of getting established in space
I mean, space tourism is much easier than astroid mining but much of the tech needed for space tourism will also be needed for astroid mining. It’s literally a technological leap requiring resources at the scale of the entirety of humanity just to make space tourism viable, so they go with the loffty but achievable goal before the goal that’s currently complete sci-fi