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Elementary requirements of a space colony. Commerce of interplanetary space 0101.


PB666

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To be blunt here in the disclaimer, there is simply no possible way to replace all the elements that would be required to build and replicate space colonies.
The key factor here is that with really efficient ION drives and solar panels we could ship the most rare elements to where they are needed.
The basic assumption here is that if you have electricity that any form of an element can be converted to any other form. You might want to have a smelter, a greenhouse, a chemistry facility, milligravity, etc.

Lets start with the basics.

Hydrogen - storage form H2, H20, Pt-H - While hydrogen is the most common elements in our solar system, it largely resides outside of earth in inconvenient places namely the Sun and the gravitationally inaccessable gas giants. Its density in outer solar systems objects is higher then inner solar system objects (except the gravitationally heightened sun). The sun produces hydrogen, lots of it, problem is to get close enough to harvest it the level has already fallen. There is far too much need for hydrogen to bring it from Earth or other gravity wells. Hydrogen is the most basic reducing agent, it is the smallest and compounds in which it is found have the highest volatility and lowest viscosity. Because of its high energy per sp, sp2, sp3 and ss bond/mass hydrogen is a major component of rocket fuels, particularly first and second stages. It is also a component of fuel cells. Because of its volatility hydrogen is first lost from planets that a hot and/or have no atmosphere.

Hydrogen
  H20 - water, required for life, electrolysis, chemical synthesis, air conditioning, greenhouses
  NH3 - Ammonia, required for fertilizers, used in air conditioning and cooling systems. 
  CH4 - Methane, one of the simplist fuels, can be used to make higher organic compounds and ammonia.
  CH3CH20H - Ethanol . . . . . synthetic intermediate in the making of synthetic oils and other fuels. 
  H2NCRHCO2H - Amino acids . . . .Required to make protein, R (CHOSN) containing side chains
  H2SO4 - sulferic acid . . . . required for life, to hydrogen to reduce sulfate is an essential process for biological oxidation
  HCl - hydrochloric acid . . .for the extraction of metals from high complexity ore. Required for life, a precursor for some refridgerants, for the preparation of some electronics. etc. 
  H3PO4 - phosphoric acid . . . for life, for extraction purpose, fertilizer. 

Option 1. Mercury exploit, charged particles from the sun pound mercuries surface and slowing them down, using a pulse charge system protons and electrons can be directed into a set of channels where they can be pumped and collected. Critique- landing on mercury challenging,bringing the electrods, channeling the surface, etc more challenging.

Option 2. Comet exploit, comets are occasionally thrown from the kuiper belt into the inner solar system where they degas, wrapping and heating the comet could capture these gases. Comets are generally are in high dV orbits relative to earth, stablizing those orbits so they can be harvested is difficult, stable zones are devoid of sustantial solar electric power, a nuclear electric power plant may be required.

Option 3. Lunar option, problem is that the level of hydrogen in the form of sublimated materials is probably not enough to sustain a lunar colony, let alone expand.

 

Carbon - Storage form graphite, diamond, organic compounds, dry-ice. Outside of the earth is one of the most frequent elements found in gases of non-gas giants with atmosphere in the form of CO2 and methane, also present on comets. Carbonates are also found bound to metals in asteroids and other soils. On hot planets like mercury and venus carbonates are driven off of metal into the atmosphere. Carbon also acts a reducing agent, although under some circumstances is can be an oxidezer, it is a general thicken of fluids, fluids with high carbon complexity tend to be more viscous and less volatile, diamond as a good example of the effect of branching sp3 bonds.

Carbon
  CO2 - required for life, greenhouses, blood chemistry, concrete and basically stone based construction.
  CH4, Ethanol, amino acids, oils, see above - see hydrogen
  =C= (sp3) diamond, required for high end devices and for drills (embedded diamond dust)
  =C- (sp2-p) graphite, found in graphene and other modern graphene based structures. component of carbon-fiber, light weigh building materials. 
  


Option 1. Moons of martian planets
Option 2. Short perioid comets.

Oxygen -  is the primary oxidant, diatomic oxygen (02) is rare where photosynthetic life is absent, the most common reduced form of oxygen is water, but oxygen is also a component of CO2 and is more stable in rocks (asteroids and rocky planets than hydrogen), it is also found in comets and is a small component of solar wind.

Option 1. Moons of martian planets
Option 2. Short period comets.
Option 3. Kuiper belt planetoids and trojan objects of Jupiter and Saturn.
Critique - transfer orbits take generations. Nuclear is an absolute requirement.

Nitrogen- Nitrogen is a key component for life, it is also a major component of hyperglolic fuels as well as solid fuels, therefore it is almost essential to have nitrogen for deep space operations where main engine fuels may not be required, it is frequently used with oxygen, so demand for nitrogen also increases demand for nitogen. Nitrogen is a required component for atmospheres. It is relatively volatile, not as easily trappeds as carbon and oxygen.

Option 1. Short period object
Option 2. Kuiper belt planetoids and trojan objects of Jupiter and Saturn.

Aluminum-  Aluminum is a major component of light weight space craft, it is a fairly common element, but is hard to mine except from certain sources.  Aluminum is the ultimate storage for rocket fuels such as for SFRB that might be used for landing ventures on planets.

Option 1. Lunar harvesting.
Option 2. Asteriod mining
Option 3. Moons of martian planets
Option 4. Mars.

Argon (Xenon) - Xenon is widely used as an ion-(hall thruster or roses by any other name) however it is extremely difficult to find off earth, with solar efficiencies improving and Ion drives reaching higher ISP, the argon storage problem is less of a problem, many ion drives can burn Argon and Xenon. Argon is basically found whereever atmospheres are found, it tends to be a bit more common in the outer solar system, likely because of atmospheric loses from the inner solar system. Argon also prevents fast spoilage in artificial atmospheres. Essentially we need cold atmospheres were vapor velocity at ground level + solar wind is not sufficient to blow argon away, this represents objects very far away from the sun.  Boiling point is at 87.302 K

Option 1. Harvesting of just outer system planetoids, atmospheric purification
Option 2. Harvesting of the asteroid belt objects.
Option 3. Harvest from mars.

Silicon - Silicon is very heavy, it is found in nature as an acid of Si04 which undergoes polymerization under pressure to form glass, silicon is a component of electronic circuit boards, glass windows in habitats and in space craft, silicon is a major component of asteroids. Silicons most important role is in building photovoltaics. 

Option 1. Asteroid mining
Option 2. Lunar mining
Option 3. Mars moon mining.

Copper - copper is a major component of refridgeration systems, water piping, it is used because of its ease of repair compared to aluminum, as a water carrier it is fairly resilient to corrosion if the water is kept close to neutral and some divalent cation like calcium hydroxide, or finely ground calcium carbonate is added to the water supply. Copper is the primary metal used in electrical systems, it does not have some of the pitfalls of aluminum wiring. Namely there is little or no voltage on brass connectors.

Option 1. Asteroid mining
Option 2. Lunar mining
Option 3. Mars moon mining.

Nickle, Iron, Chrome - the various metals are all components of metals that are used in space craft, the alloys of steel are made from carbon, iron and other metals to obtain strength and heat resilience, these metals are required to build structures and more importantly efficient rocket engines. Metals are widely available in the inner solar system.

Option 1. Asteroid mining
Option 3. Mars moon mining.
Option 2. Lunar mining
 

Calcium, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium, Sulfur, Chlorine.  Important for life, but also useful in other processes magnesium is a solid fuel convienient for ION drives when argon is difficult to find, lithium and sodium can be used as heat exchange liquids in nuclear power stations. Sulfer and chlorine is used in chemical manufactoring, Calcium is used in making certain forms of sheilding.

Option 1. Asteroid mining
Option 2. Lunar mining
Option 3. Mars moon mining.

Platinum, gold, paladium, tellurium, uranium.  Solar panels are not a neccesity but in the inner solar system they are the most cost effective means of electric power generation. The problem is that core components of these systems are made of not so easy to find minerals such as cadmium and semimetals (tellutium, gold). Platinum and paladium are used in fuel cells and for hydrogen storage, and is required for electrolysis of water into H2 and O2. The more stable metals are more resistent to acid solubilization that most metals, consequently some acid based purification is often required for extraction.

Option 1. Asteroid mining
Option 2. Lunar mining
Option 3. Mars moon mining.

Rare Earths. The primary use of rare earths

Option 1. Earth sourced while other sources are found.
 

In creating stand alone colonies what we see is that sourcing of elements is not quite as easy as on earth, if we remove earth from consideration one might have to travel the mercury/kuiper-belt transfer in order to find the best source for minerals
What is also means is that somewhere along that ellipse needs to be a facility to process the crude material into refined starting materials that can be used to manufacture the various objects. There are alternatives, magnesium might be used instead of xenon or argon in ion drives, solar panels are made of different semi-metals (metaloids), different sources for magnet metal, multiple alloys can roughly generate the same functionality. The processing to final products for some of these items is a very extensive a popularly cooperative process, which all adds weight in space to do the same thing. Some things, like working with cyanide or other poisonous intermediates are to be avoided.

This all translates to a fairly long period of dependency on earth.

The question was asked about the stand alone profitability of going to mars, lets strike mars and ask any exploitable body, the answer is it would take a long time for the process to become profitable because, relatively speaking the energy invested to acquire the basic ingredients for building anything (complex structure) other than a solid block of nickle covered with silicon glass are spread widely across our solar system. We need to find more efficient and roboticized ways of covering these great distances.

The other thing is that here on earth, the highest price you will ever pay for transportation is the fuel it takes for a 747 to travel from say Perth Australia to Los Angeles California. Where the cargo payload is say 10% of the weight of the fuel, most often you are paying 10% or 20% of the total cost of a good in transportation, once you start compositing structure, it would be as if every part has to be transported from Perth to LA 3 or 4 times over. Despite the high expense, its doable with an eye on conservation. If  I recieve a tin of fresh fish eggs from Perth, I can throw the tin in the trash, not so in space, the tin is recycled, the CO2 is recycled, the N in the urine and sweat is recycled, the water is recycled, Poop would be recycled.  

To say that not-for profit needs to be involved emphasizes the point that the various connect the dots that we need to make a stable space-alone system work is not 'connected' not even started. It takes government and not-for-profit donors to establish the first connections, in fact all the connections, even if hair thin, for the commercial space ventures to be profitable for things like landing on mars or moons of mars. It is to say that once science is doing, well, science on many bodies that we will find alternatives to resources that I have stated above, so that maybe we dont have to mine Kuiper belt objects for Argon and Helium. But here again we may find something even more valuable harvesting hydrogen from say mercury (like maybe an abundant source of tritium and dueterium) or kuiper belt objects that makes it highly worthwhile to have Mercurian polar colonies or generational ships to the kuiper belt.

The point is lets not put the cart before the horse, first we have to go to asteroids, see what it takes to mine them, go to comets, see what it takes to bottle their gases and package the metalics and metaliods. Go to the low gravity well moons and see what can be used. Space X can get your robot into space, but then its the government that needs to fund the science aspect of the mission, if they manage this time, instead of leaving a lander base on the moon, they leave behind a long duration robot that continues to work, drilling, preparing, etc for future landings, then you have begun the process of making and keeping a connection.

[Note: I came to write this post after creating a rather massive colony on the pole (sink hole crater) of Moho, I chose moho because it takes the most important element out of the game, energy, infact, once you get your factories running full steam, there is too much energy and not enough negative energy.  I have launched a rather big self modded space factory that allows for gilly back forth building of anysized object I can dream of, which means I come to Moho with basically everything, no longer thinking about kerbin (the only thing kerbin supplies is kerbals, adam and eve). But then I wanted to built a sort of reflective colony on moho from scratch on moho.
   What I came to see is that the tools provided feel well short of the task, a metal drill and a smelter create metal and rocket parts. The reality is that such a smelter would require calcium and create slag and gases, those gases would need to be separated into elements, the slag would be separated into elements, and thus many of these process need their own chemistry unit, that is not in the game, or in the add ons. Ore is composed of elements which can be separated into purified or enriched molecules, which can be broken down and reformed into what we need to build colonies. After sitting down and writing out a short list of the facilities need, I can to a short list about 50 or 60 parts that can be added as units to the colonization system modules - this was the answer to the profitability question - why private companies are not hopping over each other to go to Mars]

 

 


 

Edited by PB666
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Quite an impressive post PB666, good work!

The only immediate criticism I might have is that the biggest unknown on such material discussions is that we have a lot of theories on the elemental compositions of various planets, moons, asteroids, etc and some spectroscopy or other surface readings, we have precious little information on what actually lies beneath the surface of most of these bodies. One could probably fairly argue that any of the inner planets are largely likely to be elementally similar on the whole (excluding gasses) as it wouldn't make the most sense for say, Earth to have the uranium deposits it does, but Venus and Mars to have effectively zero, especially when given the largely randomized nature of matter distribution in an early and energetic solar system during planet formation.

Any given asteroid is probably likely to simply be what it says on the tin, IE: given the surface area to volume ratios, what you can get from spectroscopy of an asteroid is most likely a fair representation of the contents within. Past a certain size though, this gets murky. Ceres for example might have some fairly interesting innards being a dwarf planet.

Mars in many respects is probably set as far as any solid element is concerned, at least when considering a global sense. When you start to consider terraforming then the question gets interesting. The books Red Mars and Green Mars have some fairly interesting thoughts on various possibilities while generally assuming that Mars itself has quite a lot of stored sources of various gasses. Additionally, yes, there is the possibility of redirecting comets and the like to dump more gasses.

Venus is harder to figure out as we don't really have too good of an idea what the surface conditions are like. There certainly isn't going to be much in the way of surface water for example, but quite possibly there could be some deep deposits.

What is likely true is that short of some very interesting engine techs or semi-unlikely infrastructure growths, any initial Mars colony is likely to be fending for itself with ISRU activities for bulk materials. I partly come to this conclusion because first off, NASA has stated that any current plans for Mars missions are temporary stay only, no colonies. That means that so far the only group likely to have a means to Mars in the next 10 years AND a stated goal of colonization is Musk. Now, whatever your personal beliefs on the likelihood of his plan happening, you have to admit that currently we are absent any colonization statements from NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, or the Chinese Space Agency (I forget the name, sorry China!) that I am unaware of, this means that Musk is the only possible colonizer. While he has not revealed his plans yet, he has not historically seemed that interested in asteroid mining, so you could probably safely assume his Mars plans do not rely upon this. That said, if he has the means to reach Mars, he has the means to reach the asteroids, springing a surprise asteroid mining industry out there would also somewhat be in keeping with Musk's known MO. Even if all he did was offer a discount on launch services to Planetary resources in exchange for something like 1/10 of their mineral shipments heading to Mars instead of Earth, that could certainly help.

The trick currently is still just the economics of it all. Yes setting down a gigaton of iron or even something more precious on Earth could make its owner a rich person, you have to get it there which has energy costs. Not to mention fascinating political and legal questions that are still as yet unsettled on the international stage. So right now, the only place you can make an economic profit (as opposed to an infrastructural profit [IE Using your resources to further develop your own capabilities rather than selling them]) is Earth or near Earth space, which again brings up those issues.

So I suppose the tldr of this all is that we largely don't actually know what the elemental scene looks like in the solar system to any real degree of confidence and as such it is somewhat hard to predict what material trades or economies might develop in the early or late game, even more because we don't know what engine techs might exist.

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16 minutes ago, Mazon Del said:

Quite an impressive post PB666, good work!

The only immediate criticism I might have is that the biggest unknown on such material discussions is that we have a lot of theories on the elemental compositions of various planets, moons, asteroids, etc and some spectroscopy or other surface readings, we have precious little information on what actually lies beneath the surface of most of these bodies. One could probably fairly argue that any of the inner planets are largely likely to be elementally similar on the whole (excluding gasses) as it wouldn't make the most sense for say, Earth to have the uranium deposits it does, but Venus and Mars to have effectively zero, especially when given the largely randomized nature of matter distribution in an early and energetic solar system during planet formation.

Any given asteroid is probably likely to simply be what it says on the tin, IE: given the surface area to volume ratios, what you can get from spectroscopy of an asteroid is most likely a fair representation of the contents within. Past a certain size though, this gets murky. Ceres for example might have some fairly interesting innards being a dwarf planet.

Mars in many respects is probably set as far as any solid element is concerned, at least when considering a global sense. When you start to consider terraforming then the question gets interesting. The books Red Mars and Green Mars have some fairly interesting thoughts on various possibilities while generally assuming that Mars itself has quite a lot of stored sources of various gasses. Additionally, yes, there is the possibility of redirecting comets and the like to dump more gasses.

Venus is harder to figure out as we don't really have too good of an idea what the surface conditions are like. There certainly isn't going to be much in the way of surface water for example, but quite possibly there could be some deep deposits.

What is likely true is that short of some very interesting engine techs or semi-unlikely infrastructure growths, any initial Mars colony is likely to be fending for itself with ISRU activities for bulk materials. I partly come to this conclusion because first off, NASA has stated that any current plans for Mars missions are temporary stay only, no colonies. That means that so far the only group likely to have a means to Mars in the next 10 years AND a stated goal of colonization is Musk. Now, whatever your personal beliefs on the likelihood of his plan happening, you have to admit that currently we are absent any colonization statements from NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, or the Chinese Space Agency (I forget the name, sorry China!) that I am unaware of, this means that Musk is the only possible colonizer. While he has not revealed his plans yet, he has not historically seemed that interested in asteroid mining, so you could probably safely assume his Mars plans do not rely upon this. That said, if he has the means to reach Mars, he has the means to reach the asteroids, springing a surprise asteroid mining industry out there would also somewhat be in keeping with Musk's known MO. Even if all he did was offer a discount on launch services to Planetary resources in exchange for something like 1/10 of their mineral shipments heading to Mars instead of Earth, that could certainly help.

The trick currently is still just the economics of it all. Yes setting down a gigaton of iron or even something more precious on Earth could make its owner a rich person, you have to get it there which has energy costs. Not to mention fascinating political and legal questions that are still as yet unsettled on the international stage. So right now, the only place you can make an economic profit (as opposed to an infrastructural profit [IE Using your resources to further develop your own capabilities rather than selling them]) is Earth or near Earth space, which again brings up those issues.

So I suppose the tldr of this all is that we largely don't actually know what the elemental scene looks like in the solar system to any real degree of confidence and as such it is somewhat hard to predict what material trades or economies might develop in the early or late game, even more because we don't know what engine techs might exist.

the reason I think bonafida space agencies don't have a colonization plan is that they are not sure how or that they can sustain them. Mars has a feature that the moon does not have, on the moon you can, given cumulative space docking land about any thing on the moon with a GPS system in place or even lorance like system, land just about any piece of equipment. Therefore we could dig down say 100 feet, or given time we could even reach the solid warm center of the moon and chances are you would find alot ot uranium and rare earths. That could justify a moon colony, say what you like about Nuclear energy, it beats the crap out of coal, and if we had a great supply it could pay off. But you would be building SRBs to get you back to earth with your load, which means small SRBs. As far as I know the space shuttle is the only vessel that could carry a good size load of uranium back to earth and make it profitable.

Mars is a different story, even if you had pure uranium-235 (which is particularly dangerous) or pure platinum it would not be cost effective to ship it back to earth. One of the basic problems is that most board of directors expect now that an investment made today will pay-off in five years, this is not the case, you can't expect a 5 year payoff in a mars mining operation.

The problem with mining economics off-world is that compared to other planets the earths surface is dynamic. This may also be true with other planets, but we have the whole collision thing that occurred after the earth had considerably cooled, then the biological epochs of earth and the fact that we have liquid water has created alot of deposites where killer contaminants are reduced. So you get iron deposits that are low silicon, you have gold deposits, etc. And there is alot of earth and 2000 years of prospecting to find these things, made more easily so by having breathable air and food and water availability. The second problem is that you set out on a 5 year mission to get platinum off of mimos, and year 3 in your mission someone finds a rare combination of palladium-tin and krypton does the same thing for 1/3 the price and you are SOL. Alot of the rare earth stuff is going to be functionally replaced by graphene, which is a cheap on earth as it is anywhere in the galaxy. The so called smart material, in which some very special property is caged and oriented by carbon-nitrogen is going to take alot of the pressure off the rare elements and make things stronger and lighter weight. Imagine that when you make a magnet, its almost impossible to get all the domains to align, but then you put a single atom in a cage which then orients the atom, and you can basically have cages on a string which you weeve into a cloth and connect together like a diamond.

So the reality of interplanetary commerce is that its primary motivation is future growth off-world, what are future off-worlders willing to pay for something. If its not future growth and if someone isn't funding off-world growth, commerce does not make sense until there is growth, chicken-egg argument. So then the question is why NASA is right now only talking about a manned flyby (and later maybe a landing and reading the Orion page that sounds ify . . obviously we don't have a mars colonization plan because we do not have a manned mars mission plan with details). Because that is what they think they can do, they may have other robotic plans for mars and its moons, but everyone is interested in what their manned missions are. I would be more interested in do they intend to land on mars moons and bring back samples. The big payback from the moon. . . . seriously we could have sent five clueless missions to the moon where they tripped over themselves. . . . . all that would have still been good with the return of a single moon rock, even 40 years after the mission science papers are still being written on the rocks. So I think primary mission is to get samples from Mars, and if that is too hard then get rocks from the moons of mars, and from there we analyze and see what can be done. I could imagine some crude ore processing unit where tiny little nanobots pick little crystals and separate them one by on onto conveyor belts that then go to a chemical processing bath and separates the elements of the crystal, which is then made into pure samples. All of this would be tested on the mars rocks on earth before being sent to mars for practice. 

Someone made the point about why be in space, why should government support a space program. Other than being the heaviest payback welfare system, a space colonization system is a form of insurance against things like global nuclear war or asteroid impacts. These are the benefits now, but with good space science the colonization could have its own internal economics. 

 

 

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It's much easier to force a resource recycling on the Earth than to mine and deliver resources from other planets (even if they really are there).

Every aspect of industry requires at once enormous amounts of facilities, storages and substances ready to use. On the Earth they were being evolutionarily built for centuries.
On another celestial body you need either to build a huge metallurgic facility at once (which means you need to mine and produce the mineral in really huge amounts), or just to send a raw ore to the Earth where a metallurgical corporation already has the required plant.
The second way is much easier. Also, say, a platinum corporation, sponsoring the mining project, needs ore for their plant, not an extraterrestrial colony itself.

Almost all elements you can mine outside the Earth are so common here, that it has no purpose to dig iron or potassium on the Moon. Probably even titanium.
So, only very rare elements mining would find a sponsor.

OK, say, now here appears a portative "smelter" which can split any piece of matter into atoms and store them separatedly. Nothing too fantastic in such presumption.
Now you don't need all that metallurgical plants. You extract a rock, split it into atoms, then you print goods with 3d-printer.
So, all you need is to deliver this mega-smelter with mega-reactor and mega-printer to any asteroid or planet which you prefer, and to start mining/splitting/printing.

But on the Earth there is already many times more of "empty rock", "solid waste", "useless stuff" to be recycled.
And this "smelter" is the greatest way to utilize any useless trash, getting pure elements and printing the new useless trash. At some moment there is no need to dig new portions of ore at all.
Today a person eats sandwiches, discards empty sandwich paper, old boots, visits toilet. Trash and waste water are being delivered to the recycling facilities.
Tomorrow he/she gets a new paper with sandwiches, new boots - made of somebody's yesterday atoms, just shuffled.

Now all terranean metallurgical and chemical industry turns into a "environment-friendly" recycling lego.
So,
1) Still nobody needs those extraterrestrial elements as all of them are already here;
2) Still only very rare elements are indeed required, and maybe really mined on asteroids. And as probably there are not many places in Solar System were cesium and holmiun are laying as ingots, not many extraterrestrial mines would be.

So, now the only purpose to colonize at least something is a vault creation.
But now it's even more pointless than before, because now you can build all-recycling self-sufficient closed-cycle underground cities on the Earth.
This will overcome almost any disaster which can make the Earth even worse than Mars, except the planet destruction. But if burst the Earth, any Mars colony will anyway be eliminated by falling pieces.

So, the Earth will stay the only planet colonized humanity. Scientific and observational outposts, rare element mines. Not real colonies.

Edited by kerbiloid
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53 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

It's much easier to force a resource recycling on the Earth than to mine and deliver resources from other planets (even if they really are there).

Every aspect of industry requires at once enormous amounts of facilities, storages and substances ready to use. On the Earth they were being evolutionarily built for centuries.
On another celestial body you need either to build a huge metallurgic facility at once (which means you need to mine and produce the mineral in really huge amounts), or just to send a raw ore to the Earth where a metallurgical corporation already has the required plant.
The second way is much easier. Also, say, a platinum corporation, sponsoring the mining project, needs ore for their plant, not an extraterrestrial colony itself.

Almost all elements you can mine outside the Earth are so common here, that it has no purpose to dig iron or potassium on the Moon. Probably even titanium.
So, only very rare elements mining would find a sponsor.

OK, say, now here appears a portative "smelter" which can split any piece of matter into atoms and store them separatedly. Nothing too fantastic in such presumption.
Now you don't need all that metallurgical plants. You extract a rock, split it into atoms, then you print goods with 3d-printer.
So, all you need is to deliver this mega-smelter with mega-reactor and mega-printer to any asteroid or planet which you prefer, and to start mining/splitting/printing.

But on the Earth there is already many times more of "empty rock", "solid waste", "useless stuff" to be recycled.
And this "smelter" is the greatest way to utilize any useless trash, getting pure elements and printing the new useless trash. At some moment there is no need to dig new portions of ore at all.
Today a person eats sandwiches, discards empty sandwich paper, old boots, visits toilet. Trash and waste water are being delivered to the recycling facilities.
Tomorrow he/she gets a new paper with sandwiches, new boots - made of somebody's yesterday atoms, just shuffled.

Now all terranean metallurgical and chemical industry turns into a "environment-friendly" recycling lego.
So,
1) Still nobody needs those extraterrestrial elements as all of them are already here;
2) Still only very rare elements are indeed required, and maybe really mined on asteroids. And as probably there are not many places in Solar System were cesium and holmiun are laying as ingots, not many extraterrestrial mines would be.

So, now the only purpose to colonize at least something is a vault creation.
But now it's even more pointless than before, because now you can build all-recycling self-sufficient closed-cycle underground cities on the Earth.
This will overcome almost any disaster which can make the Earth even worse than Mars, except the planet destruction. But if burst the Earth, any Mars colony will anyway be eliminated by falling pieces.

So, the Earth will stay the only planet colonized humanity. Scientific and observational outposts, rare element mines. Not real colonies.

Uranium cannot be recycled so its a potential candidate.

Splitting things into atoms for the most part is impracticle. Many elements are siderophiles which mean they will copurify with iron, if you want to get these you have to use a differentinal extraction process. The job of the smelter is basically to separate siderophiles from slag elements and gases, although the addition of graphite aids in the creation of steel (if you are interested in the rare elements this is not warranted at this step) and limestone the separation of slag. Slag can then be crushed into a fine powder and extracted with hydrochloric acid and thus leaving that acid stable silicates and solubilizing the alkali metals. These are then treated with base and the polyvalent cations generally precipitate leaving Li, Na, K+ chlorides in solution. Putting these back in elemental form is impractical, it requires electrolytic reduction, or excessive heating. Lithium is useful for making lithium ion batteries, sodium is useful as a system coolant (its vapor point in much higher than water). The smelter is designed to force disequilibrium between transition metals and alkalis such as the metals degass and become nonionic. To separate the siderophiles requires the acid based oxidation of the metals. This means that the metal needs to be pulverized into filings, treate with acid (like sulfuric which also acts as an oxidant, adding potassium dichromate would speed the process up) and bubbling pure oxygen into the mixture. Once oxidized you can neutralize the solution and do differential extraction. The vessel of choice for this is glass-lined, since glass is stable to a 300' c and is chemically stable up to about pH 12, but some care needs to be made to remove fluorine from solution early in the reaction.  The washing elements need to be recycled, this will require an electrolysis to produce chlorine gas, sulfate can be precipitated with calcium . . . . . . .

You have alot of process chambers that need to be created, laser 3-D printers is an end process, you have to get its reagents into forms it can handle. Some elements could be delivered in copper lines, glass lines with teflon connectors, or in cartridges. This means that some process modules can be separated and use common lines for application, while others need to juxtapose on corridors that bots would need to traverse, picking up cartridges, taking them to other locations, cartridges clean and prep, cartridge return.


Presumbably you could use a host of tunneling lasers to pound the surface of dirt to create gases of all the elements, but they will sublime on contact with anything, including your lasers and the equipment.

 

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I've used such splitter just as a sample of a minimum ISRU refinery opposite to a full metallurgical or chemical facility, with dozens of columns, reactors, basins, adsorbers, adsorbent regenerators, etc.
Just as an ultimate magic caldron.
Of course, there is no need to split everything such deeply.

I mean, even if create a tiny processor of matter available for space pioneers, anyway the Earth provides it with much more resource base.

P.S.
What you've described about the metal processing is true, but as you can see, the main product of any metallurgical plant is a pure element (steel slabs, aluminium slabs, copper ingots, etc.).
Just some of them a better to store like a simple composite chemical substance, but also as a single simple substance. And all this process is nothing more than extracting of its pollutions.

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I've used such splitter just as a sample of a minimum ISRU refinery opposite to a full metallurgical or chemical facility, with dozens of columns, reactors, basins, adsorbers, adsorbent regenerators, etc.
Just as an ultimate magic caldron.
Of course, there is no need to split everything such deeply.

I mean, even if create a tiny processor of matter available for space pioneers, anyway the Earth provides it with much more resource base.

P.S.
What you've described about the metal processing is true, but as you can see, the main product of any metallurgical plant is a pure element (steel slabs, aluminium slabs, copper ingots, etc.).
Just some of them a better to store like a simple composite chemical substance, but also as a single simple substance. And all this process is nothing more than extracting of its pollutions.

 

Steel by definition is not pure, steel contains at least Iron and carbon. When you think iron think rot-iron. Presumbably even off-world most natural elements will be found in crystals, so isolating the crystals first helps

A. Degassing -  A process that requires the addition of heat close to the denaturation point of the crystals in a seal chamber with a vacuum pump

  1. differential gas collection
    a. presumbably the gasses have different liqification points, a still would collect these and separate them according to boiling point
    b. the next process is to sublime gases that do not liquify, like CO2
  2. Crystal separation
    a - n.  separated crystals would be place in helium driven tubes where they are sent to a devoted process module for that crystal
  3. Dust (ultrafine grain processing) anything that is not an identifyable crystal or gas.
     

B. Differential crystal processing

  1. some crystals would be better treated with a strong monovalent acid like HCL
  2. some crystals would be better treated smelted
  3. other processes

C. Sub processeing - these are processes that apply to what you have obtained from the first.

     Lots and lots of process modules, some need to be connected by lines to their destination (production modules, life support, bioproduction, etc). For example a module that makes stainless steel might make plates, curved plates, column stocks). A robot would come along and take the column stocks to a production machine that make nuts, bolts and washers, once these are made the bot then takes a container to the factory, where these are loaded into a robotized assembly machine. The plates would be taken to bender where the are curved and welded into structures, eventually welded into structures outside of the facility and attached.

D. Dust extraction. Probably feed into an ISRU.

Again ISRU is basically a (I only care for these things cause I am not going to build a space colony purification process). If your goal is to extract everything useful from a clump of dirt, in the end you probably will have decimeter cubed blocks of nickle and silicon wafers dotting the surface around your processor (you wont need as much of these as supplied)
 

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Steel is Fe mixed with exact and predictable small amounts of C and sometimes Ni, V, Mn, Mo, W, etc, created from a wild mix of iron oxides polluted with sulfides, sulfates, etc.
No need to store it as a pure Fe, it's impractical.
But btw if you, say, heat a piece of ore to 10000 K and then magnetically separate ions, you would have no choice rather than to get pure elements into different pots and then combine them in required proportions.

But as I've told above, "to atoms" here had been meant just like an idiom.

32 minutes ago, PB666 said:

If your goal is to extract everything useful from a clump of dirt, in the end you probably will have decimeter cubed blocks of nickle and silicon wafers dotting the surface around your processor

If your goal is another, in the end you exactly have the same amount of nickle, silicon and other excessive elements as a large slagheap near yours, but as a mix of chemicals.

From another side, any stone is a combination of Al,Si,Mg,O,Fe,etc. All of them are required on Earth, and the Earth contains many different stones.
So, splitting a stone to its elements on Earth, probably you would discard only oxygen (as there's enough of it), sulfur (as its the most annoying impurity, and there is much of it) and, say, calcium, just because.
I.e. you again would have nice gypsum to mix it into concrete.


 

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10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It's much easier to force a resource recycling on the Earth than to mine and deliver resources from other planets (even if they really are there).

Every aspect of industry requires at once enormous amounts of facilities, storages and substances ready to use. On the Earth they were being evolutionarily built for centuries.
On another celestial body you need either to build a huge metallurgic facility at once (which means you need to mine and produce the mineral in really huge amounts), or just to send a raw ore to the Earth where a metallurgical corporation already has the required plant.
The second way is much easier. Also, say, a platinum corporation, sponsoring the mining project, needs ore for their plant, not an extraterrestrial colony itself.

Almost all elements you can mine outside the Earth are so common here, that it has no purpose to dig iron or potassium on the Moon. Probably even titanium.
So, only very rare elements mining would find a sponsor.

OK, say, now here appears a portative "smelter" which can split any piece of matter into atoms and store them separatedly. Nothing too fantastic in such presumption.
Now you don't need all that metallurgical plants. You extract a rock, split it into atoms, then you print goods with 3d-printer.
So, all you need is to deliver this mega-smelter with mega-reactor and mega-printer to any asteroid or planet which you prefer, and to start mining/splitting/printing.

But on the Earth there is already many times more of "empty rock", "solid waste", "useless stuff" to be recycled.
And this "smelter" is the greatest way to utilize any useless trash, getting pure elements and printing the new useless trash. At some moment there is no need to dig new portions of ore at all.
Today a person eats sandwiches, discards empty sandwich paper, old boots, visits toilet. Trash and waste water are being delivered to the recycling facilities.
Tomorrow he/she gets a new paper with sandwiches, new boots - made of somebody's yesterday atoms, just shuffled.

Now all terranean metallurgical and chemical industry turns into a "environment-friendly" recycling lego.
So,
1) Still nobody needs those extraterrestrial elements as all of them are already here;
2) Still only very rare elements are indeed required, and maybe really mined on asteroids. And as probably there are not many places in Solar System were cesium and holmiun are laying as ingots, not many extraterrestrial mines would be.

So, now the only purpose to colonize at least something is a vault creation.
But now it's even more pointless than before, because now you can build all-recycling self-sufficient closed-cycle underground cities on the Earth.
This will overcome almost any disaster which can make the Earth even worse than Mars, except the planet destruction. But if burst the Earth, any Mars colony will anyway be eliminated by falling pieces.

So, the Earth will stay the only planet colonized humanity. Scientific and observational outposts, rare element mines. Not real colonies.

there is no such thing as 100% efficiency, were gonna require more resources eventually

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21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Hydrogen - storage form H2, H20, Pt-H - While hydrogen is the most common elements in our solar system, it largely resides outside of earth in inconvenient places namely the Sun and the gravitationally inaccessable gas giants. Its density in outer solar systems objects is higher then inner solar system objects (except the gravitationally heightened sun). The sun produces hydrogen, lots of it, problem is to get close enough to harvest it the level has already fallen. There is far too much need for hydrogen to bring it from Earth or other gravity wells. Hydrogen is the most basic reducing agent, it is the smallest and compounds in which it is found have the highest volatility and lowest viscosity. Because of its high energy per sp, sp2, sp3 and ss bond/mass hydrogen is a major component of rocket fuels, particularly first and second stages. It is also a component of fuel cells. Because of its volatility hydrogen is first lost from planets that a hot and/or have no atmosphere.


Hydrogen
  H20 - water, required for life, electrolysis, chemical synthesis, air conditioning, greenhouses
  NH3 - Ammonia, required for fertilizers, used in air conditioning and cooling systems. 
  CH4 - Methane, one of the simplist fuels, can be used to make higher organic compounds and ammonia.
  CH3CH20H - Ethanol . . . . . synthetic intermediate in the making of synthetic oils and other fuels. 
  H2NCRHCO2H - Amino acids . . . .Required to make protein, R (CHOSN) containing side chains
  H2SO4 - sulferic acid . . . . required for life, to hydrogen to reduce sulfate is an essential process for biological oxidation
  HCl - hydrochloric acid . . .for the extraction of metals from high complexity ore. Required for life, a precursor for some refridgerants, for the preparation of some electronics. etc. 
  H3PO4 - phosphoric acid . . . for life, for extraction purpose, fertilizer. 

Option 1. Mercury exploit, charged particles from the sun pound mercuries surface and slowing them down, using a pulse charge system protons and electrons can be directed into a set of channels where they can be pumped and collected. Critique- landing on mercury challenging,bringing the electrods, channeling the surface, etc more challenging.

Option 2. Comet exploit, comets are occasionally thrown from the kuiper belt into the inner solar system where they degas, wrapping and heating the comet could capture these gases. Comets are generally are in high dV orbits relative to earth, stablizing those orbits so they can be harvested is difficult, stable zones are devoid of sustantial solar electric power, a nuclear electric power plant may be required.

Option 3. Lunar option, problem is that the level of hydrogen in the form of sublimated materials is probably not enough to sustain a lunar colony, let alone expand.

There is an option 4: Getting it from a Mars Moon, or a C-type asteroid, which contain hydrated minerals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-type_asteroid

Also, if you can get to mercury, there is H2O in permanently shadowed craters there too...

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Oxygen -  is the primary oxidant, diatomic oxygen (02) is rare where photosynthetic life is absent, the most common reduced form of oxygen is water, but oxygen is also a component of CO2 and is more stable in rocks (asteroids and rocky planets than hydrogen), it is also found in comets and is a small component of solar wind.

Option 1. Moons of martian planets Option 2. Short period comets. Option 3. Kuiper belt planetoids and trojan objects of Jupiter and Saturn. Critique - transfer orbits take generations. Nuclear is an absolute requirement.

Option 4. Extract it directly from the rocks of the moon and asteroids- all terrestrial objects are of similar composition (ignoring ices), and will contain large amounts of oxidized rocks.

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Carbon - Storage form graphite, diamond, organic compounds, dry-ice. Outside of the earth is one of the most frequent elements found in gases of non-gas giants with atmosphere in the form of CO2 and methane, also present on comets. Carbonates are also found bound to metals in asteroids and other soils. On hot planets like mercury and venus carbonates are driven off of metal into the atmosphere. Carbon also acts a reducing agent, although under some circumstances is can be an oxidezer, it is a general thicken of fluids, fluids with high carbon complexity tend to be more viscous and less volatile, diamond as a good example of the effect of branching sp3 bonds.


Carbon
  CO2 - required for life, greenhouses, blood chemistry, concrete and basically stone based construction.
  CH4, Ethanol, amino acids, oils, see above - see hydrogen
  =C= (sp3) diamond, required for high end devices and for drills (embedded diamond dust)
  =C- (sp2-p) graphite, found in graphene and other modern graphene based structures. component of carbon-fiber, light weigh building materials. 
  


Option 1. Moons of martian planets
Option 2. Short perioid comets.

Option 3. From respiration

Option 4. From C-type asteroids.

Seriously, what is with you and forgetting asteroids????

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Nitrogen- Nitrogen is a key component for life, it is also a major component of hyperglolic fuels as well as solid fuels, therefore it is almost essential to have nitrogen for deep space operations where main engine fuels may not be required, it is frequently used with oxygen, so demand for nitrogen also increases demand for nitogen. Nitrogen is a required component for atmospheres. It is relatively volatile, not as easily trappeds as carbon and oxygen.

Option 1. Short period object
Option 2. Kuiper belt planetoids and trojan objects of Jupiter and Saturn.

Option 3. Extract it from Earth/Mars/Venus Orbit via something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system

but on a larger scale.

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Aluminum-  Aluminum is a major component of light weight space craft, it is a fairly common element, but is hard to mine except from certain sources.  Aluminum is the ultimate storage for rocket fuels such as for SFRB that might be used for landing ventures on planets.

Option 1. Lunar harvesting.
Option 2. Asteriod mining
Option 3. Moons of martian planets
Option 4. Mars.

NOW you remember asteroids?

But the primary usage for aluminum is construction, not fuel- hydrogen-based fuels are much better for that.

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Argon (Xenon) - Xenon is widely used as an ion-(hall thruster or roses by any other name) however it is extremely difficult to find off earth, with solar efficiencies improving and Ion drives reaching higher ISP, the argon storage problem is less of a problem, many ion drives can burn Argon and Xenon. Argon is basically found whereever atmospheres are found, it tends to be a bit more common in the outer solar system, likely because of atmospheric loses from the inner solar system. Argon also prevents fast spoilage in artificial atmospheres. Essentially we need cold atmospheres were vapor velocity at ground level + solar wind is not sufficient to blow argon away, this represents objects very far away from the sun.  Boiling point is at 87.302 K

Option 1. Harvesting of just outer system planetoids, atmospheric purification
Option 2. Harvesting of the asteroid belt objects.
Option 3. Harvest from mars.

Not really essential, you can use H2 or other gases for a modified VASMIR too. Hell, you could use Radon if you wanted too.

Also:

Option 4. Extract it from Earth/Mars/Venus Orbit via something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system

but on a larger scale.

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

Rare Earths. The primary use of rare earths

Option 1. Earth sourced while other sources are found.

M-type asteroids, and Mars's Tharsis should be good places to find rare Earths. But that's a guess.

 

21 hours ago, PB666 said:

 

In creating stand alone colonies what we see is that sourcing of elements is not quite as easy as on earth, if we remove earth from consideration one might have to travel the mercury/kuiper-belt transfer in order to find the best source for minerals

Then you're dong it wrong, bro.

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5 hours ago, insert_name said:

there is no such thing as 100% efficiency, were gonna require more resources eventually

Only while humanity grows,
while the industry can't recycle any slag to a combination of useful simple substances (just because a slag is usually a stable substance in an "energy well"),
while you need to produce much more than you consume and can't recycle the excessive goods back.

If you have a 99% recycling, and there is more or less constant amount of people, your need in new resources falls down to a ridiculous level and can be easily covered with the terrestrial ones, with no need in asteroids. So, only the most rare metals will be the aim of any extraterrestrial industry ever.
 

Edited by kerbiloid
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17 hours ago, fredinno said:

There is an option 4: Getting it from a Mars Moon, or a C-type asteroid, which contain hydrated minerals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-type_asteroid

Also, if you can get to mercury, there is H2O in permanently shadowed craters there too...

Option 4. Extract it directly from the rocks of the moon and asteroids- all terrestrial objects are of similar composition (ignoring ices), and will contain large amounts of oxidized rocks.

Option 3. From respiration

Option 4. From C-type asteroids.

Seriously, what is with you and forgetting asteroids????

Option 3. Extract it from Earth/Mars/Venus Orbit via something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system

but on a larger scale.

NOW you remember asteroids?

But the primary usage for aluminum is construction, not fuel- hydrogen-based fuels are much better for that.

Not really essential, you can use H2 or other gases for a modified VASMIR too. Hell, you could use Radon if you wanted too.

Also:

Option 4. Extract it from Earth/Mars/Venus Orbit via something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system

but on a larger scale.

M-type asteroids, and Mars's Tharsis should be good places to find rare Earths. But that's a guess.

 

Then you're dong it wrong, bro.

By far the relative abundance of hydrogen is greatest in comets. that goes for practically all the volatiles, as comets are largely composed of volatiles. You might get it from dirt back asteroids, but fused asteroids made of heated metalics are going to be very hydrogen pour. So I have to say that short period comets are the best source beyond a doubt. All it takes is the effort to pull something like 67p into a stable orbit (which basically tou tug it a little and let jupiter and saturn do the rest) is the best source for the volatiles. There is water on Mercury, but since you made the effort to go their that water would be also split for other duties.

Near earth orbit asteroids are not good sources of hydrogen or water, there is some carbon dioxide but mars moons are better sources.

So here is the basic problem with your thinking, which you should have detected before saying im doing it wrong.

Moons, Asteroids, etc have alot of aluminum, nickle and silicon on the surface, but very little water. On  the moon or mercury this water is precious, because this will be needed for the colony, and is only found in select places, like the caps. This is not the kind of water you want for making rockets to explore the system. This is the kind of water you want for building green houses and domestic use. Most asteroids will be wasted effort to get water, but are good sources of metals.

The short period comets are the best source, have the lowest delta-v but require some effort and lots of time. This is where things like high efficiency solar panels and ion drives come into play. Even fusion if it ever comes about. Another strategy is to simply capture a comet, protect it from the sun and place it in a mars/earth orbit where it can be exploited, or even better place it in earth L2.

Mercury is good because of simply the huge amount of power, you can set out voltaic potentials and capture plasma, giving you all the power you want. This is good for the development of Nerva, which Mercurians would not have any problems with. You don't have to worry about using water, save it for domestic use and skim protons from channels in mercury to use in rockets.

The other thing about mercury is you have another advantage you can use solar voltaics and rf/laser power to basically accelerate your Nerva propellant to high ISP ION drive exhaust velocities. Mercury is more than about water and/or surface protons, its about power. For example a magnesium based ion drive that could develope say exhaust velocity of 1000000 m/s or even 10000000 m/s would have a solar usage zone after lift-off from mercury of millions of miles, some d/v to push its orbit in while it accelerates, it has 60 days of solar power at 4 to 8 times that of earth (provided solar panels). We can imagine how much dV that could development for travel to the outer system.

HYdrogen is a poor propellant for Vasmir (storage is inefficient compared to other gases and solids, metalic magnesium is the best storage form), the best ion drive propellants store as solids (magnesium). Vasmir we don't have a power supply for, unless you are in mercurian orbit and high heat solar stability has improved and power to weight ratios increase by 10 fold. The thing about bring comets into stable orbits and covering them from solar radiation is that these are huge concentrated reservoirs of volatiles, but you have no cost at all for launching product and landing. If you placed one of these in Martain L2, its basically there for your mars moons needs. Sure you can invest 100 fold more effort trying to get hydrogen from Mimos, but you still have to launch it, were as on L2, you don't have to spend the effort and you don't have to pay much launch cost, and you can spend a tiny about of dV to send it to L1, or package it up and send it to earths L2, were it can be used. Again all this would be done utilizing the argon (comets have argon gas also) and other minerals you capture on the comet to basically run your ION drive, when and if fusion power ever becomes feasible. For a mercurian polar-crater colony we don't have to wait for fusion. There is also the potential of hunting down dirtballs in Jupiters orbit.

Freddy your problem is that you tend to gloss over the problems in space colonization, you think that some webpages handwaving solution is a solution. Space colonization is hard, the best sources of resources are often the hardest to reach, the ones within reach demand such an energy cost to extract it makes expansion incredibly difficult. Your colonies are going to leak and lose material. But then you want to use water (2H2 + O2) as a launch fuel. To much competition for too little resource. When they say there is water on the polar moon or mercury, they don't mean lakes, they mean basically frost accumulated in between the dirt on the surface. When they talk about water on Mars, its in saturated solution with other minerals. H20 is volatile in the inner solar system, its stable on earth only because of Earths size (gravity) and bound atmosphere, and temperature. Simply using a drill is some of these locations to bring up dirt will supply enough instability that water basically vaporizes and blasts away into space. For 2H2, O2 based engines you need big sources of water, not trivial sources.

 

You need to be able to find great sources of resources, so that a little waste does

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13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Only while humanity grows,
while the industry can't recycle any slag to a combination of useful simple substances (just because a slag is usually a stable substance in an "energy well"),
while you need to produce much more than you consume and can't recycle the excessive goods back.

If you have a 99% recycling, and there is more or less constant amount of people, your need in new resources falls down to a ridiculous level and can be easily covered with the terrestrial ones, with no need in asteroids. So, only the most rare metals will be the aim of any extraterrestrial industry ever.
 

show me one example of 99% recycling that makes a profit

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4 minutes ago, insert_name said:

show me one example of 99% recycling that makes a profit

Copper can be completely recycled.

Recycling glass is not profitable, since sand is basically granualized glass, there is little difference in energy cost.
Plastic is barely recyclable, the problem is that there is not one kind of plastic, for plastic recycling be useful the user has to separate plastics by composition

Polyethylene is basically thick wax, (oil at higher temperature), the polyethylene can be carefully recycled back to polyethylene plastics.  the polycarbonates and the like can be ground into small particles and used in a variety of applications, these tend to lighten soils. They can also be burnt, reused, no.

Cardboard is about 100% recyclable. In our household we recycle all the cardboard except the milk containers. This is profitable because cardboard takes alot of landfill space, and landfill cost money.

Aluminum is mostly recyclable.

The heavy organics (peels, rinds, ends) I recycle.

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1 hour ago, insert_name said:

show me one example of 99% recycling that makes a profit

That's exactly why you need the mining industry.

Idea is: while you need large mining facilities to mine extraterrestrial resources, you can mine only small amounts of rare metals on other space bodies.
Once you get a compact tool allowing to mine anything anywhere without building a large industrial plant, you need only small amount of rare metals from other space bodies.

Similar to:
While you live in a tribe and need flintstone, you can get only a little of it.
Nowadays you could get as much flintstones as you wish, but you don't need them.
 

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1 hour ago, PB666 said:

By far the relative abundance of hydrogen is greatest in comets. that goes for practically all the volatiles, as comets are largely composed of volatiles. You might get it from dirt back asteroids, but fused asteroids made of heated metalics are going to be very hydrogen pour. So I have to say that short period comets are the best source beyond a doubt. All it takes is the effort to pull something like 67p into a stable orbit (which basically tou tug it a little and let jupiter and saturn do the rest) is the best source for the volatiles. There is water on Mercury, but since you made the effort to go their that water would be also split for other duties.

C-Type asteroids are not metallic chunks, those are M-types, and are much more rare anyways.

Also, Comets tend to have inclined, and eccentric orbits, which make it a pain to get to and fro. Also, they eject matter (which can be good or bad). That's why I don't like getting resources from comets. Only do so when essential.

 

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Freddy your problem is that you tend to gloss over the problems in space colonization, you think that some webpages handwaving solution is a solution. Space colonization is hard, the best sources of resources are often the hardest to reach, the ones within reach demand such an energy cost to extract it makes expansion incredibly difficult. Your colonies are going to leak and lose material. But then you want to use water (2H2 + O2) as a launch fuel. To much competition for too little resource. When they say there is water on the polar moon or mercury, they don't mean lakes, they mean basically frost accumulated in between the dirt on the surface. When they talk about water on Mars, its in saturated solution with other minerals. H20 is volatile in the inner solar system, its stable on earth only because of Earths size (gravity) and bound atmosphere, and temperature. Simply using a drill is some of these locations to bring up dirt will supply enough instability that water basically vaporizes and blasts away into space. For 2H2, O2 based engines you need big sources of water, not trivial sources.

I know that. I was just pointing out that if you have a full fledged space colony of 10,000, you should at least have enough infrastructure to get what you need, even if it is relatively rare.

 

BTW, if you're so desperate to go to MERCURY for H2, you can get it from the Mars subsurface (and yes, I DO know you need to filter out perchlorates) and  asteroid belt asteroids, like Ceres, which have abundant water.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Near earth orbit asteroids are not good sources of hydrogen or water, there is some carbon dioxide but mars moons are better sources.

They are not, bit there are sources. I was more referring to C-type main-belt asteroids, which are cold enough to have water, instead of just hydrated rock.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

The short period comets are the best source, have the lowest delta-v but require some effort and lots of time. This is where things like high efficiency solar panels and ion drives come into play. Even fusion if it ever comes about. Another strategy is to simply capture a comet, protect it from the sun and place it in a mars/earth orbit where it can be exploited, or even better place it in earth L2.

Yeah, good luck on your cometary redirection. You need an enormous amount of energy to move solar system objects, not to mention the dust will block out, and potentially damage solar panels.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Moons, Asteroids, etc have alot of aluminum, nickle and silicon on the surface, but very little water. On  the moon or mercury this water is precious, because this will be needed for the colony, and is only found in select places, like the caps. This is not the kind of water you want for making rockets to explore the system. This is the kind of water you want for building green houses and domestic use. Most asteroids will be wasted effort to get water, but are good sources of metals.

"Most asteroids" exist in the Trojans and Asteroid belt- the latter of which is from 2-4 AU. Keep in mind the frost line of the solar system is 2.7AU. Most of the asteroids beyond that region will have plentiful water ice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_(astrophysics)

http://www.astro.cornell.edu/~randerson/Inreach%20Web%20Page/inreach/asteroids.html

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Mercury is good because of simply the huge amount of power, you can set out voltaic potentials and capture plasma, giving you all the power you want. This is good for the development of Nerva, which Mercurians would not have any problems with. You don't have to worry about using water, save it for domestic use and skim protons from channels in mercury to use in rockets.

...wut? How is being close to the sun good for NERVA? In fact, it should be worse, the H2 inside would boil-off even more quickly. I think you meant ION.

And Skimming protons from the solar wind/exosphere of Mercury is probably uneconomical, since the density is minisule.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

HYdrogen is a poor propellant for Vasmir (storage is inefficient compared to other gases and solids, metalic magnesium is the best storage form), the best ion drive propellants store as solids (magnesium). Vasmir we don't have a power supply for, unless you are in mercurian orbit and high heat solar stability has improved and power to weight ratios increase by 10 fold. The thing about bring comets into stable orbits and covering them from solar radiation is that these are huge concentrated reservoirs of volatiles, but you have no cost at all for launching product and landing. If you placed one of these in Martain L2, its basically there for your mars moons needs. Sure you can invest 100 fold more effort trying to get hydrogen from Mimos, but you still have to launch it, were as on L2, you don't have to spend the effort and you don't have to pay much launch cost, and you can spend a tiny about of dV to send it to L1, or package it up and send it to earths L2, were it can be used. Again all this would be done utilizing the argon (comets have argon gas also) and other minerals you capture on the comet to basically run your ION drive, when and if fusion power ever becomes feasible. For a mercurian polar-crater colony we don't have to wait for fusion. There is also the potential of hunting down dirtballs in Jupiters orbit.

Hydrogen is largely bad since it is so light, and so it gives higher ISP when higher thrust, not ISP, is needed. However, VASMIR can use higher-thrust, lower ISP modes, which can mitigate the lower TWR. But yeah, you're better off using Magnesium, or possibly even Aluminum. Or Argon/Krypton/Xenon when available. (or possibly even Radon if you want to go Kerbal.:D)

Or at least that's the impression I got.

Mercury is great- until you consider high-delta V costs due to its location, the fact that it has relatively little economic pull (M-type asteroids can give everything Mercury has to offer, along with C-types and S-types) and the fact that bases have to face its solar spin resonance, which makes it a pain in the ass to build solar panels, since you need them in Orbit, or all over the planet. Not to mention it has little public value. People like Moon, Mars, Europa, Titan, and Triton, to name a few bodies. Mercury is not on that list.

 

BTW: I also noticed you did not include Phosphorus in your list.  You need Phosphorous to survive, and so do plants and animals.

C-Type asteroids contain Phosphorus, as does the moon.

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-nasa-mission-to-help-us-learn-how-to-mine-asteroids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KREEP

Another thing you forgot about is silver, essential for high-tech and efficiency electronics about as much as rare earths.

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

That's exactly why you need the mining industry.

Idea is: while you need large mining facilities to mine extraterrestrial resources, you can mine only small amounts of rare metals on other space bodies.
Once you get a compact tool allowing to mine anything anywhere without building a large industrial plant, you need only small amount of rare metals from other space bodies.

Similar to:
While you live in a tribe and need flintstone, you can get only a little of it.
Nowadays you could get as much flintstones as you wish, but you don't need them.
 

I doubt that will ever happen, I mean, how economical is it going to be to get gold out of sandstone? Not much,  I expect. Flintstones stopped being used because human's didin;t need them anymore. Unless we stop needing rare Earths, that's not happening. And recycling is nowhere close to 99% efficient.

 

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8 minutes ago, fredinno said:

I doubt that will ever happen, I mean, how economical is it going to be to get gold out of sandstone?

How much gold do you usually use? And how much of it have you discarded inside outdated electronics?
So if recycle all gold thrown away by you, would you really need the gold from asteroids - or, say, one tenth of gram, refined from the seawater, will be enough to cover the difference?

When you drop a device, the metals it contains do not disappear. They are just bound inside stable substances and lay on ground.

And don't forget that the more additional gold you mine, the more of gold is contained in the scrap behind your house. So, once there will be enough golden scrap to stop mining the gold at all.

Uranium and other depletable resources of course should be mined much longer.

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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