Nibb31

You are only selling it if you have people buying it. The biggest current demand for platinum is jewellery and catalytic converters for the automobile industry. By the time we are capable of mining asteroids to get the stuff, we will either have moved on from using oil as our major power-source, or sufficated to death or blown ourselves to smithereens fighting for it, so the need for platinum as a catalyst will have withered. As for jewellery, the value comes from rarity and the volumes are ridiculously low. If you dump tons of it on the market, there goes the attractiveness of platinum jewellery, and you probably wouldn't have demand for tons of it in the first place anyway. There is also platinum in sea water. It's too expensive and not practical to extract it from there, but it will always be much cheaper than the sheer amount of energy needed locate an asteroid, send up all the heavy mining equipment, and bring the minerals back to Earth. Plus all the R&D to actually develop the technology for all that. And there is an even larger number of people who were treated as lunatics and fools who were actual lunatics and fools. In the vast majority of cases, when someone has a stupid idea, it really is stupid. People telling you that you're wrong is rarely a guarantee that you're right. Most of the time, you are wrong. I didn't say that asteroid mining will never happen. It might happen one day as cost-effective alternative if ever need to start building stuff in space. It will come after we find a way to actually find a lucrative way to use space, and after we develop the technologies to actually transform any mined resources into something useful. We are nowhere near that stage, and we won't be there before at least 50 years, if ever. What I did say was that if it does happen one day, it will not involve large amounts of space workers. In order to be cost-effective, it will have to be a highly automated activity that will minimize any manned presence. There will be no space miners or space cowboys, because space is not the Wild West and reality isn't science fiction. What was that PT Barnum quote again ? Nibb's Free Financial Tip Of The Day: "Never take commercial powerpoints at face value".

And from what source is that claim ? Unsurprisingly, Planetary Resources. A company that is solely based on hype and powerpoints and has none of the technology needed to achieve their claimed goal. Their business model is to produce infographics to raise money to pay the founder while he can produce more infographics to raise more money. All the Powerpoint slides in the world won't create an "trillion dollar industry". They have no idea how to technically proceed with asteroid mining, let alone how to do it cost-effectively. They have zero technical achievements. They have no idea of the technology that they're going to use, and therefore no idea of the costs involved, and therefore no idea how to make money out of it. And even if they did have the tech, there is simply no market for space-mined resources. Believe me, PR looks more like snake oil than a "modern gold rush".

You fail to explain why speed is important and how it is related to trial and error. Speed is only important if you have limited time, which is true when you have humans that rely on limited supplies. Robots have all the time in the world. They can spend 10 years analyzing a single rock if necessary. There is no hurry. As for diversity of samples, dozens of robots picking up hundreds of 1mg samples from different locations on the globe provides better statistical value that a human picking up 1kg rocks in a 10km radius around his base. Completely irrelevant. Given the cost, you would only send state of the art equipment on such an important mission, whether it's teleoperated or manned. Not sure what your point is...

Asteroid mining is another one of those far-fetched justifications for spaceflight. There is nothing in our solar system's asteroids that isn't already available on Earth. Why? Because our Earth was formed by those same asteroids. If you are planning to use the stuff on Earth, then it will always be cheaper to get it from Earth. Extracting the small concentrations of platinum or gold from seawater would be cheaper than bringing it back from asteroids. And your method still requires non-invented technology like orbital furnaces and ore extraction and processing facilities and some low-cost propulsion system to deorbit 500 ton lumps of metal. None of the companies that you mentioned are anywhere near having a viable business model, let alone the technology to pull off asteroid mining. They are venture capital funded outfits and their founders move on to other activities when it becomes apparent that they are vaporware and the VC money runs dry. It's common practice in the so-called "new space" sector. Industry, transport, energy, telecom, military or health services already trust machines every day, for far more life-threatening stuff than this. Working in space is nothing like working on Earth. Adding human rating to an orbital mining factory adds a huge amount of complexity and extra weight. You need to add life support, habitation, EVA facilities, supplies, docking facilities, workshops, tools, equipment, spares... Why would a business do that if they could simply use a teleoperated RMS with something like Robonaut on the end for a fraction of the cost, complexity, risk, and mass? With a high-speed communication loop and VR controls, there would be zero difference compared to actually sending someone up there to do the work. Surgeons already use teleoperated robotics with haptic feedback and VR displays for remote operations over the internet or to perform micro-surgery. There might be a slight lag, but nothing unsolvable, and it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than sending people up there to do the work. It's a no brainer. There will never be space miners or space cowboys. Space is not the Wild West.

What's the point of a mod pack in KSP ? Each time a mod is updated, you have two solutions: either you struggle to keep your zip up to date and users have to redownload your entire mod pack every couple of days, or you do regular updates by rolling them together, but in that case, you are going to constantly lag behind the individual mod versions. This isn't minecraft. There is zero complexity involved in downloading and installing individual mods. There is no compiling involved, all you would be doing is unzipping mods and rezipping them in a single file. I don't see the added value in that.

I don't think so <=

What makes you believe that asteroid mining or any other of those hypothetical industrial space applications would require a manned presence?

The only advantage in this scenario is the reduced lag in teleoperating the robots. Is that benefit of reducing lag worth spending billions and risking lives to build an outpost? And if so, why land the astronauts at all? Cut out the expensive lander and they could control the same robots from low Mars orbit, which would combine low-lag and wider area coverage by multiple robots. But seriously, robots are getting more and more autonomous. Curiosity operators only send coordinates and the robot figures out the best route to get there autonomously. The lag isn't a problem. In a decade or two, exploration robots are only going to get more and more capable, closing the gap between manned and unmanned exploration. By the time we are capable of sending a manned mission, we will have robots that can crawl, climb, dig, fly, send samples back to Earth, and fix themselves, which would negate any advantage of humans over machines. Nowadays, we could get most (if not all) of the scientific data returned by Apollo with robots and telepresence, for a fraction of the cost and risk of human lives. Apollo was done for "prestige and inspiration", with a political goal. It was not conceived as a way to get scientific data. The science return was a mere by-product. Was Apollo a first step to making us a Moon-dwelling species ? I don't think so. It was a one-off political stunt designed to impress the world. Manned exploration is a solution looking for a problem. You want a manned mission and are grappling at straws to find a justification for it. In reality, we will go to space when we have a reason to do so. Science is not that reason.

Considering that there is a waiting list several years long for Soyuz, the question is moot, because you will be 18 by then. As for having a minor on board, there's a whole bunch of liability and responsibility issues with this. There is high risk involved, and having a parent pay for the ticket sign-off poses all sorts of legal issues. There's also the matter of training. Even if you are 10-year-old genius, I doubt that you have the maturity or the educational background to allow you to pass the training requirements.

Yes, but again scientists aren't typically interested in speed. They favor reliability and stability, which means the less joints, hinges, and actuators, the better. Therefore: wheels. Something like the SEV is definitely not simple. It has all sorts of failure modes, from power to propulsion to computers to life-support and it can get stuck in the sand or roll over. Ignoring failure modes and contingencies is not a way to plan a manned expedition. Minimizing risks means that you have at least one plan for any single point failure. You don't want your astronauts to die just because their rover gets immobilized 20km from the base. No, because the cost of a series of Curiosity based on the same design would be a fraction of that cost. The major part of that budget was development of the rover, not production of the hardware. 4 astronauts is not a species. Nobody said that robots are better in every circumstance, but as far as science goes, there is no technological barrier preventing a robot from doing anything a human can do in an exploration context. Yes, prestige and inspiration are the only reason to do a manned expedition, but science as a sole justification is not worth it. So who is willing to pay $55 billion for a "prestige and inspiration" stunt ? PS. I believe that $55 billion figure is wildly underestimated.

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Without Orion, SLS has no purpose. It's just about the only confirmed payload that is available to fly on it. None of this makes any sense in terms of exploration. Orion is meant to be an vehicle for BEO exploration, but to go anywhere useful it needs a propulsion module and a shielded hab module which are not planned. So yes, it would have been better to concentrate on a space-only exploration vehicle based around a shielded hab and high-Isp (NTR or SEP) propulsion module and use a cheap CCDev vehicle to ferry the astronauts to and from the space ship. But then, there would be no need for SLS.

I grew up with TOS reruns, which was great as a kids show. I have a bit of fondness for its candidness and its likeable characters, which were great for the 60's and 70's, but the later shows sort of tried too hard when the naivete of the era was gone. Agreeing with Seret here. It's annoying that every planet they visit has a perfectly breathable atmosphere and each time they run into an alien, they are some sort of human archetype with wierd patterns on their forehead. The holodeck thing was just an excuse to write whatever they wanted As for science-fiction... well, there's fiction, that's for sure, but the science is closer to Lord of the Rings than anything else. The technobabble is just a replacement for magic. I actually preferred the JJ Abrams movies, as they made the franchise less theatrical and more gritty.

Again, it's not about the numbers. It's not about speed or distance or the quantity of rocks it can bring back. It's about the scientific return on investment and the quality of the data. A manned rover's range is limited by the ability to get back to base if it breaks down. The Apollo LRV excursions were planned so that at any time the astronauts could walk home. For this reason, a manned Mars expedition would typically include at least two SEVs and a crew of four, so that one crew could rescue the other crew. But even then, you have to plan for the contingency of a failure on the second SEV. This is what seriously limits the exploration radius of manned expedition. A robotic rover doesn't have to care about that. Robotic rovers are only limited by the landing weight. But if we are capable of landing a 3-ton manned SEV on Mars, we could just as well land a 3-ton robotic rover with a far longer range than the SEV and a much more capable science payload.

There is no reason to believe that.

They were sensors designed to cut the engines before reaching the ground.

Only a couple of minor flaws: - You omitted the dV to land a fully fueled LM on the surface. - Once the LM gets back to LMO, then what? - The CSM/LM only had consumables for a couple of days. - There are no more Apollo CSMs or LMs.

We have already explained in that thread that "Cydonia" is nothing special compared to other places. We are more likely to find signs of life in ancient river beds or places where there are signs of liquid erosion or recent liquid activity. There is no point in maiking the exact same thread. The location of a manned outpost would probably have to follow - Easily accessible landing site. - Mild climate and adequate solar exposure. - Easy terrain for a SEV rover. - Various different environments/features in less than a day's reach from the rover. I suppose the first two criteria point to a fairly flat, low altitude, equatorial landing site. This argument is often thrown around, but it is false. Robotic missions have performed much more science than manned missions to Mars, simply because there are no manned missions to Mars. The reason for that is that it is too damn expensive to do a manned mission to Mars. The scientific return simply isn't worth the investment compared to a robotic mission. A manned expedition would be limited in terms of radius around the landing site and duration of the stay, a few kilometers at most, and a couple of months. While humans could do more sampling in a week than a robot, they would reach diminishing returns after a week because they would only be picking up more of the same rocks in the same area for months until the launch window. Science isn't about the quantity of rocks that you pick up. It's more about the variety of samples from various areas of interest and over longer durations. By comparison, a number of robots can cover a wider area of a longer period with less maintenance, risk, and at a fraction of the cost. Humans would also miss all the long duration data, such as weather, climate, seasonal variations or sismological activity. Humans also have this pesky habit of spending a large part of their time on sleep, hygiene and feeding. All of these activities require equipment that would be better spent on science, if that's what your mission is for. Humans are also dirty, messy, clumsy, fragile, and they make mistakes. The actual science return depends on the equipment that the human crew carries, but that same equipment can very well be operated by a robot and sent to perform the exact same experiment for much cheaper. There is simply no single experiment that requires human presence that could not be teleoperated from Earth. In science, you design an experiment around a hypothesis, not around who operates the experiment. The only scientific value of sending humans to live on Mars is to learn about living on Mars, which is only useful if we have a reason to live on Mars other that to study living on Mars. QED.

Especially when those people are launching Galileo satellites that compete with their own Glonass system...

After an abort and separation of the capsule, you would still want to destroy the rocket before it hits the ground.

From this video, it does looks like it started going off-course, nearly horizontal, which caused the FTS to fire: http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Rocket-Explodes-at-Space-X-272370541.html Apparently, they were testing new actuators on this flight, so that's a likely cause for the deviation.

I guess that's what tests are for... It will be interesting to know at what phase of the flight the mishap occured, take-off, hover, or landing. Chances are that the flight termination system self-destructed the rocket because it was veering off-course. If they can diagnose the problem, losing the F9R-Dev1 vehicle shouldn't have too much impact on their test program because F9R-Dev2 is already under construction.

Some individuals will be more curious and adventurous as others. These are the explorers or the scouts, but they do not represent the entire group, so it doesn't negate my point. Just because some people climb the Himalaya "because it's there" doesn't mean that we will ever see massive settlements on top of Mount Everest.

It still sounds far-fetched. I would wait for some sort of confirmation or third-party analysis of the samples.