TransAstra's Asteroid Mining Proposal

[YNM]

54 minutes ago, radonek said:

Anyone who can move rock to Earth orbit can also push it to collision course.

They can only push themselves once they have captured the body and start extracting it (therefore it's no longer what it was). They'll then dispose off part of the object itself as propellant, so whatever is it that they're carrying back is not the mass of the original anymore. How far the loss will be and whether they'll have to leave parts of the object behind is still not exactly known, since we haven't found a lot of objects in their target range.

It's not like we've been entirely mindful either - satellites with hazardous chemical / radioactive materials on it have fallen on the Earth, and we have crashed 129 tonnes of space station before, which resulted in a littering fine. (pretty sure would've been different if it did went on a city.)

We're also still pretty bad at detecting asteroid impacts before it happens itself. (fireball and bolide data here, the only three example of us discovering them before it hits (one only maybe hit).) So I guess it could be counted as being the same as leaving things as-is...

But I get the worry - being unable to manoeuvre something is going to be really bad, ie. if the water-based thrusters becomes disabled or something. Although I'll say that a possibility is just for them to keep the orbit away from an impact trajectory in much the same way we have manoeuvred spacecrafts returning samples.

As for keeping intents in check... well no amount of regulations would ever be able to tell anyone what their intention should be.

Edited January 12, 2021 by YNM

[AckSed]

Sorry for reactivating an old thread, but TransAstra are in the news again: https://www.universetoday.com/167353/a-mission-to-find-10-million-near-earth-asteroids-every-year/

They still have hopes of mining asteroids, but now they're focusing on kickstarting (lower-case k) their business by using in-house algorithms to detect low-magnitude, high-speed near-Earth asteroids in numbers. They just need to launch 4 small cubesats to the Lagrange points as proof-of-concept before they go for the big boys.

Also, they're talking about using their solar moth thruster, sorry, "Worker Bee" as a satellite delivery service. And they have a SBIR grant from the Space Force to help.

However, I am not seeing any progress for either; I can't find any launch manifests for the smallsats, and the grant from the Space force was more than a year ago.

Really hope they don't fade away.

[kerbiloid]

Somewhere in the Asteroid Belt, soon.

(Also, the real reason of the NASA spacesuit development delay)

Spoiler

 

... it must be made of leather and be edible.