Forget Mars, the Moon, or Venus, I'm going to Phobos

[SuperBigD60]

As far as I'm aware, and I may be wrong because I speculate a great deal, but instead of bothering with the ridiculous km/s scale dV when dealing with any object Moon size or bigger, why don't we focus on exploiting whatever resources small bodies (I picked Phobos because I figured it and Deimos would be easiest to get to from Earth) where you could trip and endu up on an escape trajectory?

I mean, Phobos itself is still massive enough to have a lot of whatever you're going there for (neglecting the dubious nature of the benefits of offworld mining), and still you could basically jump into orbit.

My question, then, for debate is this:

Why bother with planets at all in the near future (next few centuries or so) if we can find whatever extraterrestrial resources we need on asteroids or smaller bodies?

[Skyler4856]

Extremely long transit times, radiation, larger bodies to mine (therefore more likely desired resources are present), deathly low gravity (pretty much at orbital levels) etc

Edited March 4, 2014 by Skyler4856

[Rakaydos]

I'm going to put this here:

http://www.scifiideas.com/science-2/colonizing-asteroid-cores/

[Tex]

I'd go with the radiation exposure as being a significant con. Unless you can come up with a way to keep radiation exposure levels to that of the ISS crew (which puts them at a 3% increased risk for cancer), your crew is going to become very sick very quickly. Unless of course you use probe miners, but a manned crew is much more reliable.

Planets are the safer option, if not the most obvious or fastest. The best thing to do would be to set up a Mars-based colony first and do your mining from there. Plus, it's within 13000 miles of Phobos!

[RuBisCO]

I'm going to put this here:

http://www.scifiideas.com/science-2/colonizing-asteroid-cores/

That was a nice read. That certianly solves the problems of radiation and sheilding all in one, mining out an asteriod and fill it with a habitate.

[SuperBigD60]

I'm going to put this here:

http://www.scifiideas.com/science-2/colonizing-asteroid-cores/

Now that's much more in depth than my imagination had in mind, but the point the guy makes about planets being more interesting anthropologically, yet asteroids more useful industrially is something I was thinking about.

I'd go with the radiation exposure as being a significant con. Unless you can come up with a way to keep radiation exposure levels to that of the ISS crew (which puts them at a 3% increased risk for cancer), your crew is going to become very sick very quickly. Unless of course you use probe miners, but a manned crew is much more reliable.

Planets are the safer option, if not the most obvious or fastest. The best thing to do would be to set up a Mars-based colony first and do your mining from there. Plus, it's within 13000 miles of Phobos!

What would make probe mining less reliable? Especially if we're talking a couple hundred years into the future when we start to outstrip current science fiction technology in some areas (speculative, but I'd be very surprised if we didn't at least advance in automated technology significantly in the next hundred years),

And if you were real crazy about colonizing, you could hollow out the middle and leave a rather protective shield of several layers of rock to avoid radiation. Although, at that point, I suspect you've wasted the advantage of using a smaller body.

As for atmospheres being protective, if we're talking about Mars, you basically don't have an atmosphere, so you'd need just as much a shield there as you would in orbit.

[Rakaydos]

And if you were real crazy about colonizing, you could hollow out the middle and leave a rather protective shield of several layers of rock to avoid radiation. Although, at that point, I suspect you've wasted the advantage of using a smaller body.

Even if the body is large enough to have significant gravity, it's still gong to be less than a planet's. And you dont have an inconvienant atmosphere.

[Nibb31]

Mining Phobos would be several of orders of magnitude harder than landing a base on Mars.

Do you have any idea of what's involved in digging a sub-surface mine here on Earth? It's years of surveying and prospecting before the first pick hits the ground. It's thousands of tons of heavy equipment, fuel, chemicals, processors, diggers, haulers, conveyor belts, elevators, rail systems... Mining in zero-g would require to develop robotic, low-maintenance, zero-g, vacuum, rad hardened, versions of that same machinery, as well as the launch, transport, and landing systems to put them on Phobos. It's a ridiculous idea with current or any near-future technology.

[Streetwind]

Actually mining in zero-g would not require any of that, because mining in zero-g can work completely different. In the absence of gravity and annoying atmospheres, you can simply use solar-pumped lasers to ablate the surface and capture the resulting cloud of dust. You never even swing a pickaxe or drill a hole or do any other kind of physical digging. That sort of stuff is just extremely difficult without gravity helping you.

As for the OP: Forget Phobos. Why bother flying all the way there? We have a very large number of resource-rich candidates that is far, far closer to earth and requires far, far less effort - less effort than reaching the moon, even. And private companies already working to stake them out for future exploitation. You can find a very nice and very comprehensive presentation by Chris Lewicki, former NASA flight director and now president of Planetary Resources, in this thread. He demonstrates quite nicely that for the cost of an offshore oil rig, and using technology available today, you can easily begin preparation for mining a near-earth asteroid that potentially contains more platinum group metals that have ever been mined in the history of mankind combined. And he's very much intent on being the first venture to do so.

By the way: that video is about a year old. Since then, Planetary Resources has successfuly kickstarted their ARKYD-100 micro space telescope, and a first prototype is expected to be released from the ISS out of an airlock sometime around April this year.

[SuperBigD60]

It hadn't even occurred to me to think about closer asteroids

And I do believe I've heard of Planetary Resources before

[Everten P.]

I mean it's a cool concept but remember how far away it is you would have to bring Phobos to an Earth orbit to justify the logistics plus, as some should know molybdenum on the moon is indigenous (or found purely) plus the moon is closer so all you would need to do was make a large clump of it, put a parachute on it the send it back to earth.

[Streetwind]

You can actually send metals on reentry without a parachute - by making it into a giant ball of very fine wool. It would be so light for its size that it cannot possibly move fast enough through the atmosphere to burn itself up, it would simply float down to the ground where it can be picked up. An orbital processing station could spit out a cloud of these whenever its orbit passes over a specified pickup zone. A kind of electromagnetic mass driver could effortlessly provide the deorbiting deltaV for these balls.

[SargeRho]

Yeah no, that's a bad idea. Metals are quite combustible when they are made into powders or fine wool.

[SuperBigD60]

I mean it's a cool concept but remember how far away it is you would have to bring Phobos to an Earth orbit to justify the logistics plus, as some should know molybdenum on the moon is indigenous (or found purely) plus the moon is closer so all you would need to do was make a large clump of it, put a parachute on it the send it back to earth.

How might you move an asteroid, good sir?

[Streetwind]

How might you move an asteroid, good sir?

You realize that that's exactly the topic of the bonus NASA mission pack that's coming to KSP shortly after .24 is released, yes?

[SuperBigD60]

All the more reason for my question

I guess we just can't answer it until that pack is released

[Headhunter09]

I mean it's a cool concept but remember how far away it is you would have to bring Phobos to an Earth orbit to justify the logistics plus, as some should know molybdenum on the moon is indigenous (or found purely) plus the moon is closer so all you would need to do was make a large clump of it, put a parachute on it the send it back to earth.

Phobos is closer, in terms of delta-V, than the surface of the Moon. If you use robots, it actually makes much more sense economically to mine Phobos than the Moon.

[SuperBigD60]

It hadn't even occured to me that getting to Mars orbit is only 500 ish m/s more than getting Lunar orbit. That means Phobos is way better, if you could make something completely self sufficient and autonomous

[Albert VDS]

It's a great idea to Phobos, actually any place in the solar system is a good idea.

There's always a lot of new things to discover, but the amount of things you can discover might be linked to the diversity and size of the body you a visiting.

Phobos isn't that big or very diverse, so I don't see a reason why we should forget Mars or even the Moon.

[SuperBigD60]

It's a great idea to Phobos, actually any place in the solar system is a good idea.

There's always a lot of new things to discover, but the amount of things you can discover might be linked to the diversity and size of the body you a visiting.

Phobos isn't that big or very diverse, so I don't see a reason why we should forget Mars or even the Moon.

That's fair.

I've just been in an extraplanetary launchpads kick, and so "less gravity is better" is just kind of ingrained in my mind at the moment.

Anyways, I tend to approach the issue with a much more practical vs purely scientific mindset (which seems to contrast with yours, I would say)

[MrZayas1]

Look, it may make sense for us to mine smaller objects, and to a sense that would make sense, but thinking in astronomical terms, a small company in the future might be mining asteroids for profit, but as that company grows, the jobs will become more tedious, and potentially end up costing the company more money to send a craft out to the belt than to mine a moon or planet of the orbiting body. Bigger companies would probably want to go straight for the large asteroids, for this reason. Take this example. You are a starving man/woman looking at two plates of food, with the same thing on the plate. But, one is filled to the brim with said substance, the other is only in miniscule amounts, which do you choose?

That should be about the answer to your question hope it helps!

[Streetwind]

Except that that example isn't in any way, shape or form descriptive of the situation at hand. It ignores the realities of mission complexity, dV costs, available launch infrastructure, travel time, upfront investment and RoI, the risks of walking uncharted territory, basic geological principles about the distribution of elements in large bodies, and the fact that even the so-called "miniscule amount" referenced is more than there has ever been obtained on the entire Earth in all of its history. And its monetary value reflects that fact.

Not to mention that if I was starving and told to choose between two plates, I'd say "screw you" and eat both

Now if we had LiftPort's lunar space elevator to work with, that would make mining operations on the moon a fantastic prospect. Sadly, they seem to be making much, much less headway than Planetary Resources... I doubt they can pull it off.