A Billion Tons of Nickel

i believe the real justifcation for most of these schemes is "I read way too much Asimov as a kid, and I took it all seriously." They want to go into space because they want to be like the heros in their favourite sci-fi novels. Everything else is just rationalisation.

(And circular arguments like "We need a billion tons of nickel to build space ships to mine the asteroids/ colonize the moons of Jupiter/ fly to Alpha Centauri" are cheating.)

Why is that cheating? Economics is pretty circular by nature.

It should be noted that nickel is starting to creep up into precious metal territory at a price of $1.47 an ounce or so (more than $52,000 a ton). When you look at all the stainless steel used by industry, well, lets just say "a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

I think reaching the asteroid belt is largely worthless. I think the larger drive will eventually be hydrogen mining operations, if we ever get fusion power down to a reliable level.

Actually, this is a _major_ reason against space exploration. Historically, exploration started as a cheaper way to bring low weight/high value products such as spices back to Europe. The advantage those products had was that all the high level processing occured in the east and transport was simply adding value by exploiting local scarcity in Europe.

Unfortunately, asteroid mining is unlikely to work until refining can occur "onsite" so that the we are transporting the high value results and not just tons and tons of ore.

I think the premise is wrong. Its not a billion tons of Nickel - its the 1000 you might reasonably get back and market. And even though Nickel is mentioned, you would have to look at precious metals to start. You would have to. Its not that we need so much its always the economic question - what are the markets and things we could do if something was at a much lower price.

It always strikes me (and I was an L5 member back when and still am a believer, for other reasons) that these billion ton scenarios are missing that important point of processing the stuff. We can't process ore in the quantities described for asteroids here on earth with all the economic incentives in the world. We simply do not have the technology. Look at the recent failure in the little toy study NASA did about processing regolith. You can talk about giant mirrors melting and spin separation, but man that is way out there in terms of a business plan. The details of getting that working would be a nightmare. Now if you did find some platinum type metals, a reasonably small amount would open up new markets on Earth where we really are constrained by supply - we know how to do things with some of these catalysts that we just don't do because it would be uneconomic.

The most credible sounding mining justification was for Helium three from the moon. This assumes that we somehow obtain fusion reactors that can burn the stuff -which I think is a pretty big if. In any case if we
had such reactors, then it could well be worth the expense of mining/shipping.

Well...

A billion tons of nickel is about 9.07Ã1014 grams. Each nickel coin is 5 grams...

...so that gets us to about 45.4 trillion dollars in coins.

We can erase the national debt!

(ducks and runs)

Helium-3 is probably the canonical example of space-cadet wishful thinking and ddishonesty. And I think that it's energetically more efficient to get it from the smaller gas giants anyway, if it comes to that.

Fancy catalysts seem like a more plausible idea, but that's not saying much. Space solar power seems more plausible still. But all of these are being driven by people who want to build rockets and fly to space and want a justification, rather than those who have a problem to solve and see buying rockets and going to space as a possible solution.

(although I think the spanish new world gold thing was different - they were trying to mine currency)

Materials aren't the problem involved in colonizing Venus. A more critical problem is where are you going to get the water. Venus has no water. It does have sulfuric acid which has hydrogen and oxygen in it but can you imagine the energy necessary to turn sulfuric acid into water.

I can think of no circumstances in which the real cost of anything brought back from that far in space would be anything other than astronomical. If we needed nickel that much, it would be an incentive for someone to come up with way of doing things that didn't require nickel, and at a much lower cost.

While your economics angle has some merit, it would have even more merit if you bothered to mention how much nickel we drag out of the planet in the place-- at present, it's about 1.5 million tons per year. Bringing back literally a billion tons and then dumping it on the market for free all at once, yes, would crash the market, although it's still possible to see how the first guy back could make a hefty profit.

Steel production, on the other hand, is already up at or over a billion tons a year. So bringing back a billion tons of iron would certainly depress the commodity price, but unless you have a guaranteed way to bring back one a year, you won't kill Earth-bound mining operations.

Either way, it seems like it'd be kinda cool to say, "Okay, we have five hundred years of nickel hanging in a lunar orbit. We can stop ripping it out of the ground now, 'k?"

Hey, who needs a billion? Give a thousand tons or so some judicious propulsion, and you've got a kinetic energy weapon with the destructive force of a fission bomb.

Or at least that's what Mycroft told me.

ok nickel really isn't the real incentive as i've heard it, platinum, which is in the same family of metals as nickel. platinum's important because in addition to being freakishly expensive, it is the best electrical conductor in the world.

you need a billion tons of nickel to make nice shiny spacestations. The whole point is that if you want to build things in space to any scale its way cheaper to start with something thats not stuck in our gravity well.

The question is - why do we want to build big things in space? Because the earth may not always be a viable place for us to live.

"Knowledge is power"
"I want to know"
"Space, the final frontier......"

Those are the reasons behind space and off-Earth colonization. The kinetic weapon (mass driver) is an interesig idea, provided you don't mind the absolute horror if you miss, nor the side affects of a hit.

Interestingly we also are ignoring the cost of getting that nickle down to earth. It could be said what comes down first had to go up. The huge cost of the setup alone means no business would back such a plan in the foreseeable future. Meaning (ta-da.wav) government steps in.

Government has no need to to mine a billion tons of nickle. Government also has no need to setup a colony on Venus, forgiving our eco-friends the population of the US is managable under current circumstances. So kicking out a few thousand to setup off world colonies really isn't a driving force yet.

Maybe in a few more generations, if Ebola, HIV, antibotic resistant TB, or any of a number of diesease haen't wiped out a good portion of humanity the population of planet may require off-world habitation. Until then the best reasons for having people live off world just don't exist. Yes, many scientific experiments work better in zero-G, or Low-G but the "need" for these is still in one of those top three reasons. Until one of those reasons become compelling its all pie in the sky.

Now, for my personal views, lets get out there. Sign me up to live on Mars or Venus. If nothing else, it would be interesting. Given my qualifications at preset I'm kind of limited in what role I would play. But interestingly enough it could be one of the more vital ones. Logistics manager or possibly security (military background). Of course menial labor is also an option.

Probably the only justification would be if a mineral were discovered which is plentiful in some asteroids, extremely rare on earth, nearly impossible to synthesize, and offers some ginormous advantage in, say, semiconductor fabrication. Or maybe that is uniquely useful in fusion projects (fantastic lasing medium, maybe).

This is pretty sfnal, though.

It would be neat if asteroids were found that contained 4-dimensional buckyballs, or something wacky like that.

Jacob is missing the point of space colonization. It's not about population pressure valves, it's about eggs in multiple baskets.

Skwid, actully I understand that argumnt completly. Yet in order for such a huge outlay in cost to be incurred a need must be felt. While global extinctions are possible, and from geologic history they are likely, they are only likely on a geologic scale, not a human one.

Humans live in the here and now. If a pressure is not felt no action is taken. This is a social issue. Look at it this way. We (US Citizens) knew child molesters existed, we knew they ould kidnap children, we knew locating a kidnapping victim within the first 24 hours was crucial to finding the child alive. Yet Amber alerts and Megans law did not appear until a pressure event occured forcing a change in law.

Or look at the assault weapons ban, fundamentally one of the most flawed pieces of legislation ever as it bans a weapon on its appearance, not its function. Function in this case being defined in means of output, not that it shoots bullets. Yet it flies right through.

No child left behind, very flawed. Yet who could vote against a bill called "No Child Left Behind" without sacraficing themslfs on the political bonfire. This law will not get changed in any fundemental way until after the damage is done.

Specifically about the eggs in one basket. Te mentaity of people will change allowing such off-world colonization to occur is when the need is first felt. Say by an asteroid hitting a major metropolitian area with nough force to obliterate the town. Small town won't be sufficient, will have to be a big place. At that time you'll see actual work begin as the incenive for movement will have occured and the constant reminder of the crater will be there. In this scenario though its still a population issue. The population must feel sufficiently threatened by an event to make changes, just as over population would cause a social imperitive.

Interestingly enough the country that I feel is most likely to first reach such a state will be China. Huge population, regular disasters, a sense of lagging in space exploration, political drive to expand borders and commerce, large scale long term work projects history. Whether such a venture would be undertaken by their current government is quesitonable at best though.

If you're the one providing the billion tons, you still make plenty of money.

After a while you won't be the only provider, but the existence of competing mining operations in the asteroid belt implies a substantial space-bound economy. With a growing industrial economy, there will be more demand.

Your example about New World gold is instructive...I think it's safe to say that the colonization of the New World was an enormous boost to the global economy, even though the extractive industry that started it wasn't sustainable at the initial level.

Also, recent research into "peak metals" suggests that earthbound sources are going to get a lot more pricey:
http://baloghblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/now-what-peak-metal.html

Humans have spent that past hundred thousand years expanding to use more resources. At no point did the prices of resources collapse sufficiently to make the expansion end. Once we can mine the asteroids at reasonable cost, we'll do it, and the expansion will continue just as it has since the dawn of our species.

A cubic kilometer of metal asteroid is worth a quadrillion dollars at current prices. After the first trillion dollars worth of nickel is brought to Earth (nickel foam lifting bodies down through the air, floated on ocean to port, melted to make stainless steel at a regular steel costs) the price of nickel will have equilibrated down to the price of iron, and something else must be mined. But much of that first trillion is profit.

Everyone talks about bringing the metal back to earth, bringing it back is irrelavant, ownship is. Currently there isn't any property rights in space for governments, corporations, or individuals. The current space treaties forbid ownership of any kind. Investors do not want to invest in space exploration for this very reason. If the world as a whole said that whoever makes it to an asteroid first can claim ownership of it the wealth of the metals would automatically be realized and TAXABLE. The corporation would then beable to get billion dollar loans in a new york minute. Just like a mineral rights mining claim means instant asset and can be used as collateral for a loan. The metal doesn't have to be actually mined for asset value to occur, it is the property rights of the person controling the rights that give it value.
If I had the property and mining rights to an asteroid I could obtain loans for 50 billion dollars, and start building VERY expensive ships of all catagories. This would lead to EXPLOSIVE growth in BDB, big dumb boosters. Fuel and iron is cheap if your just worried about lobbing infrastructure into space and as everyone knows the flight rate is what will bring launch costs down, not new breakthroughs in technology, new technology actually increases costs as witnessed by NASA. Assembly line building and launching of 1960's technology low pressure gravity feed big dumb boosters built by ship yards and tank companies could easily be put in place if I had 50 billion in loans to set it up and start launching I could achieve the economy of scale and flight rate needed to push the basic infrastructure into space. If one blew up, simply use bulldozers to push the junk off the pad and set up the next one, i would not have to suspend operations for 3 years to discover some new and brilliant form of technology to reinvent the wheel. Does the entire auto industry and every person that owns and drives a car come to a GRINDING HALT everytime a car crashes? No you push off the road and traffic resumes. This can not happen using the most advanced technology there is. dumb, cheap, expendable, low tech, high flight rate, and property rights is the only way we are going to get going in space.

Vladislaw

As lucas has said, platnium is by far the most enticing metal for its conductive properties. For example, it is used in hydrogen fuel cells, and its preciousness is a primary reason why the technology is so expensive/unavailable/unfeasable on a large scale at this point (other than the expense/energy needed to produce hydrogen in needed amounts).

I think the whole "need to make a profit" thing is getting blown way out of proportion and being given way to much importance. Getting something established, IN A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME that can be reasonably self sustaining should be the real goal. Learning how to make something really pay a huge return is often impossible until you have hung out for a while and understand the environment first hand. I think the bar is being set way to high.

Making money on Venus should not be the end all to whether or not a floating city would be worth it. The experience, the economic benefits of creating an industry here on earth to support it......forget tax breaks, take the tax breaks and build up a space faring market that has a deep enough root to start growing on its own along with supporting a devloping support industry. You will encourage students to learn more math, science, engineering, etc., which will pump much more into our economy IN THE LONG TERM than tax breaks every could. If we mobilized for space development like we did for WWII the economic, scientific, social, and general health benefits to our society would be beyond anything we could imagine.

I have an MBA and am all for the business end of thing, heck, I have staked many years and a lot of money on it, but I do not go to work for the primary sake of making a profit. I go to work so I can take what I make and do something REALLY meaningful with it...a family, investing in my child's future, perhaps a little landscaping to make my place look pretty. Other than that, I just want to live. AFTER the road is paved, AFTER we have an established, reasonably self sustaining outpost on Venus, then lets talk corporate interest...until then, that mindset has no business being involved in our decisions(no pun intended).

Anyway, my point is that we just need to get a floating city, or whatever it is, enough level of infrastructure that it can be marginally self supporting within seven or so years of being established. We WILL NOT know how to really MAKE MONEY at it (not that that is the most important anyway) until we have been there for a little while. The public realm's/NASA's job should be the same as me raising a child. I do not know what they are capable of, I do not know where it will lead. I just need to get them to a point at which they can take care of themselves and then let them go on their way.

If we have pumped money for 15 years into something like a Venus Colony in a CONCERTED effort to create another foothold for mankind and it isn't even able to reasonably sustain itself and is virtually proven that it never will, then by all means get out.

In the meantime, all "profit" minded/aka near sighted, dubunkers of SERIUOS space development should carry the burden of proving that it cannot be done, rather than the more adventerous having the burden of proving that it can. Nine out of Ten entrepreunrial exploits fail, but the ones that succeed more than make up for those that do not.

Anyway, I need to get ready for work....

"but I do not go to work for the primary sake of making a profit" of course not, you goto work to exchange your labor for money. a commodity you use to exchange for other goods and services. you can not set your labor rate the market determines that. if you were a business you could then market a service in which case you would make a profit or loss after expenses. you are talking about apples and oranges. businesses are in the business to make a profit to pay for research and developement, new factories, satisfy shareholders/investors etc. laborers work for businesses and exchange that labor so there isnt a profit margin in the equation.
the only way you can make launch costs cheaper is to increase flight rate. there is only about 50-80 commercial per year and you have 12 players competing for them and that number is not going to change much in the next 40 years as electroncs get smaller and capability increases.
the only cargo that can change that paradigm is human cargo and that means space tourism PERIOD! why is tourism such a dirty word when it relates to space? tourism is the number one planetary economic activity and rising. the more tourists the more cargo launches needed also creating the opportunity for economy of scale. then the government can buy the launch services commerically cheaper then they can do it themselves and build your floating city.

you said" Anyway, my point is that we just need to get a floating city, or whatever it is, enough level of infrastructure that it can be marginally self supporting within seven or so years of being established"

how could a government run facility EVER EVER EVER be "marginally self supporting" tell me what government ANYTHING is marginally self supporting!!!
they would need constant flows of water, oxygen, food, electronics, etc etc etc from earth. UNLESS there was a commercial company they could buy water from that was mined from an asteriod they OWNED and were mining for a profit and sold it to your space station cheaper then the government could have it shipped to the station from earth.

vladislaw

I posted a response to this at http://redengineweekly.blogspot.com/
check it out

To refined mineral we could use the sun's heat,the acid from the sulpheric surface of venus. "almost too convinent"

The spinning jenny was invented in 1764 by James Hargrieves. This device allowed a person to produce 9 times as much yarn as was previously possible with a spinning wheel. This, as you might expect, led to a significant decrease in the price of cotton yarn, with disastrous consequences for those employed as spinners. However, in the face of low price, people were able to afford such luxuries as a change of underpants or a second blanket for cold winter nights and demand for yarn increased, which in turn led to an increase in employment and a better standard of living for all. A lesson we can take from this is that in a market economy supply, demand and price are linked, and that a low cost increases demand. A person living in a Tokyo apartment might be satisfied with 300 sq. ft, but if an abundance in construction material made a larger dwelling affordable, they would purchase more space.

In addition, space bound infrastructure enjoys some unique advantages. For example, light is blocked by the atmosphere which greatly reduces the efficiency of solar panels. By placing solar panels in space and having the collected energy beamed to earthbound receivers in the form of microwaves (which are not significantly affected by the atmosphere), we could greatly increase the amount of clean energy available. Building structures in space will be far cheaper if materials do not have to be transported from Earth.

In order for the whole world to enjoy a first world standard of living, we need to greatly reduce the cost of resources and energy. Some of this will be accomplished through recycling programs and the curtailing of some of the more excessive forms of consumption, but it will not be enough. In order for humanity to reach the next level, space exploration must take place.