Moon First – Mine the Asteroids Later

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Paul Spudis

I have a new post up at Air & Space on mining asteroids for water and platinum.  This piece extends some of the arguments I have made previously in my three-part series on lunar versus asteroid missions:

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part I: Operational Considerations

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part II: Scientific Considerations

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part III: Resource Utilization Considerations

Comment here, if so inclined.

This entry was posted in Lunar development, planetary exploration, space industry, space policy, space technology. Bookmark the permalink.

21 Responses to Moon First – Mine the Asteroids Later

  1. Michael Wright says:
    August 6, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    Is there some way we can pursue all of the three legged stool (Moon, Asteroids, Mars), maybe not on a grand scale but exploratory (or experimental or whatever word works best) missions. Since SLS is coming whether there is agreement or not among space advocates, how can it be used? How can we use SpaceX launch vehicles? Other launch vehicles or how can we tie in JPL Mars missions. Or each of this stuff too independent and no interoperability can be used?

    It seems biggest barrier is getting a sensible system for us to easily get out of this big gravity well.

    Thanks for letting us vent on this subject.

    • ernst wilson says:
      August 6, 2014 at 5:33 pm

      No Michael “let’s crawl first” dixit PS…one day at a time

    • Paul Spudis says:
      August 7, 2014 at 6:59 am

      Is there some way we can pursue all of the three legged stool (Moon, Asteroids, Mars),

      Sure — if a substantial, additional increment of money were to become available, multiple goals and destinations could be pursued simultaneously. Right now, NASA gets less than 1/2 of one percent of the federal budget. If it were one percent (or even 3/4 of one percent), it could be a very different program.

      Note well: I do not say that it would be a very different program — only that it could be.

    • Marcel Williams says:
      August 7, 2014 at 11:12 am

      The meteoroid program is really not a part of human space program, IMO, unless you’re talking about using light sails to import them to EML4 or EML5 for eventual exploitation for oxygen, water, and mass shielding,

      A lunar water producing outpost program is the key to easily getting to Mars by the early 2030s.

      There’s no reason why Commercial Crew vehicles can’t be used to shuttle humans to LEO. But you’re going to need the heavy payload capacity and the large fairing area of the SLS if you’re going to deploy large reusable vehicles and habitat modules at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points for interplanetary journeys.

      The Falcon Heavy wouldn’t be able to deploy such large vehicles and habitat modules which probably why Elon is working on a Super Heavy methane rocket for future Mars missions.

      Marcel

  2. billgamesh says:
    August 6, 2014 at 7:22 pm

    “The reason for going to an asteroid instead of the Moon was that it costs too much money to develop a lunar lander whereas asteroids, having extremely low surface gravity, don’t require one.“

    Slowly but surely, as the probability of the SLS increases, the question is being asked more often; what about a lander? This is because as the probability of an operational human-rated heavy lift launch vehicle increases the probability of any long duration deep space mission in conventional spacecraft decreases. Space Radiation is becoming the-subject-that-shall-not-be-discussed. At some point the denial will come to an end and it will be apparent the only place to go is the Moon. It is not Low Earth Orbit that is half-way to anywhere, it is the Moon. Only from a “Nuclear Moon” will true spaceships launch on interplanetary missions.

    The “NASA” starship engine in the news shocked me the other day. I was unaware this concept had been publicized several years ago in a slightly different form and the NASA label threw me off. Considering Musk is also making impossible promises, what path is the public supposed to believe and support? The U.S. Space Program has seen nothing trying to “get something for nothing” with programs like the NASP and shuttle either complete or partial failures. When the space agency allows stories in their name claiming quantum drives and such it is a very bad sign.

    The brutal amount of raw lift required and the commiserate expense of super heavy lift vehicles is the first space travel prerequisite, even before a lander. The SLS is not a worthy successor to Saturn and while the vehicle will take us to the Moon, it is still too small and will have to be succeeded by a much larger rocket if progress is to be made instead of just footprints. In the interim, the “Raison d’être” of a lander needs to be clearly identified. I have tried to troubleshoot this discrepancy and come up with water as the primary focus of this project; water as spaceship radiation shielding.
    “Getting into and out of the Moon’s gravity well requires a change in velocity of about 2380 m/s (both ways)-“

    Altair was big but was still nowhere near big enough to transport machinery to set up a permanent lunar infrastructure. What is to be done? Though I am a severe critic of fuel depots in Low Earth Orbit and other such New Space nonsense, a water depot in lunar orbit could be the logical next step. It all depends on how easy the lunar ice is to harvest. If a robot lander can do it then the immediate action would be to start mass producing such landers to lower the cost and flying them to the Moon on an SLS a reasonable number of times a year. Taking empty stages into lunar orbit from Earth as wet workshops and filling them with lunar water brought up repeatedly by robot landers will provide the critical base of shielding needed for progressively larger numbers of human beings on long duration missions.

    • billgamesh says:
      August 6, 2014 at 8:29 pm

      “-brought up repeatedly by robot landers-”

      This lunar drone concept means the lander will have to extract and process fuel to refuel itself. If lunar ice melted and stored is the feedstock and solar energy the power source for splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen and then storing it in liquid cryogenic form, some rough calculations can be done to see if this system is in the realm of the practical.

      If drones do not work then the only other option I can come up with is “the lunar parking lot” where large spaceships are constructed in space without engines or shielding and then landed “light” on top of lunar ice deposits. These spaceships each become a Moon base while their radiation shields are filled. They are not operational spaceships until they can fly and that will require a nuclear propulsion system to lift off from the lunar surface carrying thousands of tons of shielding and equipment.

      I suspect these engines will be multi-thousand ton solid alloy nuclear pulse propulsion “flying saucers” manufactured in underground lunar factories. Once these become available large payloads of several thousand tons can routinely be lifted from the lunar surface into cislunar space. Excavating the factories and underground living space necessary to insure a supply of these massive discs is in my view only possible using nuclear explosives.

      Until the engine discs can be manufactured on the Moon the only scheme for bringing them from Earth is fly a slice at a time and then weld the sections together in lunar orbit (perhaps with a special nuclear bomb). This may work for the first few spaceships but just like bringing water up out of Earth’s gravity well, it is too expensive for sustained production.

  3. Warren Platts says:
    August 8, 2014 at 7:55 am

    The other problem with PGMs is that the market simply isn’t big enough to support a major space program. An article that debunks the Planetary Resources business model claims that when someone dumped a mere ~8 mT of Pt on the market (worth $400M), it caused a 25% drop in the price of Pt. If you’re going to run a major space business and have aspirations to be the world’s first trillionaire, PGM’s won’t cut it. Gold, on the other hand…. 😉

  4. Warren Platts says:
    August 8, 2014 at 1:21 pm

    Sorry sir, I tried to put it in, but apparently the comments don’t accept url tags. It’s an article by Tim Worstall in the Register:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/24/planetary_resources/

    Here’s another one by him I just found that takes on Deep Space Industries:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/no-asteroid-2021-da14-isnt-worth-195-billion-whatever-deep-space-industries-says/

    Of course, for any sort of mining, the first step is prospecting, so I just read with interest your detailed, July 28 Air & Space update on the Resource Prospector Mission. You mention exotic elements such as mercury, but unless things have changed, I believe the RESOLVE instrument suite will not be able to detect heavier metals. It would be a shame to go all that way and not have that capability IMHO. We make the case in this white paper for developing a fast XRF sensor that could be incorporated into RPM (the Mars rover has an XRF, but it takes like 3 hours for a detailed reading–too long for a time-constrained mission like RPM):

    https://www.academia.edu/5903667/Prospecting_for_native_metals_in_lunar_polar_craters

    Also, because RPM is going to be solar powered, it’s not going to be able to get into the more interesting craters (such as Rozhdestvensky N 😉 ) with the high-CPR signatures indicating the potential for relatively pure, 2-meter+ thick ice deposits (that might also contain potentially extremely rich electrostatic placer deposits of precious metals 😉 ); we would have to land in the middle of such craters since the craters walls are simply too steep for RPM to handle.

    Thus, what we need IMHO is some sort of non-nuclear, solar-independent propulsion, such as a fuel cell system, or possibly even an internal combustion engine powered system. My own BOTEs suggest that with a 30kg mass budget for the power system, such a solar-independent propulsion system could last close to a week–about as long as RPM is projected to last anyway–and possibly significantly longer if the residual fuels within the lander could be utilized.

    In any case, it’s good to see that the mission is getting some traction and is on schedule for a 2019 launch–“only” 5 years from now. The real question is whether there will be any follow-up missions….

    • Paul Spudis says:
      August 9, 2014 at 2:20 am

      Warren,

      Thanks for the links. I view the RP mission as a good start, not as the definitive prospecting mission. The Russians plan to fly a long-lived polar rover in a few years (the launch date keeps hopping around), so they may get more of the information that we need.

      • Joe says:
        August 9, 2014 at 11:18 am

        Is this the “Luna-Resurs” mission where India was to supply the lunar rover?

        If so the Indian Government just announced that they were leaving the deal with the Russians and would be flying the rover on their own in 2017.

        “On August 7, 2014, the Minister of State for Science and Technology of India Jitendra Singh told the Indian parliament that the nation’s space agency, ISRO, would launch the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft on its own, essentially ending the project’s dependency on Russia. According to the new design, Chandrayaan-2 will now feature an indigenously built lunar lander, instead of the previously planned Russian platform. The all-Indian Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft could fly in 2016 or 2017.”

        http://www.russianspaceweb.com/luna_resurs.html#2014

        Might be just as well, the Russians have their own interest in lunar resources and the Indians (if successful) may be a more reliable source of information.r own in 2017.

        • Paul Spudis says:
          August 9, 2014 at 11:25 am

          Actually, I was talking about a different series of missions — it is an extension and modification of their “Luna-Glob” series, which was originally designed to emplace a global geophysical network and is now designed to do polar volatile exploration.

          • Joe says:
            August 9, 2014 at 12:52 pm

            Understood.

            According to the linked article this series of missions have been delayed by three years each.

            http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_2014.html

            Too Bad. They would indeed be useful.

          • Vladislaw says:
            August 10, 2014 at 11:45 am

            Saw a blurb about this on sat news
            http://www.satnews.com/story.php?number=1161054716

            ““Europeans want to cooperate with Russia on the lunar program,” Mitrofanov, who is the director of the Institute’s nuclear planetology department, told the COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) Scientific Assembly. “The final decision on their participation will be taken at a ministerial conference of the European Space Agency’s member countries.” He said his institute’s chief partner, the Lavorchkin Research and Production Association, was working on unmanned lunar stations Luna-25 (project Luna-Glob), Luna-26 and Luna-27 (both of the Luna-Resurs project). The Institute was developing research devices for these stations, which were planned to be launched in 2017, 2018 and 2019, he said.”

          • Joe says:
            August 10, 2014 at 1:20 pm

            Sad proof I suppose that Dr. Spudis statement that “the launch date keeps hopping around” is correct. The article to which I linked lists the new dates for these vehicles as:

            (1) Luna-Glob lander (Luna-25) – Lunar pole lander – 2019
            (2) Luna-Glob orbiter (Luna-26) – Lunar orbiter – 2021
            (3) Luna-Resurs lander (Luna-27) – Lunar lander – 2023

            Being positive, perhaps European participation will give the effort more cash and accelerate the schedule.

  5. gbaikie says:
    August 9, 2014 at 2:44 pm

    It seems to me that currently Moon is best destination in terms of potentially having commercially minable resources and the Moon has this possibility because the known presence of water in it’s polar regions. Or the moon might have minable water.
    So this means that if you spend billions of dollars in order to mine x amount of lunar water, the x amount of water has more value than the billions spent to obtain it.

    At the moment, there is only one commercial activity in space and this is launching and operating satellites. So the x amount of money spent to make a satellite, launch it into orbit, and operate it, is less than the amount revenues gained from using the satellites. Satellites lower the costs of doing many different things on Earth, and globally the satellite industry has gross revenue of 200 billion dollars per year.
    If one had a lunar industry which had gross revenue of 20 billion dollars per year, we be in a different world and different world in similar sense that having 200 billion satellite industry makes our world different than compare not having this commercial satellite activity.

    A large portion of the 200 billion dollar of satellite related revenue is related to government spending, and likewise one could have 100% of revenue related to lunar activity being governmental spending. So if space agencies of world spent in total 20 billion on lunar activity, per year one could call that a lunar industry with gross revenue of 20 billion per year. It’s not really what I mean, but we can still imagine it being world changing. Or one could hope some commercial activity could emerge from such an activity.

    In terms of commercial vs State enterprises, something like 70% of oil production on Earth is directly controlled by State enterprises, by that I am generally referring to:
    “Today over 90% of reserves are under the control of national oil companies (NOCs) which are owned, at least in part, by the governments sitting on the oil in question. ”
    http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582522-day-huge-integrated-international-oil-company-drawing.
    So globally world governments are dominate player in oil industry, as there are in satellite industry, and could be thought of as being a dominate player related to all lunar activity.

    But in any case, whether 100% or a some degree of government involvement, one still needs to mine lunar water in a profitable manner. Related to this is a concept [which is only used related to “space development”] called ISRU [in situ resource utilization]. The idea of ISRU is extracting local resources, so as to lower the cost of lifting such resources from Earth. So one launches 20 tons equipment from Earth and it makes 100 tons of water, and in total one does have to lift the 80 tons of water as payload from Earth. So the idea behind ISRU is cost reduction, by making it so one needs less rocket launches in order to do space exploration.

    So we divide the issue into ISRU and/or commercial mining. One is to save costs of a space program, and the other is to make money by investment of capital with expectation of return on that investment.
    One could imagine, that NASA doing commercial mining, and one imagine a commercial mining company “doing” ISRU- in other words getting resources from the Moon, to lower their “program costs” [total dollar amount needed for investment].
    I would say it’s easier to imagine a Chinese space agency commercially mining lunar water, as the Chinese are a communist country, and it doesn’t have congressional laws prohibiting NASA from engaging in such “commercial activity”. Obviously one can change laws, though one might take a moment to wonder why such laws were considered necessary.

    I would say the Moon has a huge potential connected of having commercially minable water. And in terms of ISRU, that extracting water at Mars would be more practical than compared to the Moon.
    Mars doesn’t have commercially minable water, and the Moon might have commercially minable water, but in terms of ISRU, Mars has higher potential value.

    The end game in terms of having commercially minable water on the Moon, is connected to the need to export from the Moon. And same rule would apply to Mars, and therefore this should be enough of explanation of why Mars does not have commercial minable water.
    And in addition It appear to me, it could be cheaper exporting lunar rocket fuel to Mars orbit, as compared to exporting Mars rocket fuel to Mars orbit. But all one has to do in terms of lunar export, is focused on exporting to Lunar low orbit- in terms of minimum requirement. And such minimum requirement in terms of Minable Mars would be Earth high orbit.
    If one has mining on the Moon, then it creates a possibility of having a minable Mars and it also makes more likely to mine asteroids.

    At moment the moon is not minable, what is needed to exploration of the Moon to find and determine where to mine lunar water. And what discovered, includes the possibility that the Moon does not have minable water.

  6. billgamesh says:
    August 9, 2014 at 5:17 pm

    Mining was intimately involved with the industrial revolution; steam engines were first invented to pump water out of mines. The space age will see a different kind of steam engine in the form of nuclear energy. Explosives are also connected to mining. I would say the best way to excavate underground lunar factory space is with nuclear weapons. Being outside the Earth’s magnetosphere is the key to using nuclear energy on the Moon and in lunar orbit. The SLS and the launch abort system for Orion are also key for transporting fissionable material to the Moon.

    I may differ with Dr. Spudis and most of the regulars over the primary use lunar water resources will be used for. While liquid hydrogen and oxygen as rocket fuel derived from lunar ice is often discussed I believe such propellents will be limited to use mostly inside the magnetosphere. In my view water derived from lunar ice will enable Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit not as a massive chemical propellent load but as a massive space radiation shield. I expect eventually pure hydrogen beam propulsion will replace conventional rockets as the prime mover in cislunar space.

    Mining the Moon for silicon type materials comes after excavating a radiation sanctuary and alloys come after silicon. My reasoning is that excavating underground factory/city space will be followed by solar energy industry manufacturing and then by metal industries because the solar energy will be needed to refine ore. With pulse propulsion discs the solar energy arrays can be lifted off the Moon thousands of tons at a time. With these arrays in GEO a beam propulsion cislunar railroad can be realized.

    Mining for platinum on asteroids seems quite ridiculous to me compared with supplying clean cheap electricity to the entire planet and exploring the solar system with atomic spaceships. We have the planetary resources to build a “space navy” as Dr. Spudis has proposed, but we have no fear or profit motive driving us as yet. It will take one or the other or both.

    • billgamesh says:
      August 9, 2014 at 6:17 pm

      I would add that the recent discovery of several “pits” on the Moon being possible entrances to cave systems offering a ready radiation sanctuary illustrates the salient problem for humans. We have no place to go on the Moon that is not much different than being in outer space. Inflatable habitats are no answer because a solar event will kill everyone and any excavation to utilize regolith is problematic. But inflate the habitat in a deep enough cave and radiation levels drop to Earth level. If there is ice near this sanctuary then a semi-permanent base can come into being with a single mission.

      But an inflatable tent in a deep hole is not a city.

      Dr. Spudis would of course know better but in my view the Moon is very stable compared to the Earth geologically. The trillions of dollars that have gone into star wars directed energy weapons more than likely generated the ideal solution to excavating an artificial cavern. Heat and Earthquakes make living deep under the Earth impractical but the Moon seems made for it. Just as deep space was made for the nuclear industry.

      The cost of a 100 megaton hydrogen bomb is not much different than the cost for a 1 megaton hydrogen bomb. Using geology the right strata for the best design of weapon can be found and perhaps several miles down a cavern the size of a sports arena can be created in less than a second.

      http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140808110715.htm

    • gbaikie says:
      August 10, 2014 at 3:29 pm

      “Mining for platinum on asteroids seems quite ridiculous to me compared with supplying clean cheap electricity to the entire planet and exploring the solar system with atomic spaceships. We have the planetary resources to build a “space navy” as Dr. Spudis has proposed, but we have no fear or profit motive driving us as yet. It will take one or the other or both.”

      It seems one of majors long term justification for space exploration is harvesting solar energy from space and beaming power to the billions of people living on Earth.
      But this seems to be a trillion dollar plus “project” and something which can only occur once we are already mining the Moon and making solar panels [solar harvesting infrastructure] on the Moon [or using asteroid as raw material].

      So only way one can harvest solar energy from space and export it to Earth, is for the electrical power to be cheaper in space than it is on Earth. And at the moment electrical power in space is about 1000 times the price than compared to earth.

      So roughly a nearer term goal is to get electrical power in space to about $1 per Kw hour.
      Or once electrical power is about $1 per Kw hour in space, one have realistic mad dreams of spending trillions of dollars to provide Earthling with clean, endless, and abundant and comparable low cost electrical power.

      And it seems when one has electrical power in space which one can buy for $1 per Kw hour, than one will also be able to buy rocket fuel for about $100 per lb at the lunar surface. And not only cheaper rocket fuel, but everything made on the Moon would be cheaper- including human labor costs on the Moon. And so from such a position one do the economy of scale to bring costs down even further.

      Or some imagine it’s possible to use economy of scale to launch solar panel from Earth to harvest solar energy from space, but I would say that if energy cost were 1/10th or less of existing cost on the Moon, it’s more economical to use the Moon instead of Earth a point to build and launch the solar infrastructure.
      Or if things only cost about 10 times more on the Moon as compared to Earth then at that point in time, it is trillion plus mega-project which would generate hundred of billions
      dollar per year from the 20 trillion kWh per year earth market. Or 20 trillion Kw hour
      at 1 cent per Kw is 200 billion dollars per year.
      So start by spending more 100 billion, spend hundreds of billions per year, and it one might finish it within 10 or 20 years, and getting 1/10th of it online and providing power within first 2 to 3 years. And say if takes 10 year to get to 1/10th of such capacity- then you are bankrupt [you would not get to 5th or 6th year].
      So this requires lunar development to be developed so things can done in timely fashion. Or the project would be in prototype like stage, but surrounded by infrastructure that is more mature- or fairly dependable. Or such project may require some other largish project to done prior to this being attempted, such a large lunar telescope or a mass driver.
      Or we can’t start it, within say 50 years, or say 30 to 40 years after one has started lunar water mining.
      Of course another possible large project, could be say a Nuclear Orion launched from the Moon. Or large [typical size used on Earth] nuclear power plant is build on the Moon [or Mars]. Or all of the above.

      So in near term, we looking at price point of about $2000 per lb of rocket fuel at lunar surface- that allows lunar export of rocket fuel. In decades that follow, and when lunar rocket fuel is at $100 per lb. It requires or it follows that we will have reusable spacecraft landing and leaving the Moon. Operationally is will like airlines flights- low maintenance, hundreds of flights before engine replacement/overhaul. if lunar rocket fuel is less than 500 per lb, it allows lunar rocket fuel to be shipped to Earth’s low orbit- assuming Earth launch by that time has not lowered considerably [which is very likely]. So reusable plus cheaper rocket fuel, makes getting the moon far cheaper than it is currently is to get to ISS and Mars would far cheaper than cost to currently get to the Moon [or GEO].

      So with lunar rocket fuel at 2000 per lb, this is point of breaking thru the delta-v barrier
      or it makes advantage of high ISP of Ion or nuclear *less* important. It could be like idea of using nuclear power for cargo shipping on Earth. Or we use nuclear power for submarines, aircraft carrier, a russian icebreakers, and etc. And by using nuclear power cargo ship one increase amount it ships, and lower cost, but it not done. It could be mostly not done because of laws and regulation, and similar laws would not apply regarding space. But another factor is that if cargo ships if had larger ocean to travel, they might have larger need of nuclear powered ships. And having rocket fuel available in space effectively shorten the ocean of space.
      Or perhaps when Mercury or Titan become commercially viable, one will see a larger need for nuclear spacecraft.

  7. billgamesh says:
    August 9, 2014 at 9:32 pm

    To be fair though, there may be some dangers associated with any demolitions associated with lunar colonization- at least in the movie “The Time Machine.”

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