soft landiing an asteroid at the south pole

Ryan_m_b

I'd be very careful about technological predictions, particularly ones to do with space. There have been predicted manned Mars missions for over 30 years and we're still not much closer.

Having an asteroids worth of material would be great and all but first the technology has to be there and that technology will always have huge ramifications on Earth first. Robots using resources in situ to build tools and other robots are hugely non-trivial. The technological hurdles are immense.

Borek

Last time I checked 1000cm³ of iron/nickel alloy didn't weight much more than about 8 kg

HallsofIvy

Where so much water is kept? I had always heard that the center of antarctica was pretty arid.

shashankac655

yea ,but notice that ,the article says that we will run out of some important minerals in 50-60years and the amount of these minerals that are said to be present in those asteroids are astonishing!!! and their prize too.We don't need to send humans there do we? Robots can do the job(it can reduce costs) but still i accept that cost will always be problem.

Mars mission is a different story because if all these minerals are present in these asteroids ,why do we need to go to mars?we don't need to mine on mars because it far more expensive because we will have to do atmospheric entries and overcome Martian gravity and all that ,it's unnecessary isn't it?

About robots building robots ,i agree with you.

Ryan_m_b

What's a few orders of magnitude typo between friends?
Another typo, I meant ice (implication being we'd like to keep it in it's frozen state).
Again I would be wary. The level of infrastructure and technology needed for asteroid mining is astounding. Most asteroid missions cost tens of millions and involve sending a few tonnes worth of probe. You're talking here about sending enough robotics to effectively mine and send back kilotonnes of material!

I remain unconvinced that asteroid mining is the key to our problems. Rather the resources needed to conduct such a mission could more likely solve the problem in other ways e.g. designing different materials to reduce dependencies, developing better recycling infrastructure, funding more efficient prospecting/mining operations etc.

Cosmo Novice

Landing an asteroid anywhere on earth in a "safe" (a moderately undefined term in this context) manner could not be sanctioned by any government on earth and I suspect any attempt at such an action would start a major conflict.

Zero G manufacturing is a much more likely endeavour, purely because if a company could become established as space technologies improve, becoming cheaper and more reliable, t could be commercially viable. I honestly think that commercial viability will be one of the core influences in space exploration/utilisation in the next few centuries. I think we are also looking at centuries for any meaningful system colonies. Just my two cents worth.

Ryan_m_b

We differ here, even with some astounding developments in space science I don't think commercialisation of space is that viable. At least not the kind of viable that allows for manned exploration and colonisation. On the other hand an economic environment where an entity has a large surplus of wealth and a willing population is a great place to start. I remain unconvinced that market forces and capitalist business models can ever produce the ++multi-trillion dollar, ++multi-decade investment that manned exploration and colonisation require.

Cosmo Novice

I think colonisation unlikely! I am probably a bit more sceptical than my post - I was thinking more towards high end/small scale technologies produced in Zero-G. Technoly hard to recreate in a non Zero-Gee environment. Some interesting stuff floating around about Zero-G industry and manufacture.