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Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Ship goes down, brings ores. Ship goes up, takes trash with it. Two issues solved with one rocket.
I don't think you realize just how huge and dead space is. We can dump all the trash humanity will ever produce in space and it'd likely not even be noticeable for anyone looking in from the outside. There is no life we can potentially ruin by dumping trash in the asteroid belts, there is no environment that would be getting harmed. No water it can poison, no way to come back to us except by orbital intercept and we already have ways to avoid that as well.
Space is the ultimate solution to pretty much every single environmental problem. The only thing we need to pay attention to is what happens while we send stuff up and while it comes back down. Manufacturing, trash dumps, everything remotely environmentally harmful can just be relocated to space where it does 0 harm to anything.
Launching trash with rockets with our current primitive technology is pretty dangerous. If a rocket gets out of control while suborbital it's like tons of small meteors hitting us.
This is also why launching radioactive material into the sun is a bad idea. The way there is too dangerous.
We have to face the fact that we don't have sci Fi space ships.
Regardless, mining asteroids (and potentially other planets) would be an absolute win.
Launching anything into the sun is a very bad idea unless you very specifically need it to be in the sun, because it takes so much energy. It pretty much only makes sense to send probes and nothing else.
If I'm reading the delta-V map on Wikipedia correctly escaping the solar system is cheaper by about 97.7% than shooting something directly into the sun (18009 m/s vs 790371 m/s from launch). Reducing orbital energy is paradoxically really expensive...
Even just getting something to orbit the sun closer than mercury is more expensive than shooting it out of the solar system entirely.
So yeah looking at those numbers I think space mining is a lot more practicable than I though, delta-v from the moon to the kuiper belt (including capture burns in the kuiper belt around asteroids/planetoids) is cheaper than from the earth to the moon, only problem is travel time.
Can't believe I didn't think of that. I normally know better, you're right of course.
Definitely agree. My point isn't that it will immediately solve all problems but it will step by step. As you say sending up trash is a bad idea in the beginning but once we know rockets are reliable enough (I dunno, maybe one failure in 10000?) we can start sending up chemically safe trash (stuff that won't damage the composition of the atmosphere) or find ways to bind potentially harmful substances into harmless ones (like is done with most of the exhaust gas in a combustion engine)
We obviously won't have a 100% perfect solution immediately but it is long term leaps better than what we currently have.
Not to mention the particularly toxic stuff won't even be here on earth because we will likely refine the ores in space, leaving the toxic byproducts there in the first place.
Your logic is exactly what I'm pointing out though. "We don't have a solution yet" should never mean "just make things worse, and we'll figure it out eventually".
If you haven't been living on this planet long, this is how the people who own the resources you're being sold kick that can down the road, and make it your problem when these corporations polluting the shit out of everything are the problem. If everyone in the world picked up their garbage on a daily basis, it won't fix rocket fuel pollution, microplastics, radiation, water shortages, or carbon emissions. Only the fucked up factories creating all the bullshit people think they need to live reforming will do that. Giving them more resources to make more junk to polite our planet isn't going to do shit but make them more money.
Currently the best price to low Earth orbit is $1,500/kg. In Seattle (where I happen to live), they charge about $0.18/kg to send trash to a landfill from a waste transfer station, and I assume it's quite a bit cheaper in less crowded places. That's about a factor of 8200 difference, but it gets worse. For one thing you still need to get the trash to a spaceport, which could be thousands of miles away. For another, you can't use LEO for trash because it's way too crowded already. You'd need to put the trash in a much higher orbit, which of course costs quite a bit more money. And if you want to get it out of Earth orbit entirely, well...I don't even know where to look for a price for that, because it's just not normally done.
I really can't imagine a scenario in which launching trash into space is even close to cost effective compared to just burying it. You may say the cost of launching stuff into space will come down, but who's to say the cost of digging holes won't come down just as much?
I can pretty safely assume that the $0.18 figure does not include any measures to contain and reduce damage to the environment done by that trash. The entire point of dumping trash in space would not be that it's cheaper it's that it would be overall better. General rule from life experience is that cheaper usually isn't even close to acceptable in all other parameters.
But yes as things stand now sending trash up is not economical, however by moving industry to space a lot of the trash gets produced in space though so there would be less to shoot up in the first place. Particular heavy industry pollutes like crazy and would benefit from not having to worry about their toxic goop poisoning everything around it.
To add to that, if possible trash should always be recycled. Bio waste can do bio things (I'm not a biologist, idk), Minerals can be reused, and so on.
Person...you really need to read up on the weight ratios required to move junk into space. If that was at all economically, environmentally, or logistically possible to do so, don't you think someone would have done that by now? We still launch rockets with fossil fuels, friend. You need something closer to a 1:1 weight to fuel ratio even to start thinking about this being a wash, ignoring the cost of the rocket materials.
Sci-fi thinking is great. Get with the real world and educate yourself about the problem before you start thinking that way though. Attack the problem from an informed point of view, not from what you can imagine in a Gene Roddenberry world.
You do realize that space flight has been pretty much stagnant for the last few decades. Before SpaceX came in and started reusing boosters there was pretty much 0 innovation in propulsion tech. So just throwing in the towel from the get go is a bit silly.
Besides there are plans to move industry to space, it's the entire reason NASA is restarting their moon base ambitions. And news flash: moving heavy industry away from earth will already do more for the environment than any pollution reduction program ever could. Most of the toxic trash we are stuck with gets produced while turning the raw materials into something usable. The rest of the trash is comparably a drop in the ocean.
I'm not thinking too sci-fi here, this is all pretty reasonable to do given moderate advances in rocket tech (the only major problem I see is added green house gases from rocket fuel so that's something to look into I guess)
You're making MY point here. I'm not sure what you're saying otherwise.