wbnc said:
Within a century the basic needs of a colony on any favorable world would be brought up to a level where the system became self sufficient..out of necessity. Waiting months for a part to repair your mining gear would spur local folk to build at least a basic industrial base. Which requires a basic resource extraction and processing base, basic education system, etc....
Now this would likely inspire in system mining and processing stations built up slowly over time to exploit in system resources.Which brings us right back to the viability of space mining operations...
This mirrors industrial expansion and capacity today. Local industry is created to satisfy local demand because it's generally cheaper to do so. What can be produced locally, and economically would. Everything else would be imported.
I would assume that in the future you are still going to have the same economic factors we have now to make trade possible. Moving anything in bulk will ruthlessly drive efficiencies in the transport process. A 40man ultra-large crude carrier can move 2 million barrels of oil. The Traveller ship model is centered around the RPG aspect, and larger ships just get scaled up, which is not quite how it works today.
simonh said:
I think anyone posting about how 'easy' anything is in microgravity probably is doing an awful lot of blind guessing.
It's fairly streightforward to think of ways you might be able to contain the debris, but that's not really the point. The point is that if anythign goes wrong with an operation like this in earth orbit, the consequences are utterly catastrophic on a civilization-limiting scale. It's just not worth any conceivable benefits from doing it closer to home.
I do like the idea of doing it at a Lagrange point. That makes sense because if your particulate containment does fail you've got a natural gravitational effect acting to limit the consequences.
Today it is daunting to us because it's still a very specialized operation that only a handful of individuals ever get access to. But if you look at similar industrial parallels today it would make sense that working in space would become quite common, if still hazardous, and the requisite skills and ease that come with every other task would also occur with space-based industry.
simonh said:
Lunar orbit I'm not so sure about. Particles flying off from the extraction site would not just fall to the moon's surface, they'd instead spin off into their own cloud of varyingly eccentric orbits. Unlike Earth, Luna doesn't have a residual upper atmosphere to cause their orbits to eventually degrade and naturally fall to the surface over a generation or two, so they'd stay there functionaly for ever unless you mounted a very long term and expensive cleanup operation.
Regarding Platinum, really we're talking about the family of Platinum group metals.
Planetary resources has a page on this. There are actualy quite a few industrial uses for these including Platinum itself, that are quite attractive. Platinum's cost prohibits it's use for many applications, but a larger supply would bring the price down, yes, but the lower it got the more it's industrial uses would increase as they became economical, to absorb the price drop and remove the excess product from the market. These are smart people who have done their research.
Simon Hibbs
Small particles are a threat today because our space structures are rather delicate. When we get to the point of being able to drop an asteroid into lunar or Terra orbit we'll also have greater capabilities to not only handle space debris, but to actually DO something about anything that would be of risk. The joys of progress!
Regarding platinum (and palladium, it's close cousin), you are right, there are many applications designers would love to use it but cannot due to price restrictions. However the overall scarcity of these minerals is the biggest price driver, not consumption itself. This holds true with both economic theory and practice, at least for the most part. Overall production of platinum annually is about 120-130 tons. I think palladium production is even smaller. These types of minerals are used in production where they are measured in ounces, or pounds. Even finding additional useful uses for platinum could account for the precipitous price drop that would occur. It takes something like 10 TONS of raw ore to make 1oz of platinum. A huge amount of the cost for platinum and most precious minerals is extraction costs.
Of course, going to orbit, capturing an asteroid and dropping into a convenient place to then start mining ain't going to be cheap. Those costs would have to be recouped over a period. Still, you'd see a collapse of terrestial production if something like that was available at a far cheaper cost. You just couldn't economically pay for it. Today, and probably for some time in our near future, space mining is simply not economical due to the huge costs of getting payloads to orbit.
