CAJ - Asteroid mining

Hi!

In this blog post we will mainly focus on the question how to mine asteroids but at first some facts about a man who is very interested in asteroid mining. In 1997 the US astrophysicist John S. Lewis wrote a book called “Mining the Sky” in which he describes his vision that asteroid mining could save the world’s three most severe problems, namely mineral resources, generation of energy and food supply. Although this book was written over ten years ago it is still interesting for today’s scientists. Lewis was a highly regarded professor of planetary science at the University of Arizonas and is expert in this field. In his book he states that asteroids could not only be used for mining purposes but could also be hollowed out and used as living space.

This idea sounded a bit weird for me when I first read about it but then reminded me of the “Dystopia film” we watched in Hendrik’s class. Lewis thinks that living on other planets could solve the problem of overpopulation. Of course, these asteroids would have to be earth-like or terrestrial planets and be composed primarily of rocks or metals. The existence of water is also essential since human beings cannot live without it. John S. Lewis calculated that ten quadrillion people could live on these earth-like worlds. Ten quadrillion is that much: 10 000 000 000 000 000 = 10¹⁵ (I have no idea how you can calculate something like this but he is a professor and I am sure he knows what he is doing, so...).

Enough of that, let’s focus on how asteroid mining could work in practice. At the moment scientists can think of three possible ways.

    1.  The first one is to mine the materials and bring them back to Earth to process them there.

a.  Advantage: All needed machinery to process the material is on Earth

b.  Disadvantage: The room on the spaceship is limited à very time-consulting to mine whole planet

    2.  Process the materials directly on asteroids and bring the final product back to Earth

a.  Advantage: Some of the mined materials could be used as fuel for the return flight à spaceship has to transport less fuel à can transport more material

b.  Disadvantage: Every needed machine would have to be brought to the asteroids first

     3.  Bring the asteroids to the International Space Station (ISS)

a.  Advantage: Whole asteroids could be mined

b.  Disadvantage: If something goes wrong the asteroid could hit the Earth. This would lead to a catastrophic event.

As you can see scientists are thinking a lot about this subject but have not found the ideal way yet.