Space Opera Fans discussion

Here's an interesting article I came across this morning.

Planetary Resources is an asteroid-mining company which was just launched in Seattle. It hopes to mine a near-earth asteroid called Amun 3554 for platinum and other precious metals.

Here's the link: http://mashable.com/2012/04/26/planet...

This posits some interesting possibilities. Private corporations mining the galaxy. Good? Bad? Those sci-fi books we've all read that are set on a mining colony just took one step closer to reaity :-)

Can anybody think of any good space opera books that had a mining colony as part of the setting that you think are dead-on? Shout it out.



Here's another great article, same topic, with awesome sci-fi artwork images:

HERE: http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2015/08/...

There's some really good near- and mid-term space science fiction coming out that incorporates asteroid mining or other solar system resource gathering as part of the backdrop.

James S.A. Corey's Expanse series (just started reading the first one) seems to prominently feature corporations and governments wrangling over solar system resources. Paul McAuley's The Quiet War is also set in a near-ish future of outer solar system settlement, with much of the livelihood of those who live in the asteroid belt and further out involved in resource extraction. Both are considered "space opera" I think, but McAuley's is a much harder SF take on the subgenre (which I like).

I think private corporations mining the solar system is inevitable... all the more reason for a conversation about what public policy is needed. I have a blog post on the subject if anyone is interested.

I've been keeping my eye on Planetary Resources and the early pioneers of asteroid mining for a while, checking in on them every year or so.

I think the private industry involvement in this kind of endeavor is vital to our eventual colonization and commercial exploitation of space, but there is a LONG way to go. If we were comparing where asteroid mining technology is today to, say the development of self-driving automobiles, I'd say we're at about the "we've invented the wheel" stage. There are a lot of technologies involved that we simply don't have now.

So there's a really high startup cost involved (which is why private industry is where funding will/should come from), and a fairly long time before results can reasonably be expected.

But commercialization of space--asteroid capture/mining in particular--brings up a lot of legal, economic, and ethical questions.

Who governs their operations from a regulatory POV? What kind of insurance will they need to cover accidents? I mean, imagine a mile-wide asteroid being accidentally diverted to collide with Earth...forget oil spills, this is the mother of all industrial accidents!

And what about the economic impact of $20 trillion in platinum suddenly being available on the market? Guess what? Supply and demand states that your $20 trillion in platinum is no longer worth $20 trillion because you've significantly swamped the market (not to mention all the iron, cobalt, and other stuff you've dumped on the market). Yikes!

I think once asteroid mining becomes an easily possible thing, we'd be very close to realizing a post-scarcity world for a lot of commodities. It could significantly impact (negatively) a lot of lives. So I wonder if these companies with dollar signs in their eyes now will eventually just shut down operations and start trying to throttle the supply lines to uphold their profit margins...or indeed if governments will take control of the operations in order to maintain some kind of economic stability.

Wasn't Gateway and the Heechee Saga series about a mining asteroid? It's been a long time since I read them. But if I remember correctly it wasn't much about the actual experience of mining the asteroid; it was just the interstellar travels that resulted.

Taking a hard science view of things its a long way off from todays economy of scarcity of demand no longer being a issue for some major elements such as iron, platinum, cobalt or other minerals. Even if the tricks to do it are mastered the costs associated with it aren't going to really change much.

so lets say you have a hyper efficient ion engine that's able to use the asteroids own mass as a propellent to put it into earths orbit or one of the Lagrange points. You have robotic miners that can some how mine in near zero gravity (very tricky) and some sort of resource transfer system in space to move the unrefined minerals.

Iron in space needs to get to earth which means it needs a ride capable of taking it down. You can't just dropped down like a rock you need specialized equipment that can take the re-entry including millions of tons of extra iron. Which is a bit unrealistic. Not only that you need to be able to get that platform up into space. Launch costs aren't really going to change from today to the near future that much. We are going to get more "re-usable rockets" if just the engine or the individual stages themselves.

its going to be very expensive to get anything from space back to earth for a long while. Its not going to be a dump its going to be a slow trickle. This is assuming the cost of a launch vehicle (empty) and return(full) vehicle cost out weigh the cost of the entire operation to begin with. Where it would really be useful is well "in space" for in space construction. The costs there are trivial. The costs of construction in space really isn't going to impact earths market in a negative way for a very long while. In many ways space construction even via robots is going to be an economic boom since those bots will needed to be build somewhere, Controlled from somewhere else.

Some elements Gold, Platinum, etc. are going to be worth it even in the early stages but it still is going to be a slow trickle.

I imagine the amount of platinum brought down would be small, so feasible in small amounts. But iron? We seriously need a ton of iron. Our electrical grid infrastructure is rusting out. I imagine THAT would make one heck of an impact crater, an asteroid glop clump of iron dropped into an ocean someplace.

I havn't read them myself, but the Asteroid War novels from Ben Bova sound like they fit the bill.
The Precipice
The Rock Rats
The Silent War
The Aftermath
They are all part of the Grand Tour series that are all set in the solar system.

Emeketos wrote: "Taking a hard science view of things its a long way off from todays economy of scarcity of demand no longer being a issue for some major elements..."

Oh, I agree. The qualification I stated was "once asteroid mining becomes an easily possible thing." That's not going to be true for a long time.

But once it IS true, then you have to contend with the economic impact.

Just making up numbers here, let's say the total cost of hauling that nearly mile long asteroid into near Earth orbit, taking it apart, and sending all its goddies back to Earth (realize that by the time we can do all this there may well be manufacturing in space as well so all the stuff wouldn't necessarily NEED to come back to Earth in bulk)...Let's say all that cost $581 BILLION dollars (same amount the US spends on Defense annually!)...

Let's also assume that the value of what they mine is just what they say the platinum would bring in at today's prices: $20 TRILLION dollars.

$581 billion is only 3% of $20 trillion dollars. Yes, we're talking a 97% profit margin.

Incidentally, the Gross World Product in 2014 is estimated to have been $107.5 trillion dollars. So the estimated value of that one asteroid is nearly 19% of the entire world's annual purchasing power.

I think it might have a small effect on the economy if that kind of haul became easily available!

Micah I know you are doing a thought experiment of some kind. But if they actually mined that much the price of platinum would collapse and many more uses for platinum would be developed. I don't see how just the platinum could possibly result in a 19% increase in production world wide, especially since a decent bit of the grind for the first few years even after we are getting the platinum is learning how to use it effectively at it's new price point.

Aaron wrote: "Micah I know you are doing a thought experiment of some kind. But if they actually mined that much the price of platinum would collapse..."

Post #3:
Micah wrote: " Supply and demand states that your $20 trillion in platinum is no longer worth $20 trillion because you've significantly swamped the market..."

Yes. I know. ;D

Aaron wrote: "...I don't see how just the platinum could possibly result in a 19% increase in production world wide...

My point wasn't that it would increase production by 19%, but that 19% of the world's existing economy is a HUGE amount of capital. If you were able to bring that much additional mineral wealth to the market, even spread out over several decades, you could hardly fail from being a massively disruptive economic event.

If you've got the tech to do a mile-long asteroid, after all, you've got the tech to do thousands of asteroids.

Now, there are ways to mitigate such disruption, such as using the new resources to colonize space, the Moon, and planets in our own solar system.

Any way it pans out, I think it would be a paradigm shifting event.

BTW, having an overabundance of platinum would probably jump start the hydrogen economy. Platinum is scarce on Earth. It's ranked just below gold in rarety. It's the most common catalyst used in stripping hydrogen from water. Therefore, making hydrogen gas from water is extremely expensive on commercial scales. If it were to become an abundant element, hydrogen fuel cells could provide all the elecricity we'd need for homes, cars, etc.

Which, again, would have a major impact on the current hydrocarbon economy. Another paradigm shift.

Hmm are most of the yellow rocks on Earth not just taking up storage space and collecting dust, because everybody has hyped them up to a market value far beyond it's practical usability?

As long as the amount of "precious" materials doesn't significantly outstrips the artificial creation of new money, I'm not sure it would have any impact at all... Especially since the asteroid mining company wouldn't release the platinum at a faster rate than the growth in demand (just like the DeBeers cartel and the advertising industry has done with diamonds: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issue...).

Niels I had the same thoughts vis a vis DeBeers and diamonds. The only difference might be if competing companies were involved in mining different asteroids. That might make things trickier. Ad faras the current hydrocarbon economy is concerned a lot depends on what we have done vis a vis energy sources between now and then. Up here in Canada the oil industry as a result of our recent Federal election and the last provincial election in Alberta has lost some of its political clout. So by the time we have gotten to the point where we can mine the asteroids for platinum we may have moved on to other sources of energy.
By the way Jack Williamson under the pseudonym Will Stewart published a couple of novels about mining CT (or Seetee) matter. The books are Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock but I am not sure if either are currently available. Seetee Ship was published originally as two separate stories in Astounding.

I -do- like the idea of fuel cell technology suddenly becoming viable for everyday use thanks to an abundance of platinum.

Anna wrote: "I -do- like the idea of fuel cell technology suddenly becoming viable for everyday use thanks to an abundance of platinum."

By the time we can mine asteroids, though, it may well be that we no longer need platinum in the process. Every few months it seems I see announcements of potential cheaper (both in terms of cost of ingredients and energy cost) ways to strip hydrogen from water.

I agree, though, I really like the idea of fuel cells for most of our energy needs. If we can get a cheap system developed where every house would have its own built-in hydrogen production? All you'd need is water and sewage hook up. Otherwise you'd be totall off the grid. That's what sustainable energy independence looks like.

...Now if we could only figure out a cheap, safe, easy way of storing hydrogen in automobiles...

Micah wrote: "Now if we could only figure out a cheap, safe, easy way of storing hydrogen in automobiles..."

BOOM!

Once we realise that hybrid cars can pick up power from the road, and put the wires on major roads to let them do it, we'll stop worrying about storing fuel.

See my published short story "Blood and the Wire" for how to do it.

Micah wrote: "I've been keeping my eye on Planetary Resources and the early pioneers of asteroid mining for a while, checking in on them every year or so.

I think the private industry involvement in this kind o..."

What you've described is what goes on right now. OPEC slows production of oil in attempts to keep the price high which is throttling the supply lines.

And they won't dump it immediately. Think of diamonds. Why do you think the price is so high? Because most are held off the market to keep price high.

Jonathan wrote: "And they won't dump it immediately. Think of diamonds. Why do you think the price is so high? Because most are held off the market to keep price high..."

All very true. Except that both oil and diamonds are controlled by a very small number of countries/groups.

If/when asteroid mining becomes technologically feasible, you could see the same thing but only if a limited number of companies/groups control the means of the mining. If it becomes a free for all, people will try to undermine the market.

Then again, as I said before, it could also feed a massive expansion of space exploration and colonization, coupled with space-based manufacturing. So the newly expanded resources might be put toward feeding a brand new hungry demand for raw materials.

Building spacecraft in space, creating fuel from asteroid material, metal refineries in space...It's going to be interesting to say the least.

Actually right now OPEC (specifically Saudi Arabia) are keeping the price of oil low to discourage some of the more expensive methods of production and thus reduce competition. I live in Canada so believe me I know oil.

Micah wrote: "If/when asteroid mining becomes technologically feasible, you could see the same thing but only if a limited number of companies/groups control the means of the mining. If it becomes a free for all, people will try to undermine the market."

Considering the expenses of establishing your company in space, catching and bringing an asteroid into Earth orbit (and paying the necessary bribe to be allowed to), exclude everyone except consortiums between top space- and mining companies.
It isn't like space is a democratic place where anyone can bring a donkey, a sixshooter and start panning for gold.

The costs involved pretty much mean that the only players are going to be major corporations and/or governments. Of course if a group could hijack a spaceship or two it could make things interesting.

Niels wrote: "It isn't like space is a democratic place where anyone can bring a donkey, a sixshooter and start panning for gold..."

What? No browncoats? [*whimpers*]

Name a single market that is a free for all.

free for all's in markets exist only in market infancy. eventually companies merge or go out if business, leaving a small number if players. has always happened. Will always happen.

There are a few areas in retail where there are no national players dominating but that would probably be about it. They are mostly specialty/niche markets.

John wrote: "The costs involved pretty much mean that the only players are going to be major corporations and/or governments..."

And shareholders. A lot of people became immensely rich without even setting foot on a boat back when London traders starting clubbing together to bring cargo back from the colonies.

And mining is not a niche market. The entrance costs are just astronomical in mining, so no matter where an ore is mined, only a few companies will be doing it.

So it would be a cartel, maybe? Like OPEC? Or when the Big-6 companies colluded with Apple to artificially inflate the price of ebooks? The big mining companies would most likely all have a vested interest in keeping prices artificially high and competitors OUT. Any worldbuilding with asteroid mining would likely have a lot of payoffs and bribes to deny smaller competitors from setting up their own mining colonies. maybe?

The asteroids would be similiar to oil in that both are a non-renewable product. There are only so many asteroids in the solar system so once you mine all of them there is nothing left.

John wrote: "The asteroids would be similiar to oil in that both are a non-renewable product. There are only so many asteroids in the solar system so once you mine all of them there is nothing left."

I would guess that the amount of material in the asteroids is several trillion times the total of all oil on earth. Unless you start engineering projects of Ringworld proportions using them all up is very unlikely.

Anna wrote: "So it would be a cartel, maybe? Like OPEC? Or when the Big-6 companies colluded with Apple to artificially inflate the price of ebooks? The big mining companies would most likely all have a vested ..."

On the surface maybe but commodities are sold on the old open market, so it's harder to control the prices. Not saying it can't be done, just harder than diamonds (as an example). And the entry costs are so high because of the rules and regulations.

It'll be the same with space mining. After the first rocket explodes that is carrying workers to the asteroid, every subsequent launch will be slapped with so many regulations that only the biggest companies will survive. Because of that chance, insurance for the companies will be ridiculous. That alone will prevent all but the most well funded companies from playing.

Or we'd end up with mining space pirate smugglers...

[*sorry ... got Han Solo on the brain this month 3:-) *]

John wrote: "The asteroids would be similiar to oil in that both are a non-renewable product. There are only so many asteroids in the solar system so once you mine all of them there is nothing left."

Except that there would be a huge issue state owned operations tried running mining operations in space.

There are treaties that try to establish a framework for this, but of course they are not tested yet. The US courts have denied claims of personal ownership of at least one asteroid in the past.

There's a lot of room here for hard SF exploration here. The legalities of asteroid mining are going to cause at least as much (maybe more) problems as the new abundance of resources...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...

"The foundational document that governs doing stuff in space is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, on which the United States, Russia, China, and more than 100 other countries are signatories. It reads with an optimism that seems strange today in the era of the mothballed space shuttle. The treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, forbids nations to make claims to celestial real estate, and clearly allows for private space enterprise. According to Gabrynowicz, “Non-state actors … are authorized to be in space, that’s what Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty is all about.” In fact, it’s apparent that the drafters of the treaty expected that resources would be extracted from space at some point, she says, “But we’ve just never reached agreement on what happens to extracted resources. … So what is happening is you have companies that are chomping at the bit to clarify the rules.”

AndrewP wrote: "John wrote: "The asteroids would be similiar to oil in that both are a non-renewable product..."

I would guess that the amount of material in the asteroids is several trillion times the total of all oil on earth.

There are over 750,000 asteroids at least 1 kilometer across, plus millions of smaller ones. Even small ones (say, 23 feet wide) could hold several dozen tons of water. And it costs over $80k to put a gallon of water into space.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/s...

The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act would allow private companies to own a piece of space. More specifically, the bill, which now goes to President Barack Obama to sign, will allow companies to own any resources they mine from an asteroid or moon.
...But not all industry observers are thrilled by the proposed law. Some space lawyers (yes, that's a thing) argue that the bill would violate the Outer Space Treaty. A number of countries including the United States and Russia have signed the document, which states that nations can’t own territories in space. Others warn that the the bill leaves out key details necessary for establishing a regulatory structure for the industry."

And it costs over $80k to put a gallon of water into space.

Anyone else read "The Martian Way"? It turns out to be better to supply water to Mars from Saturn's rings than from Earth.

Mining asteroids at our current terrestrial industrial stage just seems silly for many of the reasons described by others in the forum already. On the other hand, bringing an asteroid into earths orbit and using it as a resource might be and interesting strategy for establishing our first extraterrestrial base of industrial operations. Establishing the skills and industrial processes necessary to build bases in asteroids could prove to be an invaluable step in the human expansion into our solar system. An asteroid could also give the necessary resources to build a space elevator as described in Red Mars / Green Mars. I'd also be curious about what quantities of other rare earths we might find in them. Materials becoming increasing more important to our high tech industries.

One of our SOF community members, Steph Bennion, has a YA series about an asteroid/small moon that is carved out and used as a worldship to get to a distant star, and then parked in orbit and continued in use as a space station / orbiting homeworld. It's a really good series (both me and my kid liked it) with an interesting precept about the asteroid-as-worldship. Not kid-ish at all. Good for adults.

As for asteroid mining around Earth, I'd be kinda scared the astronauts would miscalculate bringing an asteroid down through the atmosphere and then, kapowie! Extinction level event. But mining an asteroid in space to get the raw materials needed to build future space stations and ships makes a lot of sense. It would save a ton of $$ and resources to blast a scarce resource out of the Earth's atmosphere.

Anna wrote: "One of our SOF community members, Steph Bennion, has a YA series about an asteroid/small moon that is carved out and used as a worldship to get to a distant star, and then parked i..."

The carved out asteroid has been done by both Niven and Kapp (Black hole of Negrav). Using an incoming object as a weapon is discussed in Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" and actually done in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

R. wrote: "The carved out asteroid has been done by both Niven and Kapp (Black hole of Negrav). Using an incoming object as a weapon is discussed in Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" and actually done in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress..."

Actually, I pinched the idea from Dandridge MacFarlane Cole, an American rocket scientist and futurologist who published a number of books and papers on the subject back in the 1960s. I think he worked on the early Mercury flights. His book Beyond Tomorrow is out of print but I managed to get a copy from the book's illustrator Roy Scarfo.

There's a Hammer film from 1969 that I love, Moon Zero Two, which is a 'space western' about a dastardly plot to capture a sapphire-rich asteroid. Very dated but fun. Warren Mitchell ('Alf Garnett'), who very recently passed away, plays the villain. For Space 1999 fans, it also stars Catherine Schell...

R. wrote: "Anna wrote: "One of our SOF community members, Steph Bennion, has a YA series about an asteroid/small moon that is carved out and used as a worldship to get to a distant star, and ..."

Just about everything that can be written about has, it's all rehash in a different light.

Personally, I think it's really cool that a YA book is using an asteroid as a worldship. It's a good primer for some of the huge ideas in "adult" sci-fi.

Anna wrote: "So it would be a cartel, maybe? Like OPEC? Or when the Big-6 companies colluded with Apple to artificially inflate the price of ebooks? The big mining companies would most likely all have a vested ..."

Sorta not really any collusion with mining would be way bigger. In reality the only control that Apple and Big-6 have over the industry is convenience, advertisement, and their good name. The entry price of releasing an ebook is practically non-existent, all of the cost is just in writing/editing/promotion. In space mining there will be heavy regulation and high entry costs and heavy regulation and high entry costs are the ways that prevents bob joe from down the street from starting his own space mining business.

I dunno ... I kinda liked The Astronaut Farmer. Maybe The Astronaut Miner? Or more likely somebody will hijack a mining colony and declare themselves independent. Who's to stop them? It will take months round-trip to get a force there to stop them, and the governments of the world won't be willing to bankroll it unless they discover some new rare alloy nobody can do without. But in the meantime, the rebels could beam propaganda back to Earth about horrific mining conditions, make the taxpayers balk.

The rebellion/propaganda war sounds a bit like Starks War, except that John G. Henry's good guys were a bit too naive in his early books.

It's a lot easier to steal somebody else's work than it is to raise money to fund your own 3:-)

Anna wrote: "It's a lot easier to steal somebody else's work than it is to raise money to fund your own 3:-)"

There's a really neat short story in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets - 'Helen of Mars' by George Ebey - about mining on Mars. Essentially, would-be prospectors take out a loan to send a mining robot to Mars, which they then control from Earth (the story conveniently ignores things like signal delay). In this tale, some prospectors realise they can get rich quicker by using their robots to attack others and steal their cached minerals. Life's like that.

http://singularityhub.com/2015/12/09/...

On November 24, President Obama signed the “US Commercial Space Law Competitiveness Act” into law. Among other things (like that the government should not pester SpaceX), it states that any US citizen who takes a chip off an old block of asteroid then owns that chip.

The law also applies to other celestial bodies blessed with “resources,” like the Moon and every other planet and lower-case moon because “resources” is a vague word. The US citizen—or, more likely, a group of citizens who are part of a company, like Planetary Resources, Inc., or Deep Space Industries—can then “possess, own, transport, use, [or] sell” the resource.
...
And, when the president signed the bill, he clarified that a given asteroid can never be your asteroid—a piece of it can be your piece, if you remove that piece from the larger rock and if that piece counts as a “resource.”
...
And the international community doesn’t necessarily see the law as fair: Right now, US citizens are the only people allowed to do the owning, while the previous agreement about space property ruled across the globe.

Interesting, so if you spend vast ressources bringing it into near orbit, you cannot stop other companies to drop in and start exploiting it?

That law will last until asteroid mining is a viable activity, then the law will change to favor corporations.