[meteorite-list] OT: Asteroidal and Lunar Materials

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun May 22 18:55:52 2005
Message-ID: <42910DD3.C4DF31A5_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Marc, and The List


    Yes, it needs decades of work!

    That post was the Visionary Me talking.

    This post is the Practical Me talking:

a. We need a major, manned metallurgical research facility in orbit about ten times the size of
the ISS with a staff of 30-50.

b. We need asteroidal missions that will return materials from a long list of potential
asteroidal sources and in doing so, test the best techniques for mining the asteroids.

c. That laboratory needs to develop, from scratch, the full range of techniques that will be
required to purify, refine, and pre-process asteroidal ore into purified metal, removing those
nasties you mention.

d. That facility will have to be supplied with great amounts of electrical power, which will
require an in-orbit solar power station to supply it.

e. In addition, the research section will have to test the full range of engineering
possibilities for the design of the furnace and gas injection system required to produce the
foamsteel.

f. The successful furnace design will have to be scaled up to the production sized unit for
full first tests.

g. Once a production furnace is available and suitable pre-processing units are on-line, we
will need a fleet of asteroid mining vessels (5 or 6) to extract the raw material from the best
asteroidal source, OR, an asteroidal mission to alter the orbit of the minable asteroid and move
it into Earth orbit alongside the production facility, OR move the production facility to the
asteroid's present orbit, in which case we will need not mining vessels but heavy-lift
transports to the asteroid. Personally, I favor the mining fleet for the long term.

h. We need to test-drop the first big pieces (I'd use the flawed ones because there will be bad
extrusions) into the Pacific. At this point the ablative polymer spin-spray facility has to be
ready (a half-mile long cylinder) and staffed and tested. I should explain (as I did not in the
earlier post) that the finished ablation shell will be a big bulky snowball of very low density,
not a thin coating on the foamsteel shape. No problem. Ideally, the ablative material should
be a polymer that dissolves in water, so that when it lands in the ocean, the piece cleans
itself as it waits to be picked up.

i. Then, we start supplying the material for the impossible dreams of the future and, oh, yes,
collecting the money and paying off those 100 year bonds, and expanding production facilities
and the mining fleet and... Eventually, as the producing companies become filthier rich and the
price drops, foamsteel will be used for more and more things that I'm sure I can't even imagine.

    It's just like any other really large-scale project. Sure, it's expensive, but how much did
the Channel Tunnel cost? The tunnel to Hokkaido? What's the estimated cost of the proposed
bridge over the Straits of Messina from Italy to Sicily? The sale of the material to build the
Gibraltar Bridge alone would probably produce a major return on the investment. And a bridge
between two continents would result ultimately in hundreds of billions of dollars of economic
activity per year that would not otherwise take place.

    The single best investment in human history was the Pyramids; after almost 5,000 years,
they're still generating income. And they aren't even good for anything but gawking at.

    It's like a commercial Manhattan Project. Just think of me as Gen. Leslie Groves. Give me
the few trillion dollars I need, and be sure to stand well back. You want to see the
blueprints? Sure. No problem.

    Think of the namesake of your Institution, Andrew Carnegie. All I'm doing is proposing to
build Pittsburgh in orbit, that's all. No big deal. I'm guessing Mr. Carnegie would want in on
this deal. And if he were alive, I would pitch it to him.

    Your objections are trivial. Gas (it doesn't have to be nitrogen, you know, anything inert
with respect to Fe will do) is not a limiting factor. One cubic foot of liquid nitrogen would
produce about 50,000 cubic feet of foamsteel. Let's use that calculator.

    You don't want to lift it from earth? OK. Extract water from a suitable asteroidal or
extinct cometary body, electrolyze it, and use H2. There's plenty of gas sources Out There.
Personally, I think it would just be easier to boost it, but... That's an engineering study.
This is a vision study.

    I think you're dead wrong about big pieces not being returnable to Earth, but if there's an
upper size limit, we make them just under the limit and join them on Earth, A mile-long bridge
isn't made out of mile-long pieces of steel, you know. I just think the big specific shape has
a certain engineering elegance, but there is a limit. We have to be able to lift the pieces
into place, and that's probably the lower of the two limits.

    The fact that it is economically feasible to develop an ultra-pure alloy of aluminum solely
for the purpose of vending viscous sugar glop is in itself solid proof of the economic
feasibility of foamsteel! I didn't know that fact about Coke cans, and I'm glad you told me
because I'm going to use that argument in its favor in some future rant.

    You should bear in mind that foamsteel is not going to be cheap, you know. With it, you can
do what could never be done in your wildest dreams. It's going to cost you some, buddy... But,
hey! It'll be worth it!

    Problems exist for only one reason -- to be beaten. This is an entirely new material
industry that I'm proposing, and years of pre-pre-research would have to go ahead of its
development. To me that only seems like a good reason to get started.

    We call America a land of free enterprise. I think the emphasis should be on the word
ENTERPRISE. Enterprise is not the act of "investing in the future," as is so often said these
days. Enterprise is the act of CREATING the future in all its immense potential.

    Why not take a few of the tens of millions of dollars of golden parachute money being given
to the idiots who killed entire industries (like the American steel industry) and build a tiny
research-grade test gas-injection electric furnace as an experimental package for the ISS?

    I guarantee you that the unit would be smaller than a communciations satellite whose sole
function is insure the cable TV delivery of Jerry Springer (dubbed in Slovenian, Bengali,
Cantonese, and Xhosa) to slack-jawed millions around the planet. And cost less...

    Hey, I'm about ranted out for now.

    Oh, one last quibble. You mentioned that this material might be better for use in zero-gee,
like for a space station, because you assumed I meant using raw unpurified asteroidal iron. But
you are right about that material being a good use for "raw" asteroids.

    But you don't have to mine them, tearing them apart into tiny fragments and then making
little 1000 meter spars. No, no, no. You find a football shaped or potato shaped iron
asteroid, five to fifteen miles long. You drill a bore hole through the long axis.

    You mount a pair of counter-rotating stations at each end on the termini of the boreholes.
You use reaction engines to increase the spin of the asteroid around that long axis. You use
arrays of scores of square-mile sized mylar solar focusing mirrors and use them to heat the
asteroid as it spins up (shielding the two stations at the ends).

    When the main body of the asteroid is suitably molten (and the ends are about like Venus),
you start pumping water into the borehole in a controlled way, balancing the heating rate with
the spin rate with the steam expansion rate, until you have a five to fifteen mile diameter
hollow metal sphere.

    Take it out of the oven. Let it cool. It's a simple recipe.

    You now have a space station eventually capable of supporting two to ten million people with
the industry, research, education, business activities, and trade that goes with them. Leave
the spin on and you have interior gravity equivalent. De-spin it and you have a huge free-fall
environment, or any gee-field in-between that you want.

    Think bigger, Marc.

    See ya in the future! It's Out There, you know.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------
Marc Fries wrote:

> Howdy
>
> Interesting, but it needs work. First off, where do you get the
> nitrogen? Asteroids are devoid of the stuff, which means hauling large
> amounts of liquid nitrogen from the Earth's gravity well ($$$$!).
> Second, you've got big metallurgy problems. Fe-Ni is not "stainless
> steel", as anyone who has watched their iron meteorite rust can attest
> to. Stainless steel is an iron-chromium alloy. Also, asteroidal metal
> contains large amounts of sulfides, which acts to embrittle metals. As
> a cautionary tale in that regard, it was discovered (far too late) that
> the iron used to build the Titanic was very sulfide-rich and the
> resulting embrittlement was a likely cause of its' sinking:
>
> <http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C10/C10Links/chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa022800a.htm>
>
> In addition to sulfides, there will be silicates and minor refractory
> components which will basically rip the bubbles as they form:
>
> http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1617/2002/344/index-en.html
>
> As a macro-scale example look at Coke cans, which have to be made from
> an aluminum alloy that is even more pure than aircraft aluminum to keep
> from ripping open under extreme plastic deformation when the can is
> made. Finally, dropping a kms-long rod of material, no matter how
> light, through the Earth's atmosphere at many km/s will break or deform
> the surviving pieces considerably. Perhaps this would be better off as
> a building material that is not intended to land on a planetary body
> (space stations?).
>
> I hate to keep playing the spoil-sport in these emails, but I hope
> y'all will look at this as a critical evaluation of the problems
> involved and not just a "told-you-so-a-thon". If we understand the
> problems then someone can work to overcome them.
>
> Cheers,
> MDF
>
> --
> Marc Fries
> Postdoctoral Research Associate
> Carnegie Institution of Washington
> Geophysical Laboratory
> 5251 Broad Branch Rd. NW
> Washington, DC 20015
> PH: 202 478 7970
> FAX: 202 478 8901
>
Received on Sun 22 May 2005 06:55:15 PM PDT