Comment on What is currently holding us back from mining in space?
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 1 week ago
We as a species are not yet capable of doing this.
We can barely land successfully on our moon, we haven’t made it to Mars with humans and many of the robots we did send crashed before becoming operational.
We don’t have the capability to run completely automated mining on Earth, people are so far always needed on site.
If we’re going to mine asteroids, we’ll need to have a lot more capabilities than we currently do.
Note that I’m scratching the surface here, we haven’t yet discussed travel time, keeping humans alive and sane, fuel or Earth resources required to mount the effort.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Not to mention we have tried to land on asteroids a couple times now, but failed. Best we coukd do was smash against them to analize the dust.
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 1 week ago
The OSIRIS-REx did manage to bring back some material from Bennu. We retrieved 121.6 grams and it cost around a $100 million. It took 8 years.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Yes, but it still didn’t land. It very slowly approached then bounced while collecting the dust. This is probably the closest we have so far of landing.
NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 1 week ago
I thought Rosetta was successful, somewhat?
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
I mean, kinda. It didn’t land, it tumbled on the asteroid and got itself stuck on a dark pit.