Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

http://daniel-suarez.com/deltav_design.html

by innot • 6 years ago

133 88 6 years ago

daniel-suarez.com

NikolaeVarius• 6 years ago

I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining

RangerScience4• 6 years ago

In same-same-but-different, I recommend "Walkaway" (Cory Doctorow) and "Nexus" (Rameez Nam).

mrslave• 6 years ago

I'll take these as unsolicited strong recommendations for my next sci-fi novel reading, as I'm just finishing the Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Thank you!

superkuh• 6 years ago

Daemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt

Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

I found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.

ppf• 6 years ago

Funny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.

mwcampbell• 6 years ago

I've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.

RangerScience4• 6 years ago

Suarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)

varjag• 6 years ago

Just read it off your recommendation here. It's not a hard scifi unless you'd think Transformers also are. Some really far fetched sysadmin fiction.

mdorazio• 6 years ago

100% agree that Daemon and Freedom are top-class plausible hard sci-fi, which is surprisingly hard to come by. On the other hand, I didn't much care for Influx.

arethuza• 6 years ago

I thought they were fairly enjoyable books but I didn't find the initial scenario at all plausible.

Setheck• 6 years ago

influx was really good!

zokier• 6 years ago

This Amazon review doesn't seem too promising, and there were few others that echoed the same sentiment.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6...

How do you feel about the non-tech parts of the novel? Does it get soapboxy or cartoony, or does it hold a sensible tone?

RangerScience4• 6 years ago

I found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.

Symmetry6• 6 years ago

I appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the book unenjoyable for me.

RangerScience4• 6 years ago

Which engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?

mabbo• 6 years ago

One of my favorite recent hard sci fi novels. The science and engineering were all real, plausible, and the story was fun too.

brutus1213• 6 years ago

Wonderful book and very thought provoking. Agreed on Daemon being fantastic. I read these as audio books on the treadmill .. can't give it a higher recommendation.

dvh• 6 years ago

Not a single radiator on that thing.

IntemerateApe• 6 years ago

in Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

I’m not familiar with the contents of the rant but I don’t think anyone can know how well Mars colonization would go.

elihu6• 6 years ago

I haven't read the book and maybe the argument is solid, but I'm inclined to disagree. For mining, maybe Mars isn't the best place (hoisting stuff out of the gravity well might not be worth it except for high-value metals), but on the other hand it has decent gravity and an atmosphere, which means it's more suitable for human habitation and fuel processing than the asteroids. And living on a planet has a certain appeal that living on a ship doesn't.

In the far future we might have better habitats in the asteroid belt than on Mars, but that's pretty far out. In the medium term, I expect Mars will be an important fuel stop at the least.

I guess there'd be a kind of a self-perpetuating economic force at work: mining would be most lucrative when the products can be consumed near where they're made, and if there's a heavy demand for construction in the asteroid belts then the asteroid belts are where most of the materials will come from. If it's on Mars, then the materials will be gotten on Mars. (That's assuming that material shipment is expensive. On the other hand, if you can mine iron in the belts and then just lob it at Mars with a rail gun and have the Martians drive out in rovers to collect the splatters of molten metal off the surface, then maybe the economics of non-local mining can work out.)

blkhawk• 6 years ago

Mars might not be worth the effort if you have good asteroid mining - you could say build a O'Neil type cylinders inside an asteroid from local resources and spin them up. Some of the Tech you need for mining might transfer directly into tech or building structures like this. For instance refining metals in zero-G via rotating smelters to separate materials might serve as system to spin up and control the cylinder rotation.

You might even get most of the stuff aside from metals as byproducts of the metal refining process (water, oxygen(from oxids) and carbon mostly). Nitrogen and Phosphor might need importing.

Most of the leftover asteroid serves as Protection against small collisions.

sacred_numbers• 6 years ago

Mars will certainly be challenging to colonize, but it has some major advantages that I believe outweigh the disadvantages.

First, water is pretty abundant almost everywhere on Mars.

Second, carbon is abundant and nitrogen is abundant enough to make food and plastic production viable.

Third, Mars has an atmosphere which is thick enough to provide some protection from radiation and meteorites but thin enough that conductive heat loss isn't too big of a concern. Also, aerobraking massively decreases the amount of fuel required to get to Mars.

Fourth, Mars probably has enough gravity to prevent most of the health risks associated with low gravity.

I don't think either Mars, the Moon, or asteroids are dead ends for colonization. In the long, long run I think more people will live in rotating habitats in cis lunar space than on Mars, and more people will live on Mars than the Moon, but I think there are enough resources for millions or perhaps billions of people to live on Mars.

WalterBright5• 6 years ago

What Mars lacks is a source of power. The solar incidence may be too weak to support much of anything. No fissile materials have yet been discovered there.

The Moon has plenty of solar to harvest.

tomp• 6 years ago

Mars is a good training ground as it does provide you something (gravity, abundance of resources), but after we're reading to take off the training wheels, moving enough resources from Earth to Mars to build a civilization is almost the same as moving the resources to ... not Mars - keeping them in space, in (probably rotating) space stations, and moving the whole station around to wherever the resources you need are (sunlight, water, carbon, metals, ...)

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

I couldn't find it on en.wikipedia, but Konstantin (the man) seems to have been a precursor of transhumanists: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Tsiolkovski#Cosmism... .

bserge2• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky

He was considered one of the founding fathers of cosmonautics in the USSR.

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

Yes, I believe he's on the left in the pantheon: https://earth.google.com/web/@29.56025315,-95.08501348,28.52... but the english wikipedia article talks mostly about those of his ideas which had substantial impact, and doesn't mention his more science-fictional manifestos.

(My guesses: Циолковский, Королёв, Гагарин, ??)

red2awn• 6 years ago

Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?

giantrobot2• 6 years ago

Physics followed closely by economics.

AtlasBarfed• 6 years ago

Have you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid?

I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic.

I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots:

process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination.

100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.

lettergram• 6 years ago

In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale?

If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent.

However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way.

Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)

rlt• 6 years ago

It’s probably just a coincidence, but I find it interesting that one of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla) has a huge demand for nickel and another one of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX) won a contract with NASA to explore 16 Psyche, an asteroid essentially made of nickel, and is working on a completely reusable rocket...

nine_k• 6 years ago

Mining an asteroid far away and then spend fuel to shuttle material from it to GEO or Moon seems rather uneconomical.

I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

One theory in favor of space mining is that (and I personally believe this is wishful thinking) one asteroid might have a lot of titanium in it that would be worth trillions (and probably crash the titanium market).

But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.

WalterBright5• 6 years ago

I suspect the value in asteroid mining will be for building things in space that will remain in space, due to the high cost of trying to launch material out of Earth's gravity well.

vkou2• 6 years ago

The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity.

The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical.

And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal.

If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.

lopmotr• 6 years ago

As I understand it, there iron and nickel asteroids that aren't chemically combined with other substances like ore is on Earth. So perhaps the only processing required would be melting and reforming it.

Kim_Bruning5• 6 years ago

Yes and no, the problem is the initial infrastructure. Travel to and from the earth's surface are your actual major cost. (And to be honest, as we all know, the downward leg is almost free; so just the travel up the gravity well to low earth orbit is your actual bottleneck) .

If there was already a town/colony on the moon, they'd attract the entire current space industry, because it's simply cheaper to launch things into earth orbit from the moon.

Specifically from the moon, you can probably upgrade your launch options and get launch costs low enough to compete with earth-surface to earth-surface shipping, in some cases.

People somehow mis-estimate delta-v costs. Take a look at the Saturn-V for an intuition. Pretty much the majority of that towering machine was needed to get people to LEO + first leg to the moon (and most of it was fuel), but only the 2 tiny space-ships at the top were needed to get people back.

elihu6• 6 years ago

I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's just to bring back high-value metals to Earth, then that's probably the least complicated because the mass you have to move is low. I don't know the logistics of, say, gold mining in space, but you might not even bother with any on-site processing. Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That presupposes you know how to find such a rock.

If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear.

Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.

Tuna-Fish• 6 years ago

Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back.

That's not how it works.

Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball.

The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it.

The feasible options are either:

1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder.

2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer.

The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.

imtringued• 6 years ago

Rockets are expensive to launch from earth. If you can refuel in space it's a different story but where would you get the fuel from if you haven't mined an asteroid or the moon yet? It's a chicken and egg type of problem.

snewman• 6 years ago

Casey Handmer has a great blog taking hard analysis of what activities will be practical in space. He argues there is no real reason for asteroid mining to bring resources back to earth. So the challenge is to identify a large market for resources to be used in space.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-k...

Symmetry6• 6 years ago

So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic.

In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.

Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'

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