Source: Lew Rockwell | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
There is a maxim in technical writing that every formula cuts your audience in half. Everything in spaceflight is based on formulas, so a tradeoff must be made to produce something readable for the non-expert. However, it only takes a few well-known and verifiable facts to demonstrate why asteroid mining is infeasible.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created after the Soviet Union shocked the American government by launching what was essentially a beeper into orbit. Surely thermonuclear weapons the size and weight of a Greyhound bus would soon follow. A war-weary nation would never approve billions of dollars for such nefarious technologies. Voilà—NASA was created and then charged by John F. Kennedy (JFK) to “put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.” This act of political legerdemain obfuscated the fact that the technology for delivering large, heavy thermonuclear weapons to downtown Moscow was the same as that required for going to the moon. Remember what ex-Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun is reputed to have said: “I aim for the stars but sometimes hit London.” Welcome to the space race.
Rockets do not fly like airplanes; they are ballistic projectiles, giant cannonballs flung by controlled explosions. All rocket engines are controlled explosions, and the technology that controls them operates at the boundary of material science. Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion determine a rocket’s trajectory. The first two laws define the concept of force, but it is the third law—every action has an equal and opposite reaction—that rocket engines exploit. A rocket motor operates by expelling the mass of burning fuel in the opposite direction of travel. How powerful the rocket must be is derived from Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, specifically the concept of escape velocity, which determines how fast the rocket must travel to reach “space.” Earth’s escape velocity is about 25,020 miles per hour (approximately 11.2 kilometers per second), the speed needed to break free from Earth’s gravitational pull without further propulsion.
All rockets require four things: propulsion, payload, guidance, and trajectory. Payload—what actually reaches orbit—is a problem because a good rule of thumb is that only 3% of a rocket’s weight is payload. To date, only chemical rockets can reach orbital speeds.
Everything in space moves incredibly fast compared to speeds most humans experience. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is somewhat slower than escape velocity, so the International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth at about 17,500 miles per hour. However, since this speed is less than escape velocity, the ISS slowly spirals toward Earth getting a little lower with each orbit and will eventually burn up in the atmosphere, as will anything in Earth orbit that moves at less than escape velocity.
Chemical rockets are weak; they are not strong enough to reach past Mars without assistance. All robotic spacecraft, such as Voyager, require gravitational assists. They typically follow a trajectory that allows Venus to briefly capture them with its gravity, slowing the planet down a tiny amount while the spacecraft accelerates. Once beyond Earth’s gravity, the spacecraft is still under the Sun’s gravitational influence. The farther a spacecraft travels from the Sun, it can orbit slower but the orbits become much longer. Furthermore, nothing in space moves in straight lines all trips are curved.
Once out of Earth’s gravity a rocket is still in the Sun’s so a rocket must move between different orbital positions around it. As an example to enter Mars orbit from Earth, a spacecraft must first escape Earth’s gravity and then adjust speed to match Mars’ orbital characteristics:
- Escape Earth’s Gravity:
- The spacecraft must reach escape velocity (25,020 mph).
- Cruise to Mars (via Hohmann Transfer Orbit):
- The spacecraft coasts through space at about 24,600 mph relative to the Sun, with trajectory corrections along the way.
- Mars Orbital Insertion:
- The spacecraft performs a Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) burn to slow down enough to be captured by Mars’ gravity. Mars’ escape velocity is about 11,000 mph, so the spacecraft must decelerate to around 8,500 to 10,000 mph to enter a stable orbit.
The further from the Sun, the slower the orbital speed. Objects in the Asteroid Belt move at speeds ranging from 11,000 to 50,000 mph, depending on location. Getting to the asteroid belt is just another Hohmann Transfer Orbit. Do not take the author’s word for any of this. NASA provides an excellent software package called General Mission Analysis Tool you can download and use. It is not free, your tax dollars paid for it.
The asteroid belt is a vast, donut-shaped region of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, roughly 140 to 280 million miles from the Sun. It contains uncountable billions of rocky objects, from dust particles to dwarf planets like Ceres. However, almost all of the asteroid belt is empty space. This is why robotic spacecraft sent to Jupiter and beyond fly blindly through the belt, trusting statistical models that predict a low probability of collision as the vehicles have little capability for avoidance.
The asteroid belt’s total mass is about 0.0005% of Earth’s mass, yet the volume of space it occupies is approximately 60,700,000,000,000 times that of Earth, making the search for valuable materials exceedingly difficult. Everything in the Solar System that is not hydrogen or helium was produced by the deaths of massive stars billions of years ago. These nova explosions created all the elements of the periodic table, with large quantities of iron and nickel but far less platinum, palladium, silver, and gold. Radioactive elements like plutonium are so unstable that they decayed into other elements long before our Solar System even formed.
Assuming valuable materials exist in the asteroid belt, a spacecraft must not only reach the belt but also extract the substance and return it to Earth. The physics are prohibitive. The velocity required to reach the belt must be reversed for a trajectory back to Earth, where atmospheric drag converts velocity into heat for a controlled landing. The energy required to complete this round trip is immense. Most valuable metals are bound in rock. Gold can be extracted profitably at less than a gram per ton of rock at current prices. Thus lots of useless rock would have to be returned to Earth.
The belt is so sparse that locating and retrieving material requires detection and maneuvering technologies that do not exist. This is a fundamental flaw in asteroid mining concepts. Additionally, nothing currently exists to slow a mining spacecraft down for a return trip of reasonable duration. An orbit that takes thousands of years is to spiral down is impractical, while a faster return requires large amounts of fuel. Since only 3% of a rocket’s mass reaches Earth orbit, sending enough fuel for a viable return trip would be prohibitively expensive.
There are only four known forces in the Universe, gravity the most important force in spaceflight. Rockets work against gravity and are powered by chemical energy. Chemical energy is the electromagnetic field. The weak nuclear force is useless for propulsion as it is what drives nuclear decay in an atom’s nucleus. The strong force, responsible for nuclear fusion, requires temperatures in the hundreds of millions of degrees—currently only achievable in nuclear detonations, with obvious downsides left for the reader to ponder.
The complexities of reaching, navigating, and returning from the asteroid belt are insurmountable with current Earth technology of chemical rockets. Mining asteroids makes no economic sense when Earth contains all the same elements in vastly greater quantities. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman famously said, “Nature cannot be fooled,” to which one might add, “even if a gullible Congress can be.”
Elon Musk dreams of going to Mars with his heavy-lift Starship, misnamed since it cannot even reach Jupiter. Mr. Musk expects taxpayers to foot the bill for this extravagant boondoggle. As far as the author knows Mr. Musk makes no plans to liquidate his fortune to fund such a speculative endeavor.
NASA, like any other government agency, remains inefficient and wasteful, despite producing spectacular imagery like the Hubble telescope to advertise their wares. The magnificent Webb Telescope operates in a range of the electromagnetic spectrum humans are unable to see so NASA artists convert the data into something visible and compelling.
Asteroid mining appears infeasible based on fundamental physics and logical deduction, principles central to Ludwig von Mises work. The laws of physics are covariant, meaning they apply universally, and appear immutable. Space is an unforgiving environment, where high-energy radiation can destroy living tissues. Astronauts aboard the ISS receive a lifetime dose of ionizing radiation in just one year. More extreme cosmic threats exist, such as gamma-ray bursts from neutron stars or black holes so powerful they would sterilize Earth if we were unlucky to be close enough and in their path. One of these lit up the ionosphere a few years ago and it was 1.9 billion light years away. Space is horrifically violent. NASA also advocates mining on the moon, but the moon only has 1.23% of the Earth’s mass so just what can be found there that is not here? Earth is filled with riches, mining can only be economically viable here; viability is based on supply and demand so things viability will fluctuate.
Shuttle pilot Jack Lousma told me once that after his first mission returned to Earth the subsequent inspection of the orbiter determined that a fleck of paint had been driven halfway through the windscreen. Had it gone all the way through everyone onboard would have perished. DOGE Musk gets his way and Mr. Trump gives him a couple of hundred billion dollars for a Mars road trip something like an asteroid going 40,000 mph impacts the party bus going 25,000 mph the occupants might never know they were dying from the explosive decompression. Mars astronauts are rolling very dangerous dice as NASA admits they cannot provide adequate shielding.
The reality of space travel is stark: it is an enormous expense with minimal return, making it nonviable economically. A rich man’s desire from childhood science fiction novels must not be allowed to bilk riche’s from the working man’s pocket.
“The stars might lie, but the numbers never do.” — Mary Chapin Carpenter
