Not Mining Asteroids
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
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
