Mining the Sky

John S. Lewis

ISBN 0-201-47959-1

December 4, 1997 to January 28, 1998.

Reviewed 2/16/98, President's Day.

This volume is the first of four or five required readings from James Benson, founder of SpaceDev (Steamboat Springs, Colorado) who hopes to go start mining near earth asteroids in the next few years. It ends with a more extensive reading list, all of which looks interesting.

The main idea is how to project terrestrial growth out into the solar system and then beyond. The main problem is how to get this going at a self-sustaining level before earth, the launching point, is destroyed. The philosophy conflicts with another book I am reading right now, Your Money or Your Life, in which they argue, convincingly, that perpetual growth is perhaps not the best thing. Perhaps Dominguez and Robin, authors of the latter volume, feel restricted to earth. However that debate resolves itself in the world and in my mind, both approaches call for something unlikely, a change of a preponderance of human hearts based on some notion of disembodied goodness. Not likely, I think.

The attractiveness of the near earth asteroids is that, of all solar system objects, they take the least energy to reach and from which to return. The book covers many foreseeable phases of the uses of solar system natural resources at and beyond this step. Lewis is a better chemist, biologist, and sociologist than astrodynamicist. Like many others, he seems to rely on someone else, or his own incomplete calculations for energies and flight paths that he does not describe in detail, nevertheless, he is on basically the right track. There is a good discussion of the various classes of near earth asteroids accompanied by some good graphical data.

Lewis, perhaps Benson and others seem to subscribe to an emerging religion, based on the works of Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men, a book that I haven't managed to locate yet. This too appears to rely on the flawed assumption that people will behave in their own enlightened best interest.

Each chapter begins with an anecdotal or novel-like piece describing some future undertaking that matches somewhat with the science and engineering about to be presented. This is a format similar to the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy. The first half dozen chapters deal with near-earth and the inner solar system. This includes various heights of earth orbit, including highly elliptical, the moon, near earth asteroids and comets and includes a long discussion about how most materials to be used in space must be brought from space due to the extreme cost of bringing things up from earth. Of course, there are some things that must be brought up, the original vehicles and the people, but one of the early goals must be to become self sufficient in space then set up a gas station in low earth orbit to help the next wave get along. Of course, no information need be carried up. That's what radio is for (my comment).

Moon bases, mining of asteroids, cheap platinum, these are all covered. The big thing needed to support people out there is water, and that mostly for fuel (hydrogen is among the better chemical fuels) with drinking water as a byproduct. Water in space will be really valuable, more so than most other materials. The next economy after that could be Helium 3, very scarce on earth, but there's enough in the solar system to get us to new "clean" methods of power generation and propulsion. This Helium 3 fusion has been a pipe dream for many decades now. Maybe it will come in and maybe it won't. If it does, it may well make space mining for earth uses economically viable for the first time.

Of course, Lewis is a nut for generating power in space and beaming it down to earth. The former is a good idea, but the latter always worries me. While it is true that it could be feasible and safe to use near earth object materials to build a power station in geostationary orbit capable of collecting from the sun all of the earth's current power budget, I don't know if I want to live on the same continent where it is beamed down to the earth. Maybe if it could be carried on wires of a geo-tether. I like tethers myself, but he doesn't talk about them at all, perhaps because he's not an astrodynamicist, perhaps because materials do not yet exist making the tethers feasible.

In the middle of the book, 50s publishing style, there are a series of pictures, everything from Galileo's picture of Ida to an artist's conception of a Dysan Sphere. Most of the figures are artist's conceptions.

A couple of chapters in the middle are devoted to Mars and what might come of Martian settlement and these are followed by an entire chapter on Phobos and Deimos and the difference between them and the main belt asteroids. This was enlightening. I knew but had forgotten that Phobos is sub-aerosynchronous, it goes from west to east in the sky every day. I did not know that the constant shade and bake cycle induced by their orbits causes them to have significantly different current chemistry than their cousins out in the belt.

Four chapters from the end he deals with the belt asteroids themselves. These are far enough out to be a transportation problem both in terms of time and resources, still, when we get there they will be worth harvesting.

Three chapters from the end he deals with the outer planets. For Helium 3, Neptune and Uranus are particularly mine-able and could easily power a civilization dozens of times our size for a very long time indeed. A concept I find particularly intriguing is the measure of standard of living in terms of power. He claims that the middle class American lifestyle uses about a kilowatt, that is, 24 kilowatt-hours of energy per day.

The meaning of this in terms of efficiencies of production and equalities of standard of living elsewhere (standard of living, another term that Dominguez and Robin dislike) is an interesting way to look at it. Here we've been used to thinking in terms of dollars and material objects, but power is really what runs all this stuff and, indeed, our lifestyles can be equated to power. I'll be using this new paradigm in future thinking of my own where possible, expecting it to give unusual insights.

In the last two chapters, Lewis goes off the deep end in terms of projections of civilization, lifestyle, and humanity far beyond the conquest of the solar system. He starts talking about civilizations with quadrillions of people headed every which way, powered by Helium 3 for billions of years. It's pretty mind-boggling and must come from this Last and First Men religion. But, he is a realist. He holds out all this fantasy as one of a huge number of possibilities. Another possibility is superlative catastrophe. And, there are many possibilities in between, including the one path that will actually occur.

When I bought the book, I was gung-ho about this commercialization of space as personified by Benson and his organization. That's why I bought and read the book, and I see a place for an astrodynamicist like myself in this endeavor. There will come a time in the future (the Heinlein model) when people like me will be as valuable as, say, roughnecks or financiers are today, although financiers will always find ways to divert more than their share of the payment resources their own way at everybody else's expense. The commercialization of space is what I've always said I wanted, but now with Benson and Lewis calling my bluff I'm having to re-evaluate everything, and this just at a time when I may be in the process of selecting a non-growth or non-promotion lifestyle. Maybe it can all work together and maybe not, I'll just have to work it all out and see.

For today's audience, this is the textbook for an overview course on how or at least why to be stepping out into the solar system. Now I'll go off to read some of the other books on Benson's list, and some others that conflict in philosophy, personifying the societal struggles of the age, as always.