NASA wants to bring a small near Earth asteroid into orbit near the moon for scientific experimentation...?

Yes, that's what they want to research, after-all, you can't use the same smelting process you use on Earth to refine metals in space, it's not like you can throw charcoal from trees or coke from coal on iron oxides to remove the oxygen as there are no trees or coal in space. Look into how iron is smelted on Earth, almost none of the procedures are possible in space, we would have to find a new way of refining iron. Then there's making steel, more trees, coal and even oxygen needed...

I think most of the future mining of asteroids and the Moon would be done with robots, any actual human interaction would be by telepresence from humans in well shielded space habitats nearby for low latencies using virtual interfaces to control robots with human like torso's and hands.

I think Planetary Resources is still working on small cubesat probes for prospecting, the hope being to find fragments of a proto-planetary core as the valuable heavier elements would've differentiated into them. However, all of our current probes have only found undifferentiated material that have never been part of a proto-planet. Such small probes may find asteroids but would not be able to move asteroids. Also, metals from asteroids can compete with Earth metals in a market in space but not fundamentally with a market on Earth, you need colonies in space for asteroid mining to really work well.

You don't really need to 3D print structures though that may be possible with vapor deposition as space is a vacuum. You only need to make wire which is easy cause they're just metal drawn through a hole. From wire you can make cables, from cables you can knit structures ( yes knit as in knit a sweater ), you then pack aluminum and iron oxide powder ( thermite ) onto the structure and ignite welding the structure solid. Yes, I want to see robots knit a torus space station just like automated looms would knit a scarf today.

If you have access to asteroids in space, you don't need mini-magnetospheres which only shield you from charged particles, you would just make a radiation shield out of "sandbags" of asteroid regolith. Most of a space habitat could be a big fat sandbag outer tire that doesn't rotate lined by aluminum on the inside then an inner tire habitat lined with Halbach arrays of rare earth magnets to magnetically levitate off the inductive aluminum strips in the same fashion as GM's Inductrack. Much of the tension can then be passed onto the non-rotating radiation shield which doesn't have to support it's own weight. The Halbach arrays would also give you your mini-magnetosphere without any inside the habitat.

The atmosphere in the habitat would be from packing dry ice, water ammonia ice and even some regolith into the inner tube as it's knitted then just allowing it to heat up in the Sun or artificial lights can disassociate the ammonia into nitrogen and hydrogen and melt the CO2. Astronauts would just need to attach airlocks, a nuclear generator and thermal radiators then bulldoze the regolith into a comfortable terrain and plant grass and trees.

The use of wires, knitting, thermite welding, sandbag adobe radiation shields and halbach arrays not only reduces all tasks to proven technologies but to technologies already automated. The tough part would be the thermal radiator but I have a few ideas for that as well. No need to wait for large scale 3D printing and magnetospheres to be proven.

there is not any possible hazard of effect in this bypass, or on any bypass interior the subsequent 2 centuries. So we are risk-free for now. In some hundred years, it may hit the moon. If it did, it might positioned on a dazzling gentle instruct yet have no genuine result on the moon's orbit. The moon isn't as massive as Earth, despite the fact that if it truly is been hit via extremely some asteroids way larger than this one and is a lot super sufficient to soak up them with little to no orbital perturbation. the genuine threat is that for the duration of a few hundred years it may hit Earth. it truly is result on orbit would be even smaller, despite the fact that if it might vaporize an exceptionally massive chew of the planet and reason a protracted term ice age, it might decimate our nutrition sources, and maximum if no longer all human life would perish contained in right here years. it truly is not a question of IF this would take place, yet while. There are over 3 hundred customary Earth-crossing asteroids super sufficient to reason international-extensive injury, and for each a form of customary bodies that's predicted that there are hundreds of unknown ones. we would desire to place money into area exploration technologies to help us stumble on those, and to strengthen the thank you to deflect one while that's discovered. it might no longer take place for 5 thousand years, or it may take place the following day. We would desire to start taking the possibility heavily.

Well, yeah, sound's great, and I think that's pretty much the long term goal. I'm not quite seeing how you're planning to show a profit from this, though, or to whom you imagine whatever profit there will go. The start-up infrastructure investments are huge, though, are these companies you're promoting actually prepared to foot the bill, or are they waiting for the taxpayers to lay down the infrastructure and then swoop down to profit from it? One of those "socialize the risk, privatize the profits" kind of arrangements? In other words, are they actually *doing* anything, or are they just a couple of pretty websites with no meat on the bone?

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Call me a cynic, but the only time I see corporations putting a dollar down today is when there are two dollars to be made tomorrow, not decades from now. That's why we have pharmaceutical companies making massive investments on anti-depressants that people will take the rest of their lives, as opposed to new antibiotics that will save lives but only be used for two weeks.

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That is a good point - Asteroids can contain useful metals.

I think that sometime in the future, the Asteroid belt will be the home of production of spacecraft, because, as you say, they wouldn't have to be put into orbit, with the usual fuel costs and such.