Asteroid Mining

I was thinking about asteroid mining today and I came up with pic related. Tell me why I'm a retard and it wouldn't work.

Attached: mine.png (800x600, 45K)

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you would need a really, really long chain of magnets

I know it would be expensive and difficult to built, however once it was built it would make it much cheaper to move objects to and from the asteroid belt.

Maybe.

But it'd be a better investment to build a giant refinery ship, and have mining ships transport raw asteroids to it, then have cargo ships transport the refined product back to earth. Once a section of the asteroid belt is empty, just move the refinery to a new section.

Your way would require large powerful magnets, you risk a ferrous asteroid being pulled toward the magnet, and you also risk it crashing to earth

the price to build it would far outweigh any benefits
you should google how far away things are in space
like even the moon

Using ships would require that they have some kind of fuel and unless it can be made from the asteroids it would have to be launched to them from Earth. Launching enough fuel for that system to work would also be very expensive and it would be a recurring cost.
Hmm, you're probably right.

Magnets are not fixed in space. Each magnet will be attracted in an opposite manner to the asteroid it is pulling. You would need stabilization rockets on each magnet which would have the same or less efficiency than having a large rocket on the asteroid.

What keeps the magnets in place? Rockets? Why not just put a single smaller one on an asteroid?

no fucking idea what a magnet relay is but considering the asteroid belt is 180 million km away I'd say your idea is completely insane. Even if you only needed a 100kg magnet for every KM (you'd need way more) that would still be 20000000 tons of magnets and at 10 million dollars per ton to launch into space that works out to 200 trillion.

Jow Forums is tech consumerism, you're looking for

Don't you fucking litter our board with this trash. This thread belongs in /b/.

Because asteroids are, quite literally, astronomically far apart. You would have to actively try to actually fucking clock into one if you passed through the asteroid belt, so there's absolutely no reason not to just mine them in place.
You wouldnt want to try and move the fuckers to some central processing station floating in space either, first of all they tend to be HUGE, and you dont want to float enormous balls of minerals and metals with no real way to lose inertia towards anything you dont want to destroy.

TL;DR You dont seem to understand anything about space and this is stupid for a lot of reasons, not least of all the fact you would need unbelievably powerful magnets to move a fucking asteroid.

there's like several dozen Jow Forums and /b/ tier threads on /sci/ right now

You couldn't have made my point for me any better than this.

everything in space is constantly moving, a long magnet relay wouldn't stay in place like you want it to. eventually one of the many gravitational forces would take it and spin it like a yarn ball.

This is accurate. OP you could move max one asteroid using this method, and then you would have to go and move all the magnets back into place and restore their potential energy.

The problem is that you have no energy input into your method beyond the initial setup, and it takes a lot of energy to move the asteroid from its orbit to the same as Earth's orbit, then even more to get it to slow it down to orbit around Earth. Any time you change something's speed you need energy.

Your best hope would be to use a spacecraft to perturb an asteroid into the path of another asteroid, such that the resulting collision somehow sent it towards earth on a path so that it just misses the earth and is captured by it's gravity well.

It would require more materials to build the magnet relay than you would get from mining the entire asteroid belt.

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we have plenty of resources to mine here on earth trump just needs to change the regulations so we can mine "rare" earths in the west not having to rely on chyna so much

There is so many things wrong with this. What benefits would this have over imparting all the momentum at the asteroid belt? The long chain of magnets is just unnecessary extra infrastructure, and you don't lose momentum in space

Also this isn't technology faggot

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Is is like ethereum.

You dont know what happened in dead space.

>magents
>magent
>asteriod
>magents
>magent
>reasources
>oribiting
Learn to spell, for fuck's sake.

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Magnets are not magic.

I think the most obvious issue with this design can be explained with entry-level physics.

A magnet of course has a magnetic field and objects that are attracted are under the influence of a magnetic force. If you had a series of magnets suspended in a line in space, and all their positive poles are facing the same direction, then they will all act upon one another with an attractive force. This means they'll all accelerate toward one another (likely converging on whichever has the greatest magnetic force). This of course ruins the linearly spaced series that you're hoping the asteroid be transported along.

[-M+] -->

Magnets aren't free energy, using magnets instead of fuel is likely more expensive

Magnetic force is too weak, moron, this shit wouldn't work even on a theoretical scale

Asteroid mining is dum, what you really want to do is starlifting.

Nah it belongs on Jow Forums. Those idiots have been spewing this crap for a couple years in metals threads.

Aren't you my classmate by any chance? He said something similar last year

>High velocity asteroid misses factory/refinery
>Hits Earth
>Mass extinction event
This concept is flawless

You wouldn't need the robot because any worthwile asteroids probably contain iron

>going to space for rocks
>we live on a giant rock
Typical libtard logic

>magents
>magent
>magents
>magent

>orbiting station
Stop right there user. I don't think you know how orbits work.

Magent relays sure are something.

I don't think you realise how long the chain of magnets would actually have to be

Because the asteroid belt is 3au's away.
Even if you were building the magnet relay instantly, travelling at the speed of light, it would take almost half an hour.

Those asteroids are going to be moving really fast, they're probably more likely to pull your array apart than anything else.

>dude lets attract massive rocks to earth

This also isn't how orbital mechanics work. The beginning of this video is a good example:
youtube.com/watch?v=0Y5oDKT6vME

The dots start close together, but, because they are at different altitudes, the inner dots begin to stray further away from the rest. Eventually it'd be hard to tell that they'd started close at all. Your orbiting relays would do the same.

Whatever your stupid question is, the answer is cost