There has been some “new thinking” on how to mine the asteroids – certainly a method that will be less dangerous to Humans; certainly it will cost less in the long-run because you don’t have to feed robots nor house them, nor make accommodation for them in any way. Even if you have prisoners as miners (an ancient and hardly-vanished tradition in practice for thousands of years (even up to today-as-you-read-this), it presents problems of its own.
“Gerard K. O’Neill proposed building enormous rotating space settlements at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points back in the 1970s.”
The first and worst problem is that he based such an effort on the use of “cheap” space-shuttle flights, never imagining that the Shuttle would be abandoned after two explosions destroyed not only the Shuttles but the crews – and they proved horrendously expensive. The Space Shuttle would never carry the amount of “stuff” he envisioned at anything even approaching economical and profit-making amounts…
He also figured that “hundreds of people would be working under weightless conditions in space to fabricate the settlements.” Experiments on the ISS as well as its 20-year continued occupancy (and it's STILL only a yard shy of being as long as a football field, barely able to house a handful of astronauts – and CONSIDERABLY less-well-funded than even a pair of Stadia like the US Bank in Minneapolis (where I live) and the Lucas Oil in Indianapolis (the next nearest one to me) – have shown that working under weightless conditions for extended periods of time is detrimental to Human health. The record stay in the ISS is 328 days for a woman; and a tied record at 355 days for a man. This doesn't promote any kind of creation of a routine that would be sustainable for any kind of mining of an asteroid. We'd need at least half standard G in order to remain healthy.
So…what then? This new idea, creatively named “autonomous conversion of asteroids into rotating space settlements” or more simply, ACOAIRSS...or, I think I’ll just pronounce it “Eco-Airs”...uses an asteroid as a point of rotation, then, utilizing robotic mining of the asteroid and initial manufacture of component parts, the robots assemble the pieces into a station that would spin up the asteroid and attached station parts until the entire thing is spinning under “gravity” created by centrifugal force (if you’re not sure if I used the right word: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/centripetal-vs-centrifugal-word-origins/#:~:text=Centripetal%20force%20is%20the%20force,something%20flee%20from%20the%20center.&text=Rhett%20Allain%20is%20an%20associate%20professor%20of%20physics%20at%20Southeastern%20Louisiana%20University.) The Eco-Airs would then be habitable by Human crews who would be able to stay for extended periods and make the Eco-Airs a going concern, mining ore for export down to Earth.
My personal opinion: the investment required – not to mention the technology and even the robotic brain power (or a AI capable of running such an affair without the protection of an atmosphere to protect it during solar flares) is problematic at best.
Humans, especially INCARCERATED Humans have always proved cheaper and more efficient miners than any kind of robotic machine – if robots were cheaper and better, there would be substantially fewer than some 700,000 people employed by the mining industry in the US alone. (I was unable to find any site where the number of miners were employed anywhere but here. HOWEVER, one report notes that “…51% of the mapped mining area is concentrated in only five countries: China, Australia, the United States, Russia, and Chile. Another ten countries account for 30%, and the remaining countries add up to 19% of the total mapped mining area.” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00624-w))
Rest assured, while we protest otherwise, CHEAP is the siren call of every effort on Earth to produce ANYTHING -- from hamburgers to jumbo jets. Cost will, as always, drive both technology and development of newer ways to use it more cheaply.
Speculating on this, my GUESTIMATE would be that there are some 10,000,000 miners on Earth. Let’s postulate then that we can, indeed capture a target asteroid. We can move it – which we know is POSSIBLE (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-dart-data-validates-kinetic-impact-as-planetary-defense-method), so we WILL do it if the profit margin is high enough. I’ll also grant that while we could probably move it into a stable Earth orbit, and given the possibility of using that ability to drop the rock on Earth as a weapon, the asteroid will most likely be moved into a stable Lunar orbit.
Speculating on this, my GUESTIMATE would be that there are some 10,000,000 miners on Earth. Let’s postulate then that we can, indeed capture a target asteroid. We can move it – which we know is POSSIBLE (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-dart-data-validates-kinetic-impact-as-planetary-defense-method), so we WILL do it if the profit margin is high enough. I’ll also grant that while we could probably move it into a stable Earth orbit, and given the possibility of using that ability to drop the rock on Earth as a weapon, the asteroid will most likely be moved into a stable Lunar orbit.
Using a variation of the technology even now devised for capturing small asteroids that could be scaled up after a few successful captures, we seed the space inside the carbon-fiber “bag” with micro-robots that actually begin the process of mining. Once enough material is unearthed, it can be used to build a programmed habitat large enough for a skeleton crew. From that point onward, Humans would work both themselves and with the robots to create a larger and larger habitat that could in turn, begin to feed off of more asteroids that have been brought into the Lunar orbit and "fed" to the growing station.
Finally, with the construction of either a new kind of freight shuttle or even independent, robotic re-entry vehicles, refined ore might be shipped back to the surface and used to bolster dwindling supplies on Earth.
A thought occurs to me that rather than building some sort of “super shell” or Dyson sphere or Ring World around the Sun, a sure sign of a technologically advanced civilization MIGHT be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Kafka (or CArbon Fiber Collapsible Asteroid Halo (CAFCAH = “Kafka”) breaking down asteroids to provide the raw materials needed for manufacturing an endless number of products both back on the surface of the homeworld, in orbit, and eventually on the Moon, Mars, and eventually the entire Solar System.
New Source:
https://spacesettlementprogress.com/autonomous-conversion-of-asteroids-into-rotating-space-settlements/?fbclid=IwAR2PAUZDmstEO-q6vwC0OVE9STbuN5zE-y5ncTFUfs5m1xP9jwVayF_oo7M,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00624-w, carbon fiber collapsible asteroid halo (CFCAH – “Kafka”)
Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth, https://www.pharostribune.com/news/local_news/article_7fcd3ea5-3c14-533f-a8d5-9bf629922f34.html, https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/29/like-asteroid-mining-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroadtothefirstflight.htm, https://hackaday.com/2019/03/27/extraterrestrial-excavation-digging-holes-on-other-worlds/, https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/every-small-worlds-mission
Image: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A2D5/production/_114558614_hls-eva-apr2020.jpg
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