Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "What Happened To Space Mining?" video.

It was always hype and delusion and largely still is. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing.
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You are in part right. The biggest problem with everything in space is logistics. How do you get stuff from point A to point B. And its not that different to what we do here on Earth now. Its just that most people have no idea of how much stuff we move. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing. Irrespective if you are Jeff Bezos who wants to shift all iron processing into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or mine an asteroid you need to get the iron to where you want it. That means bringing it down to the earths surface. The biggest payload carrying vehicle so far that could bring stuff back down was the Space Shuttle and it could bring 14tons down from LEO. I once worked on a min that did just over 20,000,000 tons a year of iron ore at an average of about 70% iron content by weight. So those 20 million tons of ore coverts to about 14 million tons of iron and if that 14 million tons was in orbit it would take 1 million Space Shuttle Flights to bring it down. Australia's annual production of iron ore is about 815,000,000 tons of iron ore. If you do the math to ship Australia's iron ore production up to LEO and then bring the iron back down its around 40million space shuttle flights a year. Even if we magically built a new super rocket 100times better that's still 400,000 flights a year. I will be honest until I was involved in mining I had no idea how much material we actually move these days. The logistics of world trade is simply staggering.
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I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing and can barley comprehend how anyone can believe them.
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@Andrew Please tell me you are getting this form other sources, because what you just said is utter complete and total nonsense. It DOES NOT matter how you bring stuff down from Low Earth Orbit. The energy has to be dissipated and at orbital speeds that's a lot of energy. This is why things burn up on re-entry. They convert kinetic energy into thermal energy by air resistance. This is why Jeff Bezos is an IDI0T for suggesting we move iron ore processing into space. Even if we get it from an asteroid the 2.4billion tons we use each year has the equivalent energy of over 1,100 Hiroshima bombs if its in the same orbit as the ISS. To get it down means dissipating that energy in the atmosphere, which would heat it up worse than it already is. Its called thermodynamics, you and all the other clowns need to do a class in it.
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@christopherharvey4849 You are very much on the right track. I can't say nuclear fusion is "the technology" we need to develop but there's a whole range of technologies that have yet to be developed to the stage where they can be used. AND there's a lot of unanswered questions regarding how we'll do things. I quite often point out that the Space Shuttle was on one hand an incredible achievement in that they made a reusable space plane work, but that it was also a horrendous failure because it consumed resources in terms of both money and people that starved development of a lot of other technologies we need to do things like build a moon base and then make it work. Things like space suit development just froze and if you know where to look it up they almost had fatal failures on some of the longer Apollo Missions. The lunar regolith is laced with microscopic fragments of silicon oxides which are almost as hard as diamond and it got into everything like the wrist and waist seals. You simply can't do a 10-14 day mission on the lunar surface with an Apollo era space suit.
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@clementvining2487 And most of all don't make stupid claims taken from science fiction as if they are science fact. Antimatter - really????? Please learn the difference between fiction and fact.
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@UCOaDHPHrsXLZCBjlzeLU74Q I'm not American, I'm Australian but went to college in America. So I know the Americans quite well. I know their attitudes towards taking things. I wasn't being pro-American I was replying to the sarcasm of your notion that Bruce could mine an asteroid. Just so you know for future reference. There's actually 2 versions of American politics. Its not surprising most people don't understand that because they are both what the rest of the world identifies as right wing. They are just slightly different versions of right wing. A bit like Apple OS and Android are both smart phone systems - same, same but different. On one side are the Realists and the other the Liberals. The Realists are mostly Republicans and in their view humans are greedy and selfish so they justify everything they take, like they did in Iraq, because that's human nature. They don't care who's in charge so long as they can do what they want and take what they want. These are the goons who went into places and overthrew or helped overthrow democratically elected governments and installed dictatorships. The Liberals are the same in many ways but instead of narcissism they have the "we are superior culture" line and its hardwired into their brains that they have to make the whole world American. Its a hangover from when the British wanted to make the whole world British. These are the people who often turn up after the Realists have hammered a nation and try and install an American style democracy. Either way if the American Realists or American Liberals start interfering in your nation its a mess AND YES they have done heaps to Australia. Don't misread that either. I love America and their people because they do some amazing stuff but there stinking foul politics is something they should burn.
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@onsokumaru4663 Very well put. There was a great British TV Series called "Hustle" about a team of conmen, who do complex lomg cons like the one done in the film "the Sting." At the very end of the very last episode they talk to the audience about NOT GETTING conned. The make the point that honest people can't be conned. People looking for the easy way or people who cheat can be conned. Its right here at 49:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMisS2AjnYA
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@clementvining2487 I HAVE SPENT MOST OF THE LAST 20 YEARS IN THE MINING INDUSTRY SO STOP PREACHING TO ME. I know more about the logistics of mining than you do. Its what gets me angry about clowns who try and preach to me about it. Unlike so many of the clown brigade I went and got real experience. So stop preaching to me until you go and get real experience too.
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@bristoled93 Yes I know who Isaac Arthur is and he way too often confuses science fiction with reality, but then so many of the so called "science communicators" are guilty of doing that.
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@clementvining2487 HERE'S SOME EXPERIENCE. In 2013 I worked for Rio Tino on the Mount Tom Price Mine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tom_Price_mine If you or any others look at the satellite you'll see there's no airport at the town of Tom Price. You actually fly into the airport at Paraburdo and you fly there on one of the last fleets of Boeing 717s because 737s are too heavy for the runway. HOW DO I KNOW THAT? Because I have worked there. If you google earth the coordinates in Wikipedia the red marker is right on a straight line (going left to right). That's the conveyor for the reclaimer to the north of that is another parallel line that is the conveyor for the stacker. In between is the high grade fines stockpiles. North of that is the high grad lump stockpile. That line of divots are because it load the trains with a series of chutes under the stockpile. I could describe that site in detail. BECASUE I HAVE WORKED THERE. I can describe other mines in Australia because I have worked on them.
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@bristoled93 I gave up watching his channel a while back because it was to much futurism and I have a very short fuse with futurists. They push conjecture and ideas as if they will be fact in the near future. They have a terrible way of grabbing public attention that the media then latch onto and then engineers spend months unravelling what they set in motion. The mainstream media like to have futurists on because they can spout almost anything and the media can stand back and claim "we didn't say it that person did." They then repeat that and repat it and repeat it and eventually it goes from being an idea to accepted reality. And university professors are among some of the worst at that. Most people don't realise that academics have to fight for funding. So they often promote "imagine when we have....." AI is arguably the worst example. A staggering number of people actually believe we have computers that can think. When we can't actually explain what thinking actually is. What we do have are algorithms that can mimic a human for specific well defined tasks. Its why it works so well with image analysis in areas like facial recognition. Space mining is another futurist fantasy promoted by people trying to raise cash. Most people have no idea what mining is about, other than it involves digging and they know even less about space.
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@bristoled93 Buddy I was in college when Challenger happened. Before that reality slapped us down our main topic of discussion was how we would be build Space Station Freedom and then head back to the moon. A few years down the track one of my class mates was helping build the ISS. We actually had a disagreement circa 2000 about how that was proceeding and she slapped me down with some harsh reality about what it took to build in space. So I know what getting slapped down with reality feels like. She's now one of a group of people that if you don't have her approval your stuff doesn't go to the ISS. We went to U. Illinois and down the street from our building was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). A couple of after we were there some of those guys as a side project did the Mosaic program. That became Netscape and then Internet Explorer. So don't lecture me about space stations or the Internet. I know more about both than you ever will for one basic reason. I LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN I DO. Its how you learn stuff.
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@seyedmortezakamali2597 Yeah right we'll just see if we can get Wile E. Coyote to design that system right after he finally catches the road runner.
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@ChickensAndGardening Not suggesting but stating it for a fact. The idea you could just move an asteroid from where they are to Low Earth Orbit is nothing but Star Trek fantasy. Here's something I tell people who go on about this nonsense. Jeff Bezos has claimed he wants to move the heavy industries like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit where there's lots of sun light 24/7 to use and you don't have to worry about pollution. One of the iron ore mines I once worked on has a capacity of about 20 million tons a year. Its a good example because the math is very easy. At about 70% iron by weight that produces about 14 million tons of raw iron a year ready to make stuff out of. The Space Shuttle could bring back from LEO 14 tons of payload which was about 13-1/2 tons more than anything else. So if you want to bring back those 14 million tons of iron ore from LEO it would take about 1 million Space Shuttle flights. Australia in total produces about 815 million tons of iron ore a year which would require over 40 million Space Shuttle Flights. Even if we made a new magic rocket that was 100 times better than the Space Shuttle that's still 400,000 flights a year. And so you know Australia produces less that 1/3rd of the worlds iron ore. Sorry but its 99.99% space fantasy nonsense. The other 0.01% is however very interesting. There are some very rare materials available from places like the moon where for those very rare substances the option of mining them in space is plausible. World Platinum production is about 215 tons a year and our needs there have been growing. If we can get a rocket that makes the logistics practical then that's plausible. If Helium-3 were to become the main fuel for nuclear fusion that needs about 5-9 Space Shuttle Flights to power the entire planet each year. But the issue there is nobody yet has a power station that runs on Helium-3. At the end of the day its just guys selling visions of the future.
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@clementvining2487 1/2 Agreed and the 1/2 is for places like a moon base where the resources are right there. But asteroids for LEO are still an issue of fuel and delta-V. I don't know how many times we need to beat you clowns around the head with that. You cannot get around the physical laws of the universe upon which orbital mechanics and delta-V are based. Sorry but that's NO for a second time. Unless someone comes up with a truly revolutionary from of propulsion THEN ITS NO. And I don't mean some science fiction garbage either I mean something that actually works. You people need to learn the difference between science fiction and reality.
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@clementvining2487 Sorry but I am well aware of what Molten Salt Reactor are. I know the history and the story od how Kirk Sorenson re-discovered them while working on possible solutions for powering a lunar base. Can you and all the other people who have no idea what you are talking about PLEASE STOP LECTURING engineers. You have no idea what you are talking about as is evident by your repeated use of the non-existent term "radiative waste." There is no such thing as radiative waste but there is radioactive waste. Its INFURIATING TO BE LECTURED by people who don't know what they are talking about but for some reason every clown who can use a computer or drives a car thinks they can tell us how to do our jobs.
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Most of all DON'T YOU EVER DARE to complain about other people when YOUR ATTITUDE SUCKS.
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@alexandervlaescu9901 CAN PEOPLE LIKE YOU JUST STOP There is NOTHING easy about space and none of it is child's play. Just stop claiming that science fiction is 100% based on fact. It isn't, even the very best science fiction has to ignore basic reality at some point. Here's a simple FACT. The human race right now digs up and processes just over 3,000,000,000 tons of iron ore EVERY YEAR. Yes 3 Billion tons incase you can't count that many zeros. The biggest capacity launcher currently is SLS at 130t to LEO. Jeff Bezos (yes the Amazon guy) wants to move all heavy industry to LEO so that we can use unlimited solar power and have no pollution here on Earth. Blue Origin's New Glenn has a capacity of 45t to LEO Jeff Bezos is yet to explain how we'll make enough rockets to do 67 million New Glenn launches a year or where we'll get enough rocket fuel to do it. SLS would be better at 23 million launches a year. And if Elon somehow strapped a bunch of Starship boosters together and made a Mega Starship capable of 1,000t to LEO we'd still need 3 million launches a year. AND THAT'S just the Iron, after that there's the Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Vanadium, Cobalt, Tin, Gold, Lead and all the other stuff the 7.8 Billion humans need every year just to keep society going. This is some of the stuff I have been trying to tell people for several years now. Sorry but reality sucks if you think science fiction is easy to convert into science fact.
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@clementvining2487 AGAIN if you and others think you are speaking about reality then what part of basic math don't you understand. JUST STOP PREACHING about the differences between theory and fact when you have no idea what you are talking about. This is what truly infuriates STEM educated people. Uneducated people PREACHING NONSENSE about things they have no understanding.
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@clementvining2487 You really are an ignorant M0R0N aren't you??? Its called being realistic and not living in a delusional fantasy. YET AGAIN YOU HAVEN'T REFUTED A THING I HAVE SAID One of the biggest influences in my reasoning was Arthur C Clarke. He wrote a really interesting book called "Profiles of the Future" where he scrutinised a lot of his own literary items. One of the things Clarke put down was the Space Elevator and he loved the Space Elevator using itor similar technology in several novels. BUT he also knew they were totally impractical for a planet like Earth because the gravity well is too strong. Like Arthur C Clarke I've also had to learn the difference between ideas and reality. I actually wanted to service satellites and I was far from the first to know there was a case for that or propose it. A classmate who works at NASA on the ISS slammed that down 20years ago with the simple reality that we don't have suitable propulsion systems for that sort of work. I once met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he further killed that with some simple reality about the commercial the launch industry. But then Harrison told me about Helium-3 mining on the moon. Which was why I went and worked in the mining industry TO LEARN ABOUT MINING. You see that's the difference between ignorant clowns like you and people like me. I AM WILLING TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN I DO. ITS CALLED LEARNING.
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@SolomonDavidMichael It gets even simpler than that. if you just look at iron ore production and if you know about the inground reserves its ludicrous. Where there might be a possibility is for very rare things. At one point Helium-3 was a potential fuel for nuclear fusion. The only known viable resource is the moon. Unless somebody finds a magical asteroid with some magical isotope of something that makes some magical technology we all want work, then no asteroid mining wont be a thing until humans actually settle space and that's a lot further off than advertised.
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@lifewithpets-7588 What??????
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@OBEYTHEPYRAMID Yeah and Bush & Co should have sent Bruce instead of marines into Iraq. Obama should have sent Bruce into Pakistan instead of seal team 6 Trump should have sent Bruce into Biden's basement. Biden doesn't need to send Stingers and Javelins to Ukraine, just send Bruce. In fact send him to Moscow. I just don't know why the nuclear football isn't reprogrammed with Bruce codes. it would make the whole US Foreign policy thing so much easier.
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@OBEYTHEPYRAMID Yeah fine. And its not so much they are separated by elitists and hypocrisy because they both have that. Both Obamas Harvard, both Clintons Yale, while Ted Cruz is Princeton & Harvard. There are 9 SCOTUS judges - 4 Harvard, 4 Yale and a Notre Dame. America has 2 factions of Ivy League brats. One group is more narcissistic and the other delusional self superiority. Both have a bunch of common traits and its those common traits that explain why NASA hasn't been back to the moon for 50+ years and why so many other things that cloud have or should have happened haven't. Both groups think they know how do to anything and everything BUT in actual fact know very little about getting anything done at all. They have projected that onto their supporters who also think everything is a matter of "just do this" or "just do that." Look at the comments on this video its a litany of "we'll just do" attitudes. I actually went off to the Australian mining sector to learn how to build mines in remote places, then get them working and then keep them working. So I actually know first hand the stuff you need to have in place BEFORE digging starts. Amazingly the management types are just like the politicians. They all think they know how it all works and what it takes to keep it working AND THEY JUST DON'T. Its a common thread running right through all our societies like a Dunning-Kruger plague. Its just more obvious in some than others.
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