About 10 years in our current future, in the mid 2030ies, a number of private companies as well as the usual government agencies, like NASA and ESA, are trying to get into the business of mining asteroids. The goal is to kick off an entire new economy, including manufacturing in space. One of the biggest problems with space development is that every liter of water, every chicken wing to eat, every computer, literally everything we need in space has to be lifted from the surface of Earth into orbit at an exorbitant cost. How exorbitant?
During the Space Shuttle era, it cost about $54,000 per kilogram of mass. That’s the cost of lifting one liter of water into space. That’s because the Space Shuttle used expendable rockets. Now, with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a reusable vehicle, the cost has come down dramatically, to about $1,400 per kilogram. Still a huge cost, considering how much material it takes to build a space station to live in.
If asteroids can be mined for metals, water, oxygen, the ingredients to make rocket fuel, and everything else we need, those raw materials are already in space and the cost to deliver them where they are needed, like in factories in lunar orbit or earth orbit, is much lower. Clearly, whoever can deliver materials in space to space is going to get very, very rich.
In Delta-V, this is the basic story. A renegade billionaire secretly builds a space ship outfitted to mine a near-earth asteroid. He recruits and trains an elite group of astronauts and sends them into deep space for the first mining mission.
Things do not go as planned, the billionaire turns out to be a fraud, and the minors are stranded in deep space with no obvious way to get home.
Delta-V is a well-written story of our near future in the current environment, where we are transitioning from government-controlled missions to private enterprises. I learned a lot about the technicalities of asteroid mining. For instance, I was always naively assuming that astronauts could just land an an asteroid and start digging. I didn’t realize that the surface of many asteroids is highly toxic to humans and damaging to electronics, so it’s not that simple. While the premise of the novel is fairly far-fetched, it taught me many things I didn’t know about the technicalities of asteroid mining, including how to get there, how to get back, and what’s involved in being there, let alone that the minimum trip duration is at least four years.
Overall, Delta-V is an entertaining story – and – you might have guessed it, there is a sequel.
