Space Mining and Refining
Space Mining and Refining — Terra Invicta technology. We develop methods to extract and refine space resources in airless and low-gravity environments.
About Space Mining and Refining
Space Mining and Refining is a Terra Invicta technology in SpaceScience with a research cost of 2,500.
We develop methods to extract and refine space resources in airless and low-gravity environments.
Hauling raw materials up Earth's gravity well is the very opposite of a long-term plan. In order to spread further into space, we must be able to obtain at least some of what we need from space. Fortunately, nearby asteroids have no shortage of minerals and rare metals, from which we can begin to construct ships and facilities in space. Iron, carbon, aluminum, copper, oxygen, nitrogen, and water will be most urgently required, but gold and platinum will be readily available too. But one cannot mine in space as one would on Earth. For one thing, low or micro-gravity mean mined resources cannot tumble neatly into containers or be automatically gravity-separated by type, while structures cannot be directly built upon the surface. And so it is that the first method devised to address this is a distinctly unglamorous one - a system of long (up to 1 kilometer) cables and collection bags to tether equipment to an asteroid, and to prevent mined resources from simply floating away. This is an important start, but truly mass-mining will require far more advanced solutions - and the capability to do and use more in situ form, rather than depend on what Earth can send.
Prerequisites
Leads to
- In Situ Resource Utilization
- Industrialization of Space
- Mission to the Asteroids
- Outpost Mining Complex
- Helium-3 Mine
- Resource Market Administration
- Water Purification Techniques
- Rapid Distillation Techniques
- Deep Space Metallurgy
- Molecular Beneficiation
- Rapid Fissile Enrichment
- Thermal Mining Techniques