Is Asteroid Mining safe?

So I found out that it would under certain circumstances be economic to harvest Asteroids.

Given the following:

• Technological level is nearly similar to todays Earth.
• There are transportships which can carry material through any place of the solarsystem.
• There is a facility in the Main Asteroid Belt which can process said asteroids.

My question now: Is installing a facility inside an asteroid belt and navigating around in said asteroid belt safe?

What to do with the waste? Get a ship and throw it in the sun?

How much would accidents increase the danger in the area (Kessler Syndrome)?

I think that slow moving asteroids can easily be evaded or catched and redirected/processed, but how high is the risk of fast moving asteroids? Or how likely would it be to get into a high-density area where are simply too many objects for any actions?

I thought about placing the facility in an higher or lower orbit than the belt, but that would result in mining ships (which would collect asteroid-material for processing) would either have to catch-up with the station, fall back to it or make a nearly full round around the sun to get to the station again. This seems impractical.

posted almost 10 years ago

J_F_B_M‭

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