terrible character writing; took too long for everything to fall apart; I'll probably read the sequel and it'll probably be 3 stars, too. ( )

One can almost predict the end but not quite. A lot of interesting philosophy about where humanity needs to go next. The story of a risky effort to mine an asteroid and all the human till that goes with that. ( )

Very good techno-thriller from Daniel Suarez. I don't think he could ever top his first book, Daemon, a heart-stopping thrill ride from start to finish. Delta-V refers to the power required to escape Earth's gravity well. A major problem with colonizing space is that it's too expensive to get cargo into orbit and past the orbit of Earth- but if asteroids could be mined for waters and metals, the material would already be outside the gravity well, requiring much less Delta-V to be deployed.

The book is set in the 2030s. James Tighe, the main point of view character, is a caver and family black sheep. He is recruited by Nathan Joyce, a (pre-Twitter) Elon-Musk-type visionary and business titan, to crew the first space vessel to an asteroid and mine materials for return to near-Earth. The first half of the book consists of an endless training and culling sequence, with many recruits whittled down to just eight eventually. Then the crew heads out into space for a four year mission to mine, and to prove it can be done and launch humanity into space.

The second half of the book is gripping, as things of course go wrong and the crew along with their handlers on Earth have to improvise and try to get back safely. The book ends satisfyingly, but with big unresolved issues and a planned sequel.

Suarez knows how to write page-turners. This is really good, but I have a few issues. As noted above, the training sequence is too long, and could have been culled by 100 pages. There are also a ton of characters there, which seems unnecessary since many of them never make it to the mission, and I couldn't keep track of so many.

But really good anyway, I'm definitely in on the sequel(s). ( )

amazingly well-written story with interesting characters, well-researched science/physics, and a plausible plot line... i blew through this book in no time at all, and hope i can read book 2 (critical mass) in the next few weeks... ( )

Exciting page turning adventure about the selection, training and mission of a crew for the first asteroid mining. ( )

I'm no more than 5% in to this book, and find the ideas to be interesting, and the science seems good for what I can follow. However... it's getting to be a chore to keep reading, which is not what I'm looking for these days. It's too serious and matter-of-fact, and frankly, I'm getting bored. So, maybe I'll get back in to it one day, but until then - no rating.

Interesting story, not quite credible on a number of levels, but bringing a frontier mentality to space instead of a safety mentality makes for an interesting story. Well told by Suarez as usual. ( )

Decent space thriller; the cliched but still interesting "asteroid miner space pirates" thing but with a few twists which make it better. The obviously-based-on-current-business-leaders characters were amusing. Overall, a decent read, but not as amazing as Daemon/Freedom. ( )

Fun to read but overly dramatic given the clichéd plot. The rainbow cast of character stereotypes is ridiculous. ( )

This book was a little slow to get into, but once I got hooked, I really did get hooked.

There were a number of things I liked about this book:
- I like the premise. Asteroid mining, not Martian colonization, ought to be our goal. The author argues this forcefully. It's worth thinking about, anyway.
- I think the way it comes about in this story is looking increasingly plausible from a political point of view. The breakthrough doesn't come from a massive Apollo-like government effort (e.g., the Martian); it comes from eccentric billionaires lying and doing underhanded deals and generally working around governments instead of with them. Not surprisingly, the underhanded deals come back and bite them.
- The characters are moderately interesting, and you come to admire their heroism, determination, and loyalty.

What made this book a slow start was that it took a long time for the protagonist to get through basic training. It starts off like a lot of sci-fi thrillers in bootcamp (I guess Starship Troopers showed how to do it well, and everyone's copied it since then). It's not actually bootcamp, since this isn't a military thriller, but it sure is a lot like it. It's not a bad bootcamp story, actually, and there's a few surprises in there to keep it interesting. The main effect is that you grow to respect the protagonist and his friends more and more.

But for me the book became much more interesting when they finally got out into space. The astronauts wrestle with equipment failures and the unknowns of space, in the best tradition of hard sci fi, where by definition the drama comes because of the science; if you take away the science, you take away the story. This book remains firmly within the realm of plausibility, in the same way that The Martian remains entirely plausible without invoking ESP, mind powers, magical aliens, or any of the rest of those things that blur the line between science fiction and fantasy. I suppose it's not *entirely* hard sci fi in that there's a bit of political drama too, which I thought was equally plausible and decently well done. ( )

I mean, sure, it was a pretty good book. But, there were some extremely convenient plot points that just seemed...odd.

Two stars seem low, but I'd consider three stars to be a good book, which this book fell short.

Overall, if you are looking for a book, sure, give this a whirl. If you already have a long list of books, maybe put this on the bottom? I wouldn't go out of my way to read this. ( )

“We will only be able to make deep space viable for humanity when the math makes sense, and at the moment, we’re still working that problem.”

In “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez

I'm not sure I completely understood the economic argument for mining asteroids but the way I understand it, it goes something like this...

Take platinum as an example - currently very rare on Earth. If you can bring back platinum from space and sell it on Earth at a competitive price then it could be lucrative. However the price for this sort of resource varies a lot in response to supply and demand. The act of bringing back just a little bit more platinum has the effect of drastically lowering the price until it is no longer economically feasible to do so. Except, once established, this industry should be self-sustaining. The infrastructure, raw materials and energy needed is all made "up there". A bit like the internet in one respect, the cost of physically hosting (just the web hosting part) a company like Amazon on the web is negligible. That's (one of the reasons) they are able to be so profitable. For an interstellar mining company like Catalyst, even if they are only making a tiny profit on everything they bring back, their overheads should be so small as to be effectively nil. The startup cost for them though would be (ahem) astronomical. This can be recouped though by selling rare resources at a high price at the beginning while they are still "rare".

The same is true of all minerals. They are valuable because they are rare. If I go and get a lump of Nickle the size of Texas and land it on well let’s say Texas... then the price of nickel doesn't just drop by 5 or 10 % the Price of nickel drops to 5 or 10% of its original price so now I just lost 95% of my proposed profit. Beyond that however there comes a point where i just can't sell the nickle at all because all the people who need nickle have bags full of the stuff and nothing to do with it. So massive expense to exploit a large resource leads to a complex economic outcome and so doesn't look viable as a business model.

Having said that, in ten or twenty years there will be thousands of Portuguese bouncing around on't asteroids. No doubt there will also be space police to break up strikes and then a Socialist government to shut the mines down. Washington will say that pirates are taking over space tankers, or whole asteroids with French Tricolors will be swarmed by Galactic Al Qaeda. We'll be told we still need super nukes, and the Portuguese armed forces will be depleted more than uranium. We will have a couple of space drones which we rent from Uncle Sam who will be installing good killer lasers while warning us of nasty Chinese ones. And yes, Justin Bieber will be US president and insist on singing at his own inauguration...

Mining asteroids on the fly likely will have to wait until space travel has matured a great deal from where it is now. However, that isn't the way I think it should or most likely will be done. The best way to mine an asteroid, and the safest way to do so, is to capture it first and place it in a Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon. Then you can mine it at your leisure. Better still, if you mine it from the center out, you can use the non-valuable stuff to build a habitat within it. An asteroid 1 kilometer long by .5 kilometer wide would give a volume of ~452M cubic meters if you left a 50 meter shell. Even if you cut that in half to account for walls and floors, that's a lot of room. Capturing an asteroid would entail meeting it near its closest approach with a swarm of engines to brake and stabilize it. Once maneuvered to its parking spot, mine shafts could be sunk to the most profitable appearing interior sections to begin the process of hollowing it out for pressurized working and living spaces that would eventually connect. At some point the asteroid could be spun to create artificial gravity. To give an idea of how much room there would be, think of it this way: within a volume of 250,000,000 cubic meters, you can fit 500,000 spaces 10mX10mX5m. That's plenty of room for hydroponic farms, living space, factories, hangars, hotels, etc. Ship 3D printers up to make the parts for bigger 3D printers to make tools, equipment and other necessities on site. It occurs to me that shafts could be sunk as a cone, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, say a meter to a millimeter, with mirrored insides to focus sunlight into heating/welding beams for industrial purposes to hold costs down...beyond the initial construction costs, you get free energy, roughly 1K Watts focused in a 1mm beam per tube. Movable mirrors could harness several tubes at once for however much was necessary. Basically, you get a super-sized space station that costs peanuts to build, one that would serve as a base, manufacturing, and launch point for Mars and other solar system expeditions, as well as a research platform (a massive telescope linked with orbital or ground-based scopes should give a nice 3D view of solar system objects), and waystation to a lunar colony. Obviously, from capture to completion you are looking at a generational project, something like 20-30 years from start to finish, perhaps quicker by half with luck and focus.

If you are a hard-SF fan you’ll love this one. It’s got everything. It’s got some shortcomings, but as I read it I went back in time to my own childhood…Not enough character development? Bah! This reminds me of what Martin Amis wrote somewhere in the 60s:

"Science Fiction's no good", they bellow 'til we're deaf. "But this looks good", "Then it's not SF!" It was ever thus. If you love SF-as-it-used-to-be read this one. You won’t regret it. Everyone is guilty of literary snobbery even if self-consciously. Try to avoid it at all costs.

Bottom-line: The cost of bringing Fe, Al, Au into space could be much higher than using the what is already off planet and processing it there. Near zero atmosphere and gravity is difficult to create on earth, but in space it is not so hard, as you can imagine. Ultra-high-vacuum system for wafer manufacture are expensive and limit what can be made. A multi-layer chip made cheaply on planet? Forget it. "Cold welding" on Earth? On planet production of tech items will be as far from slide-rules and abacuses as compared to today. As to transportation costs, drop by parachute, the finished product in the ocean or in an unpopulated area. I do get the point that to initially build a self-sustaining space factory would be very expensive, but once one is built, the resources to build a second one are already there and a few hundred thousand factories and mineral processing facilities later...I’m not sure whether the technique Suarez was an isotope separator, based on the mass spectrograph principle. In space you have energy in abundance, and you need to produce structural components from what you find. Matter is few in space and you want to use all of it and separate elements or even their isotopes to obtain what you want. Also, the technique could be crucial to fully separate reactor waste from a molten-salt breeder reactor. This is the method to start using not just the fissible part of the heavy elements, but the fertile as well. So starting on earth in the energy development, the separator technique can be put into space to help building the first extraterrestrial living space near earth, in the Trojans or on the lunar surface. So one can experiment and build sustainability in space before further venturing into the solar system out of direct emergency help from earth. So to imports... Maybe most important - no one on Earth will finance asteroid mining or any other industry in space that doesn't quickly return a profit on Earth. Yes, NASA or some similar agency might do some small scale stuff, but the funds (and materials) to develop real industrial infrastructure in space will have to come from space. We will build the first habitats to support those industries, not the other way around. After that there's a tipping point, when population and industry are large enough, and then most space resources will be utilized in space. (That's when we can start talking about orbital cities and megastructures.) Eventually the relatively small Earth population and economy will be an unimportant part of human civilization, but the seed money will have to come from Earth, and it will have to turn a steady profit for Earth investors. Without running the numbers, I have to tentatively agree that getting ice-derived fuels and water from near-earth orbital objects would likely be cheaper than hefting it from earth in the long run - especially if we find out that some of those objects are dust-covered ice chunks that don't melt due to their thermomechanics. Imagine bringing into Lagrange or HEO a chunk of ice containing more water than all the Apollo and Orbiter program launch exhaust combined…How would we actually use asteroid material in space? We have to smelt it and purify it, and on earth that means melting it in a big pot, inject other elements like oxygen, molybdenum, carbon, and chromium, and drain it out of the bottom (to avoid slag). And then it is forged and machined it into parts. In space we could easily run out of alloying and doping elements. How would metalworking and machining in space work, especially given that it aims to produce spacecraft, mining, and smelting machines, and fusion reactors, which all require strong, temperature resistant, lightweight alloys? Merlin 1-D rocket nozzles are made of niobium. Fusion reactors require superconductors like yttrium-barium-copper-oxide, machining requires super-hard materials like diamond, aluminum production uses consumable carbon electrodes. Hall-effect thrusters require a boron-nitride anode. Are we expected to get all this stuff from transmutation if we can't get it directly from asteroids? And even then transmuting elements produces a heterogeneous mix of isotopes that probably more difficult to separate than asteroid ore and would require other consumables like concentrated nitric acid. Suarez uses the age old technique of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) as a decisive plot device in his novel, which is not something new and it was also a nice touch, meaning Suarez did his homework. I hope you made it this far in reading this quasi-review of sorts...

NB: Ryugu = water dragon ( )