The Financial Future of Space Travel

gurps_npc writes " This CNNMoney story discusses the financial future of space travel. In particular it gives some nice names and numbers, such as Bezos, Musk and 3554 Amun. 3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal. It is a great fact to know when trying to explain to flat-earth types that don't understand why we waste money on space travel."

Comments

selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have that much precious medals, they only remain precious as long as you don't try to sell too much of it. Otherwise, supply exceeds demand and the price falls.

To some extent it is only theoretical value.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[andrewuoft]

Great, so the rich get richer because not every company can afford to goto space (talk about your barriers to entry, or should I say orbit).

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[plasmacutter]

I hate to say this and support the righties on the issue, but the east india company and others in the early ages of european exploration and establishment of global trade routes faced the same issues. This is how stock came to be, because the risks involved in mounting expeditions to god knows what "savage land" was considered just as risky then as space is now.

The prevelance of pirates and relative lawlessness of foreign lands meant there was a good chance of your ship never returning, and ships were a big deal back then, much more expensive in real currency to build than they are now. (this is supposedly the origin of the phrase "my ship came in")

Anyway, they will push into space the same way companies launched in earlier days which involved huge risk, by spreading it among many investors in the form of stocks.

On the other hand, should we colonize mars they would quickly outstrip earth in ability to harvest asteriods as the lower gravity there would make the playing field truly unequal.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[SEWilco]

No, everyone gets richer. Suddenly there is more gold, silver, and copper available so the price goes down and everyone can have cheaper electrical and electronic devices. Steel and heavy metals become cheaper. The people selling the metals from the new source gain more money than without them, although at a lower price than when the rare metals were more rare. The people building stuff can spend less, but they'll be selling at a lower price because their competitors also have cheaper raw materials. Customers pay less and have more money for other things, or can afford more of the cheaper stuff.

And the heavy metals include fissionables, so electrical power for manufacturing and consumer use also gets cheaper.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

you realise its the poor that do all the actual work?

the rich just cream off the profits from & take the credit for the labour of the poor.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[B3ryllium]

Ooh, I wanna be a space pirate!

Can I name my ship "Serenity"?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[B3ryllium]

You've obviously never studied economy (though admitedly, I haven't either), so I think it only fair to point out the obvious:

Millions of people would lose their jobs.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

&ltShrug> You get "credit" when you do something unique, and you profit from making yourself hard to replace. Nothing can ever change that. We might as well deal with it.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

i think you miss my point.

if this asteroid gets mined, who'll be doing the actual mining?

who'll be going up into space, risking their life?

who'll be building the equipment, spacecraft, etc?

it wont be the fat cat boss that gets the majority of the cash from it.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots will do the grunt work, I'd imagine. Or convicts.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[BeanThere]

I see your point, but OTOH, in a "free" labor market, nobody is forced to do that work are they? If that person doing the mining didn't want to risk their life in space they could find a job elsewhere, in theory.

The price for such labor will no doubt be set by the laws of supply and demand; they'll find the price point at which somebody skilled enough will be willing to do it. The price probably won't be all that high.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of people would lose their jobs.

Which of course is almost never a bad thing, from a long-term historical perspective. Of what value is a job as a stable hand?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Newander]

in a "free" labor market, nobody is forced to do that work are they? If that person doing the mining didn't want to risk their life in space they could find a job elsewhere, in theory.

In theory, sure. In practice, I like to eat.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[BeanThere]

The GP does have a point though, in theory. Finding a more efficient way to produce something or obtain raw materials generates overall more wealth (or rather, wealth potential) within society. Economics is not a zero-sum game (for the rich to get richer the poor don't need to get poorer, since we can all make new "stuff"). In theory those jobs lost could be put to work creating something else, which could make other products cheaper in turn (increased labor supply in other markets), or making something new like a cure for cancer or cheap TV shows or furniture. Of course reality doesn't always allow this for individuals, particularly those who have spent their entire life in a now-obsolete industry.

One other 'angle' here though is that a single entity owning a supply of precious metals that outstrips the rest of the planet's supply would allow that entity to control prices. Traditional mining is expensive. They could surely set the price point at just below the level necessary to keep mines profitable, leaving little benefit for society at large but still putting millions out of work. (This doesn't even assume price fixing, yet even in, say, the oil industry with in theory many suppliers we still have artificially controlled pricing.)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[BeanThere]

Yup, hence all my qualifiers, like "in theory" and putting "free" in quotes :) (I'm sure the garbagemen who collect my garbage for a low wage are also "free" "in theory" to find better work :/)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[masklinn]

If you have that much precious medals, they only remain precious as long as you don't try to sell too much of it.

Have != try to sell. Check the diamonds, we do have far too many diamonds, but De Beers managed to market them very nicely and keep the price high for more than a century. If the De Beers cartel wasn't monopoly, the price of diamonds wouldn't be a tenth of what it currently is.

In fact, had De Beers not existed, no one would give a flying fuck about diamonds.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[tomatensaft]

Unless they face something, what is Doom 3 games is based on! :)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[hunterx11]

If you're so interested in creating jobs, why not start banning labor-saving technology?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[imdylbert]

I can't completely agree with your point about the poor doing all the work. Or even all the 'real' work as you said. Most of the much better off people i know, very well paid executives and managers and such, spend far more time at work than anyone else i know. They have a LOT of responsibility and a lot to do. On the other hand, the factory workers i know, from what i see, do LESS work than most people. Most likely due to the fact that they're union and unions dont' believe in actual work but rather lots and lots of breaks all day and then stopping a half hour before the end of the day to line up by the timeclock so they can sprint out the door as soon as the clock hits 2:30.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[indifferent children]

If you're so interested in creating jobs, why not start banning labor-saving technology?

Fortunately, "labor-saving technology" rarely saves any actual labor. Look at computers, fantastic potential to allow one person to do the job of hundreds. What really happened? /.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Ucklak]

The rich get richer because they have habits that grow wealth.
The poor stay poor because they have habits that continue to keep them poor.

There is nothing evil in being rich.
The evil is when someone takes a liberty or property through force from someone else.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[mcvos]

The rich may do a lot of work, but what do they actually produce? Food is grown by farmers, cars are constructed by factory workers, houses are built by construction workers. The managers may enable their work, make the labourers work more efficiently or sell their work for more profit, but even if they do that (which not all actually do), they still don't do the actual work itself.

And then there's the entire financial industry (and especially the stockmarket) that spends long hours just shifting money around for the profit of the owner of that money, without ever producing anything new.

Without workers, you have nothing. Without managers, perhaps the work will be a bit harder or less efficient. Or maybe not.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

We've had marked rises in the standard of living. Do you live the lifestyle of your great-great-great-grandparents?

The fact that a bunch of barrel makers and blacksmiths lost their jobs in the 19th century was a small price to pay. I'm not sold on this asteroid business, but the fact that a bunch of miners might lose their job in the 21st century is also a small price to pay.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[imdylbert]

Without managers those workers would have nothing to do. They need direction and enablers. Organization and structure. Without the managers, there would be chaos. Nothing would get done. The workers merely build the product. They don't plan the product lineup, they don't organize the sale of product to the vendor, they don't take care of health and safety issues, they don't do the massive amount of engineering that goes into the production of a product. Farmers may be a bit more self managing but they are a special case. A smaller entity. Construction workers have foremen to direct them. The foremen, if they are part of a larger construction agency, have bosses over them which direct them where to go based on the sales made by salesmen. There is a LOT that goes into supporting these workers and that's where you NEED to have managers. I work in IT support for a factory. Believe me they need managers.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[rufty_tufty]

"Millions of people would lose their jobs."
Granted, just like millions lost their jobs when we developed new mining methods or invented the steam engine.

But history indicates that in total many times more jobs are created than lost, and the standard of living increases.

e.g. an off the peg shirt costs me about 1 hour of my labour. 100 years ago a shirt would have cost me about a week's labour.

As a further example my dad lost his job as a machine tool maker. Now has a higher paid, less strenuous job in the education sector. Loosing jobs isn't a bad thing - it is often a sign of progress that people no longer have to work in mines or the mill like my grandparents did.
i.e. my grandad is welcome to his job as a blacksmith in the mines - I'll stay as an IC designer than you very much! BTW I have been made redundant at one point in my career and it was the best thing to happen to me.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[rufty_tufty]

and if you can't eat you won't do that job. If no-one can eat from what it pays, no-one will do the job. If no-one is willing to do the job, but the profit is there, then the wage of the job will increase until it's either not profitable, or someone is willing to do it.

This will start off as a small sector and grow.

An equilibrium will be found.

If you don't believe this will work, look at the countries that have a large percentage of the population starving, and those that have a high standard of living - correlate this to their adherence to a free market economy. Not a 100% match I'll grant you, but getting there...

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Thomas Miconi]

In other words, when you have plenty of precious metal, well it's not precious anymore.

D'uh !

Thomas-

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[mcvos]

Without managers those workers would have nothing to do. They need direction and enablers.

No they don't. Workers have taken care of themselves for millennia. The managers just make the workers work more efficiently, reaping big profits for themselves and their superiors. It's only because the rich monopolised the means of production that workers now need them.

Construction workers have foremen to direct them. The foremen, if they are part of a larger construction agency, have bosses over them which direct them where to go based on the sales made by salesmen.

And yet houses have been built for 8000 years or more.

Yes, managers certainly add value (most of the time, anyway), but it's still the workers that do the actual work, and they have done that long before there even were managers. Managers make themselves necessary, but they really need workers more than the workers need them.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[hunterx11]

We all realized the errors of our ways and made Ned Ludd Day a national holiday?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[indifferent children]

We all realized the errors of our ways and made Ned Ludd Day a national holiday?

I'm no Luddite; I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time (especially not while I'm posting on /.)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Deskpoet]

The evil is when someone takes a liberty or property through force from someone else.

That's only your limited view. The reality is that property is theft.

Your body is composed of particles of star-stuff billions of years old. Do you really believe you can claim "ownership" of that, or anything else, for that matter? Even if your consciousness manages to "improve" the work of millions of related physical and biological processes, the net result is the material of you and everything else was here before you and will be here long after you. The same goes for the products of your labors.

Ownership is a shared delusion, like society and government. If you're looking for evil, try looking at Man's attempt to spread his deranged monkey-mind beyond the ravaged confines of his unfortunate birth-planet.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[CheshireCatCO]

Also, the value probably doesn't take into account the cost of mining the metals and bring them to Earth. (Unless you plan to sell them to people to use in space, which presents a very different market and therefore I'd argue that the cost of the metal is currently not known.) Bringing things up to orbit or back down again is very expensive, which is bound to reduce the profit there by quite a lot. Perhaps even erase it.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[joeljkp]

I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet. They may be able to do it, but eventually, they'll organize themselves so that some people manage other people. It's called leadership, and it's not a pox on humanity.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[joeljkp]

Of course it saves us time. If we didn't have computers, someone would have to work these Navier-Stokes equations by hand, and that would take a lot longer (or would take a lot more money) than having a computer do it.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[joeljkp]

And when it's not precious anymore, maybe we can actually do something cool with it. Humanity benefits.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[mcvos]

I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet.

I'd like to see a horde of managers build a passenger jet.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

And so we come to the inevitable conclusion that we need *both* management and labor if we wish to accomplish anything of value.

Oh, by the way, even the most basic labors require management. Usually it's the laborer who's self-managing (remember to bring the tools, prioritize the tasks, etc.) This works fine for small or individual tasks. But when the efforts of lots of skilled workers need to come together with a diverse list of resources, it takes professional management. An awful lot of it. And it requires capital. Which has to be managed so as not to disappear (as in so many kleptocracies). The world is as it is because it works better than any previous solutions. It's this ridiculous "us vesus them" mentality that obscures this simple fact.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Bad-JuJu-Man]

Tell that to DeBeers. They seem to have figured out how to do it. Stockpiles and market cornering. Then just trickle them out as needed.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[gurps_npc]

Bringing things up is VERY expensive.

Bringing things down is only slightly expensive. We do it all the time with things like comet dust. Yes, those things are light, but the principle still applies. Down costs far less then up.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, "too much" depends on how you define "precious metal." For example, copper and gold can be defined as precious because they are massively useful in electronics, but, copper isn't actually a true precious metal (ok, it's not super-common, but, no one dug around in rivers hoping for that day they pick up a tiny little copper nugget.) You may not see much copper jewelry, but, I bet the computer you used to type that message has a fair amount of copper inside it (not to mention the gold platings protecting contacts from oxidation.) Platinum is a terribly precious metal, but, it doesn't get used much for jewelry/etc (I would take gold any day) yet, it has some serious uses in just about any field you can name thanks to it's resistance, strength, and durability, yet, currently it costs so much it can only be used for more high-end tasks. Heck, even silver can be put to use as an antibacterial (and just IMAGINE how well an air cooled system could keep components cool with an aluminum or copper plated silver heatsink?)

If you brought in kilotons of these precious metals, sure it might flood the markets and lower prices and perceived values (particularly the jewelry field would force jewelers into a higher quality of differentiation rather than being able to just rely on sticking enough gold or whatever into there.) Overall, a flooded market of "precious metals" would be very beneficial to practically everyone except jewelers (though the people buying jewelry will get more choices and quality due to it.)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Radius9]

Actually, you'd be rather surprised. My wife did a report in college on the whole garbage/waste disposal system, and as far as city workers go, garbage men are among the highest paid of the non-skilled workers, mainly because so few people are willing to do the work.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[irablum]

thousands of years ago, the great pyramids were built. And guess what, there were foreman who directed the project, (though at the time they were called "taskmasters" or "slave-drivers") There were architects who designed it, there were mining supervisors to tell the workers where to get the rocks, and there was a guy who financed the whole thing (he was usually called "King")

Not much of that has changed. workers aren't slaves anymore and have lots more rights, but they still need to be told what to do.

Also, having had a house built recently (about 8 years ago) I was certainly glad that there was a boss I could deal with to make sure it got built the way I like it, because the workers certainly kept screwing things up on their own.

Ira

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[SEWilco]

Millions of people would lose their jobs.

In what way would the opening of a new mine cause the loss of millions of jobs?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[mfrank]

Please mail me your computer, your iPod, and any other "possessions" of yours that I may mistakenly believe have "worth". Or are you still living with mommy and daddy?

Feel free to go back to living on the savannah. You'll be hyena turds within 24 hours.

The only problems with modern society is it subverts natural selection and gives morons way too much free time.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[BeanThere]

This may be true in the US, where the unemployment rate is very low, but my point of reference is my own country (South Africa) where AFAIK it's a pretty low-paying job, due to the high unemployment rate and abundant supply of unskilled labour. I could be wrong though - haven't actually checked.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[mmdog]

Perhaps instead of bringing all of it back some (or most even) might end up being used to further develop our off planet infrastructure? It seems to me that if one of the big impediments to space exploration and development is the cost of getting out of the gravity well, then being able to get the resources outside of the gravity well would go a long way toward alleviating the problem.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Incorrect.

To live, one must use stuff. Using stuff is excercising the important part of property ownership -- disposing of an item as you see fit.

Since it's impossible to live without using stuff, i.e. without exercising property ownwership rights, it's impossible to live without de facto property rights.

Anybody claiming you don't have property rights has no other meaning than that they wish to be able to take what you have and use it as they see fit. I.e. they claim property rights over it.

That someone owned (properly) the atoms before you, and someone else will after, does not affect this concept. Indeed, it just strengthens it by impressing on the living aspect as core to what ownership means.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

And congratulations to them, too! They convinced billions of people to pay a ton of money for rocks they literally have warehouses full of. Good quality 1 carat diamonds should, according to supply and demand, be about $10.00 each.

This is not their evil ways, but your slobbering consumer ways. It's a free society, don't buy the stuff.

The only thing evil De Beers did was, according to PBS, making (via their buddies in government) all South Africans at the turn of the (1900) century have to pay a head tax; hence the bushmen minding their own business were suddenly forced to get jobs (for low pay) for De Beers so they could pay their tax, thus providing De Beers with a work force.

Oh, and the PBS show also hinted behind-the-scenes strongarm tactics on some of the other mining operations around the world to bring them into the monopoly as partners.

And I'm a goof who paid about $5990.00 too much for a VF 1.06 carat diamond and about another k to get it made into a nice gold ring.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

And, of course, people being the thieves they are, for every pound of gold brought in from space, about 300 pounds of gold rings and nuggets tagged "gold from space!" will be sold.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[CheshireCatCO]

That's what I meant when I said that it might be sold in orbit. But as I noted, you don't know what the economics of that will be. Depending on the supply and demand, the prices of those metals will be different from the prices down here. So fixing a value to the asteroid right now is silly if that's your plan, isn't it?

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[CheshireCatCO]

We've brought down comet dust once in what was a pretty expensive mission. The other time we (NASA) tried that same trick, the probe buried itself halfway into the Nevada desert. That pretty much illustrates the problem.

Controlled, soft re-entry is not easy. If you're shipping down tons of material at a time, it'll be very expensive. Remember, all of that energy you need to lift material into orbit has to be shed to bring it back down. Parachutes would probably be unweildy (at best) for a really large shipment. Retrorockets would use just about as much fuel to break the descent as you use going up. And so forth.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[DerWulf]

grow your own damn food then. I hear Canada is really sparsly populated. I doubt anyone would mind if you carved yourself some piece of the wilderness and started subsidence farming (which btw is sooo much more fun than being "exploited" within a capitalistic economy. make your own hours, yeah!)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[DerWulf]

Haven't you gotten the memo? Smart people nowadays think decreasing efficiency and spending as much time as is humanly possible on one task puts the fun back in economics. Don't write yourself off, embrace your inner smartness!

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[AJWM]

I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time

Hand cook all your own meals, do you? (Or buy them at restaurants that use no technology - hmm, get food poisoning much?) Hand wash your own (handmade) clothes? Walk everywhere -- barefoot?

Just because you choose to spend the time you saved using one technology on using a different technology, doesn't mean that it hasn't saved you time.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[DerWulf]

while this idea is fun to entertain when you are like 16, sitting at your parents dinner table it raises some ugly issues. Realworld objects can very often only be used to one end at a time. Take a car, for example. You got one car and for guys with Rage-against-the-machine t-shirts screaming "property is theft, war is peace, black is white". Nevermind that four 16 year olds with walnuts for brains wouldn't even get to the point where there might be a car available at all. But anyways. All four of them have the equally important need to go somewhere. Unfortunatly, each in an other direction (north, east etc). Even worse, they all have to absolutly go now.

How would you resolve this issue? Obviously, only one of them is going to be on time, where he wants to go. Whoever takes the car is, by your values, a thief. By your morals, no one would be able to go anywhere. Which so happens to be a nice analogy to what "property is theft" and related ideology will do to a mans life.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[DroppedPacket]

"Workers have taken care of themselves for millennia. The managers just make the workers work more efficiently, reaping big profits for themselves and their superiors."

I don't know what you have been smoking, but please, lay off of it for your own good. Now try to follow along with this:

Project: Build an automobile that you can drive from New York City to Miami, Florida.
Assets: 10,000 workers.
Begin. Let me know whe you are done.

Workers generally are able to make one or two types of things with any skill. (Think about woodworking or blacksmithing. The same few types of things are made over and over by the same people.) To create a more complex item usually requires a several disparate skill sets. Getting these to come together (especially if you use more than, say 3 or 4 people) requires some form of leadership (e.g. a manager.)

As another example, try to build a computer. From scratch. Start with mining the metals you need to build the wiring. You will probably want to start with aluminum. Oh, and go build a smelter for that too.

Workers are all find and good. Every project needs workers. But the people who organize (and manage) above the low-level worker are vital to producing anything also.

Since you gave the house example, good luck making the wiring for your house. Or rolling the pipes for your plumbing. If you want to live in a house that is even 4000 year old technology, you better learn how to quary stone and shape it.

I assume you don't want to go buy any of this stuff because that would contribute to the monopoly of the rich.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[gurps_npc]

You mean every pound of gold brought from space will be mixed with 100 lbs of terran gold and sold as "containing real gold from OUTER SPACE".

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[fyngyrz]

There are signs that bringing things up will become considerably less expensive in the (relatively) near term. That will cause some fairly profound alterations in the economics of all this, should it come to pass (and personally, I have almost no doubt it will.)

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[eugene ts wong]

If you ask me, using "in legal pragmatics", would have been better than "in theory", because it's more than just theory. The idea is that nobody is holding a gun to your face or striking a law that we must do such 'n such. There are bad situations, but those don't count for the point that I'm trying to make.

Don't get me wrong, though, I agree with your main point.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[eugene ts wong]

On top of that, the workers tend to not have people skills. People skills are more important than any other type of skill out there, because it enables more people to find work, and helps coordinate us in ways that computers and lower level workers can't.

Re:selling precious medals impacts their price

[Anonymous Coward]

Ownership is a shared delusion

What about the computer on which you typed your post?

Is that a shared delusion, too?

People always miss the real message behind that Shelley poem: nothing beside remains, except the words. The legacy of Ozymandias is his writing, his idea. His delusion, if you will. Nothing beside remains.

In short, you lack enlightenment. You stopped reading too soon.

eek

[psycho chic]

hey, maybe these people have a point. perhaps someday mars will be a vacation spot, and not just in "total recall". and hey, i sure wouldnt mind getting my hand on all that precious metal floating out there, except that it would COMPLETELY drop the value of world currency. Especially if we found more of it. And a sudden drop in the value of the worlds currency would not be good for average joe. the person, not the tv show (what do u people take me for?)

Re:eek

[NalosLayor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard note the last line of the third paragraph: "The gold standard is no longer used in any nation, having been replaced completely by fiat currency." "Sweden abandoned the gold standard in 1929, the US in 1933, and other nations were, to one degree or another, forced off the gold standard." So, in summary: "1933 called, and they want to redeem their dollars."

Re:eek

[plasmacutter]

not really. Worldwide currency is no longer based on precious metals.

Granted it would murder the precious metal markets, but we already have synthetic flawless diamonds breaking into the diamond trade, and since theyre trying to engineer these diamonds to be used in place of silicon, by the time theyre done (e.g. able to produce 16 inch platters of diamond) the mined gem trades will be thoroughly obsolete.

Re:eek

[psycho chic]

perhaps i should explain in short form, since its almost 1am over here gold is traded on the stock market (1 bar gold = $XXX) now, either big companies would revert to trading in gold or would sell their gold on the stock market, bringing the price of gold down because there is so much of it. a bar gold = $XX making small traders like myself lose lots due to a sudden decline,and removing business from the very companies who did it (great plan for them, eh?) now, if they trade amoungst themselves in gold rather then in cash they maintain their wealth longer and prevent competition (who could afford to play with the big boys then?). but if they do that, its a gradual decrease in the value of our currency. am i making sense? like i said, its 1am....and my bed is calling but this stupid computer is keeping me here.

Re:eek

[SEWilco]

... and since you know about this new source of gold, make sure you sell before the price drops. Finding the right time is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:eek

[vaccum pony]

That is good reason us humans need to reorg our economy to work under a principle of abundance instead of scarcity. Everybody rich instead of just a few.

Re:eek

[Falcon040]

A drop of world currency with respect to what? World currency is not absolute but a relative measure for trade that people are willing to deal in.

The first interest/nation to utilize space technology in order to make a profit (i.e. greater gain received from a venture than effort put into achieving it) will certainly be able to acquire a greater amount of that currency that you so mention.

In order to do this, then the supplier of those special metals etc. will have to sell at a lower cost or higher grade than current market supplies. Therefore everyone trading (buyers and sellers) will gain ultimately.

This is certainly good for the average Joe.

The greatness of the Capitalist way!

Re:eek

[slashname3]

Our currency has not been tied to precious metal for many many years. The cost of those precious metals might drop if a large enough quantity was retruned, which should decrease the price of goods made from those materials. So this would actually benefit the average joe. Not only that but it should create lots of jobs to support such an effort.

Re:eek

[AviLazar]

That depends on the metal type. If you are talking about things like Gold - which has very little practical application then yes it will be insanely devalued (unless they do things like "Earth gold $25/ounce, space gold $10/ounce"). If we are talking about metals like copper, iron, platinum, and other materials that we can utilize in manufacturing then this is a boon.

Re:eek

[AviLazar]

I agree with you, except legislators are now instituting regulation that says if the diamond is not natural it has to contain an extra tag in the advertisment and diamond (i forget what it is). So that way, you will know if you are buying a natural or man-made diamond...and what woman would be willing to accept a diamond that cost $10? Remember, a diamond is forever, and if you really love her you will go through any expense and hardship to get her the very best mother nature can produce - because a diamond is forever! ;)

Re:eek

[AJWM]

things like Gold - which has very little practical application

The usefulness of a material depends a great deal on its price.

Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold, back before the electrolytic refinement process was developed. It was used for a few ceremonial or status applications -- some rich people had aluminum plates, there's an aluminum cap on the Washington Monument, that kind of thing. These days we wrap food and beverages in the stuff and throw it away, among thousands of other uses.

Gold has several useful physical properties -- very dense, very malleable, conductive, corrosion resistant, reflective to IR but transparent to (green) light as a thin film, etc. We'll find plenty of uses for it depending on what the price drops to.

Re:eek

[yndrd1984]

That is good reason us humans need to reorg our economy to work under a principle of abundance instead of scarcity.

How does that work? Even things that literally grow on trees or fall like manna from heaven (apples and water) still take investment and work to either create or get up to contemporary standards. That means that they're scarce.

Everybody rich instead of just a few.

In the first world, almost everybody is. It's just hard to notice because there's nobody that isn't rich nearby to compare to.

$20 trillion ... so what

[arrrrg]

I bet there are more than $100 quadrillion dollars of precious metals in the earth ... the problem is that most of this stuff is too expensive and difficult to get at. Same deal here, at least until we get a space elevator going. We need damn cheap travel to make it worth going to space to get IRON of all things ... for now, it's what, $20,000 per pound going up, and mining equipment / transports back down are heavy.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Telvin_3d]

$100 quadrillion... fair enough. But I think it would be more accurate to describe the $20 trillion as not only more concentrated than almost any source still accessible on earth, but where there are issues regarding getting to it in the first place, by the time you are able to get there actually refining it would be a minor issue and there are a few things like disposing of the waste that are no issue at all.
So, more accurate to say that it is $20 trillion that could be feasibly recovered. Personally that is worth far more than $100 quadrillion unreachable dollars. Not to mention all the tech we would develop on the way.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[patio11]

Exactly. All you need to do is get to the asteroid, set up an operation in orbit capable of actually extracting the minerals from all the cruft (oh, sure, $1000 an oz. for platinum sounds like a real moneymaker until you start calculating the cost of shuttle runs to get the 1 tonne of ore that ounce is buried in), and come back with the payload... preferably with your workers still mostly alive.

Ahh, well, at least the existence of this "gold mine in the skies" gives me a good reason to say "Great, so private enterprise can fund space exploration now" and stop pouring billions of tax dollars into NASA, the world's most inefficient R&D slush-fund.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Jason1729]

Hey we found one of those flat earth types...and the issue went way over his head.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Anonymous Coward]

Why send the shuttle on "runs" to bring back ore?
Why not build a processing facility in orbit. Chances are, extraction would work better in 0G anyway. We could more than likely build an orbital manufacturing plant as well, to better take advantage of our newly found raw materials without having to incure the launch co$t penalty. ...And I'm sure we can come up with a system to safely drop cargo to earth from orbit. The first thing that comes to my mind is to launch multiple cargo re-entry modules on one rocket (not a shuttle) for use in returning the precious metals (not the ore) ...Or we could build the re-enty modules in space using the orbiting manufacturing plant.
Launching the shuttle simply to return raw ore would be a big waste.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[shmlco]

"...the world's most inefficient R&D slush-fund."

Please. I think you're severely underestimating the current administration.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the gold and silver on this planet are at the center of the molten core. (Heavy=sinks) it would be far easier to gather it from the asteroid belt than to extract it from the center of the planet.

Actually advanced routene space travle is possible right now. if we spent 1/2 what we waste on the "War on TERRORISM" on space exploration we would have had a shuttle replacement already, the ISS would not only been done but the moonbase would be started.

The war on terrorism = corperate welfare for Bush's friends. nothing more. we can not stop terrorism in any way with money. WE can only stop it with extreme force or extremely trained small fire teams.

What do I mean? simple. we can stop all terrorism by simply nuking all of the middle east or small highly trained strike teams to kill the leaders easily (yes we can do this)

Pick one. what we are currently doing only serves to make companies money and get rid of those pesky poor yound adult males that would not vote republican anyways.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Prof.Phreak]

There's also the question of who does the valuations. If the entire planet was showered with platinum and gold, it certainly would devalue its value (probably be cheaper than dirt...). (not to mention hurt badly... gold is heavy when `showered' onto ones head).

It's only expensive 'cause we don't have it.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Mr. Underbridge]

Where you gonna build that refinery?

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[khakipuce]

There is a lot of expense in mining/refining on earth, that's why precious metals are precious. One thing there is in space is a very big, very hot thing called the sun. What you need to do is strap some thrusters to the asteroid and get it into a close orbit round the Sun. Then maybe gravity and some Eutectic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic) theory will take over allowing some of the elements to separate - I guess that one reason we don't do this on Earth is the cost of heating a load of waste material, but if the heat was pretty much free?

Ok, I admit you might have some issues controlling the orbit of a molten blob of metals (presumably the thrusters fell off when they got too hot :-). But extending this theory, once you got some separation, you could cast the economic material into the shape of a glider, coated with some of the less economic stuff as a heat shield/ablative coating and fly it back to earth...

Ok, ok, making a platinum glider fly presents a few challenges, but boy, I bet Richard Branson would be up for it!

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Anonymous Coward]

"at least until we get a space elevator going"
And air travel will forever remain too expensive for the average Joe until I get this broomstick flying!

Please stop using the space elevator as the solution to all space travel problems every time this subject is mentioned - please stay on topic!

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[QMO]

There's plenty of "space" for a big curved mirror.
Plenty of solar energy to concentrate with the mirror.
So, if it were me, I'd build the refinery next to the asteroid.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[zebs]

Never wanted a Golden Shower anyway thank you.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Punk Walrus]

It's only expensive 'cause we don't have it.

Sort of half right. It's expensive because the demand is higher than the supply. I mean, probably hyper-refined super-crystallized silicon dioxide is something we don't have, but the demand is nil, mostly because I made it up just now, but still... I doubt I could get much for it on Craig's List. But can you imagine a world where gold is as cheap as copper? We'd find tons more uses for it, not to mention have better, non-corroding electrical contacts and the like. Now, I haven't heard about gold on asteroids, but iron is still very valuable for industry. Think about what we could use it for in space! "We can't ship equipment up into space, costs to much!" they say now. How about BUILD those things in space? need a thick, gamma-ray reducing wall? Iron. It's everywhere, man. Most of the manufacturing could be done inside the asteroid, and eventually hollow it out, polish the outside, and used it for a huge space station when they are done and working on the next asteroids.

It's a valid point that if iron ore was suddenly plentiful, the price would drop, and some economies would be hard-hit, which is precisely why those countries should start thinking of ways to get in on that space-mining action now, because if they don't, someone else eventually will.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You point the mirror at the asteroid, ablating one side of it, driving it into another orbit around Earth.

Duh!

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[c4ffeine]

the 1 tonne of ore that ounce is buried in

Hate to burst your bubble, but that's just wrong. M-type asteroids are nearly pure metal.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> if we spent 1/2 what we waste on the "War on TERRORISM" on space
> exploration we would have had a shuttle replacement already, the
> ISS would not only been done but the moonbase would be started.

The ISS could have been built to its original plans for that matter. And that's a complete replacement launch system, probably a big honkin' rocket that can take a payload or space plane/shuttle on top of it.

Hell, the space elevator is estimated at "only" $1 trillion -- a little over 1/3 the annual budget of the US government. It may take a few years to polish off the nanotube ribbon generating equipment, but hell, that's what, barely 2x the cost the world spent on the machines in Contact?

For the cost of only 3 Iraq wars, we could have it. Or 1.3 Savings and Loan bailouts. Or, after adjustment for inflation, about 1/20 of what the US spent on the Cold War. Yeah, a trillion is a lot, but compared to what?

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Please stop using the space elevator as the solution to all
> space travel problems every time this subject is mentioned

"The Financial Future of Space Travel"? It's like trying to discuss the "melee future of your new Dungeons and Dragons Online fighter", then you come along and say, "Stop mentioning the vorpal sword every time this subject is mentioned!"

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[MadUndergrad]

Actually, you could get it into a nice elliptical orbit pretty easily. It wouldn't be hard to aim/accelerate it so that it could pass close to the sun (to collect the heat) and then swing back into earth's path.

Re:$20 trillion ... so what

[steeler359]

Peter F Hamilton - in his Night's Dawn Trilogy - had a sytem where the asteroid is broken up into more manageable bite-size chunks, made porous by directing large amounts of energy inside it somehow (it's been a while since I read it, OK?).

These mile-wide shunks are then nudged into a re-entry trajectory, where they splash down in an unoccupied bit of ocean. Being porous they float there until they're towed back to land and dismantled. Seems like a pretty elegant solution apart from the obvious risks involved :)

Jezza :)

Space will paid for through public/private

[RedHatLinux]

scheme. The government will front the money, and we'll have privatization of risk, but when the money starts to get made, we'll hear about how we need to keep government out. Kind of like today, where companies rail against government interference on the Internet and the utilities, which wouldn't exist without government action.

Seriously, without government action, the south would have no electric power, the Internet would not be here, and people in the boondocks would never have mail service, because the Free Market wouldnt support it.

On that note, remember, Free Market economics is like Marxist economics, a few designed system with strengths and weaknesses, not some divine proscription.

Re:Space will paid for through public/private

[Anonymous Coward]

In addtion, without government action millions and millions of people would still be alive today.

Centralized power is a baddddddddddddddddd thing. Very bad. It will always end up in disaster. Its just the nature of things.

There is an aspect of the Free-Market that sets it apart from all others: freedom. No government intervention in what should be personal matters.

Re:Space will paid for through public/private

[FleaPlus]

The government will front the money, and we'll have privatization of risk, but when the money starts to get made, we'll hear about how we need to keep government out.

Isn't that pretty much the point? Government helps set up the infrastructure and foundation for private enterprise to prosper. Once private enterprise has got self-sustaining economic activity in a particular field, government can then focus its resources on the next budding field.

Re:Space will paid for through public/private

[LordLucless]

And others would still be alive.

And even if centralized power is bad, there is no solution. If you decentralize it, eventually somebodys going to come along and start concentrating it again. Centralized power may be bad. but its also inevitable.

Re:Space will paid for through public/private

[jrockway]

> People in the boondocks would never have mail service, because the Free Market wouldnt support it.

Incorrect. FedEx and UPS will happily deliver to the boondocks -- maybe not every day, but you'll get your package. Neither FedEx nor UPS are the government -- they compete with each other, so the day one decided to deliver to the boondocks was the day the other had to provide better service to the boondocks or face going out of business. The government could completely ignore the boondocks and would never go out of business -- they're the government.

> The Internet would not be here.

Admittedly NTT was government subsidized at one time, but the private DSL industry in Japan has innovated far more than the FCC-regulated telcos here in America. When I was in Japan 5 years ago, I had 10M and VoIP for $20 a month. Here in the US, I pay $75 a month for 1.5/384 (and no phone service).

The same applies to cell-phone companies. There's so much government-mandated red tape here in the US that we're at least 5 years behind everyone else. Again, 5 years ago I had a better phone in Japan than I do here in the US -- for less money. (OK, so calls are cheaper. But I never call anyone.)

All in all, I don't see how the government helps anyone. I say overthrow it :)

Re:Space will paid for through public/private

[nittacci]

Great comment.
"Free Market" has become the religion of the current age. It's a misnomer as well. The people who push Free Markets the most want nothing less than markets, or anything, to be free.

Get rid of the bean counters

[skayell]

3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal. It is a great fact to know when trying to explain to flat-earth types that don't understand why we waste money on space travel. We should continue exploration not only for the monetary return on investment (ROI), but rather BECAUSE IT'S THERE!

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Anonymous Coward]

. We should continue exploration not only for the monetary return on investment (ROI), but rather BECAUSE IT'S THERE!

So going in to space is like mountain climbing?

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[patio11]

No. One is a phenomenally expensive, incredibly dangerous hobby with no reward other than the psycological thrill for a few individuals who actually get to see the awe-inspiring view from the top (if they survive the trip), justified mainly out of machismo and a desire to plant the flag on a more remote location than a flag has ever been planted before. The other involves ropes.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[CaptainCarrot]

We should continue exploration not only for the monetary return on investment (ROI), but rather BECAUSE IT'S THERE!

That's the idealistic response, but this is the kind of thing that will get NASA out of the space business and get people into it who know how to turn a profit on it. In the long run, this is what can make space travel widely accessible, not a government agency.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[mikeswi]

"We should continue exploration not only for the monetary return on investment (ROI), but rather BECAUSE IT'S THERE!"

Ideally, yes. But we've been trying to do it that way for 50 years and it hasn't worked.

It's been 36 years since we first went to the moon. Clearly the technology exists to get us there and back. So why are there no colonies four decades later? Because the government is in charge of space travel. There is no one up there to send soft money, votes or bribes back down. No one lives there, so there are no pork barrel projects to fund. Unless it has something to do with tax money, campaign money or votes, the Congress isn't interested in it.

Humans have always migrated along trade routes toward new or better economic markets, not because the King or Emporer wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountain range. If there's something there to be bought or sold, they'll go. The Western hemisphere was rediscovered by Europeans only because Spain wanted to find a cheaper/quicker way to get cargo to/from India.

NASA needs to be abolished and its engineers hired out to companies that have an actual reason to send people up there. The most dangerous place you can be is in between a corporation and something that can make them a profit. Colonies, refineries, shipyards and factories will start springing up all over the solar system, once companies realize there's profit up there.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[jcr]

It's been 36 years since we first went to the moon. Clearly the technology exists to get us there and back.

To be precise: the technology existed. The experience of the men who built and operated the Saturn rockets has been lost in large part, and while a new system for getting to the moon can be built again, I wouldn't quite say that the technology exists now.

-jcr

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[cyber-vandal]

Government agencies have made roads, sending mail and (in properly run countries) public transport widely available. Just because its government doesn't mean it automatically sucks. Public transport over here in the UK is run by private companies and its a joke compared to the well-run publicly owned systems in most of mainland Europe. Government isn't automatically the wrong idea; no human would ever have left the Earth if it was left up to the short-sighted corporate world.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Moofie]

"no human would ever have left the Earth if it was left up to the short-sighted corporate world"

I don't necessarily think that's a good example. To a very good approximation, nobody has in fact left the Earth.

(You can take that two ways...either the insignificant number of people who have left the earth's gravity behind is a rounding error, or by virtue of the fact that they CAME BACK, nobody has left the Earth.)

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Moofie]

Please specify a major field of human endeavor and achievement that is not, at least partly, motivated by "machismo".

And if you think that space travel is "phenomenally expensive", I think you haven't seen the numbers on agriculture subsidies.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[MacGod]

...this is the kind of thing that will get NASA out of the space business and get people into it who know how to turn a profit on it. In the long run, this is what can make space travel widely accessible, not a government agency.

There's room for both. Let commercial entities fund research and development in order to extract asteroid minerals (or whatever financial benefits emerge). Let NASA tackle the deeper, pure-science research. They'll benefit from the commercial endeavours, because they can use the technology developed by the commercial entities, and can use government funding to focus on the pure science aspects that lack a viable ROI.

Think academia vs. private sector engineering R in academia, we do research that may never have any commercial application, but that is valuable information because it lets us understand the nature of the world better. But at the same time, we use equipment and techniques that are often developed for the commercial world, because it's cheaper and more efficient than developing every single thing in-house

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[master_p]

You are wrong when thinking that it is only profit that can drive space exploration. If we leave space exploration to profit, then we will end up with robotized equipment mining the solar system, but no real progress in physics that will allow us to travel the stars.

If we do not aspire, as a society, to make Star Trek a reality, then we are doomed: we are trapped into our own petit interests for profit, with little regard to anything else.

The real question is: should we be more like Ferengi, or like Vulcans?

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have nuclear reactors in space that dump the waste into the sun. In fact you could dump any waste product into the sun once you moved the manufacturing processes into space. It's the biggest incinerator in the solar system after all.

Or you could have orbiting stations that harness the sun's heat and light to generate electricity, crack hydrogen and send the product back home (or beam it back as microwaves??).

The minerals and exploration will surely come later on.. but energy generation and waste disposal are the two main factors for me.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a real good opportunity. You need to be able to either aim *very* accurately, so the waste hits that 1/2 degree spot going effing fast or find some method of removing all that potential energy the waste has at this distance from the sun. This would require a motor.

If we fail, then we have a small nuclear meteorite (going slower than most meteorites, it is true) intersecting earth orbit.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Kuciwalker]

We should invade Iraq not only for the oil, but BECAUSE IT'S THERE!

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[geminidomino]

If we do not aspire, as a society, to make Star Trek a reality, then we are doomed: we are trapped into our own petit interests for profit, with little regard to anything else.

It strikes me that your cause/effect may be backwards there.

On the other hand, a ST-like future is a pipe dream.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[squoozer]

While it would be great if we could launch people (and things) into space cheaply I don't see widespread investment in it any time soon. Yeah it would be great to travel in space but is there actually any point? It's not like there is really actually anywhere to go. It would be cool to be able to go from one side of the Earth to the other in a few hours but that only requires sub-orbital flight not full blow wizzing between planets collecting asteroids flight.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[rufty_tufty]

I disagree, If we had robots all over the solar system now mining and bringing back stuff for us to use I'd say that was a great thing.
Then it'd make sense to increase our food supply through orbital farms (as we've run out of space on earth).

Then once we've done that, living in orbit on those farms isn't far behind. And once we're in orbit...

The trick is to make space profitable - once something is profitable we exploit it to the maximum.

BTW Star Trek is your utopia, not mine. Please don't make me live in that world.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Exocrist]

Perhaps not, but we should theoretically have the knowledge to either recreate that technology, or surpass it.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[16K Ram Pack]

You mean the well run public transport systems in Europe that cost even more in public subsidy?

The train companies in the UK charge a ludicrous amount of money, even though they get huge direct and indirect subsidy. Far more than for me to travel by car, and far more than a coach. It's frequently cheaper to fly from London to Glasgow than take the train, even though there are additional taxes on the plane.

Even in France, where they get huge subsidy, It's cheaper for me to drive from Angouleme to Bordeaux than take the TGV.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[16K Ram Pack]

Fixed it for you:-

You are wrong when thinking that it is only profit that can drive Computers. If we leave Computers to profit, then we will end up with improved billing systems, but no real progress in physics that will allow us to do large scale computer simulations.

Sure, people built computers to make their businesses run faster. This drove people like motorola, intel, AMD and co to build faster processors, which then went into gaming, which now drives it. Of course, the scientists couldn't possibly gain from all that innovation.

The commercialisation of space will drive everything else forward. Once enough rich, elderly tourists are releasing their home equity for a flight into space, we'll see flights come down in price, as more players enter the market. That means trips will become relatively cheaper, and the science will gain from this.

The liberalisation of the global airline market over the past 20 or so years has seen prices on transatlantic flights remain almost constant. It costs me about the same to do London to New York now than 20 years ago. Bear in mind how much inflation has gone up in the same time. That may mean that businessmen can transact more international business, but at the same time, it means more people can attend FOSS conferences.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[mikeswi]

The technology does exist. The tools and spacecraft do not, but only because no one has bothered to build them.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[CaptainCarrot]

I think research programs can only benefit from commercialized space travel.

Suppose you were in the US and wanted to visit the Sahara but there was no means in place for you to get there. You'd have to travel to a coast however you could, build a ship, gather supplies for the voyage, sail across the ocean, find a good harbor, gather supplies for your trip into the desert, find yourself some camels, and then hopefully set off in the right direction.

Fortunately, you don't have to do that. You can just hop on a plane to Rabat and go for it.

The current state of affairs for space exploration is like the first scenario. If space travel were commercialized, it may well end up more like the second. Even just getting out of the bottom of Earth's gravity well could make exploration of the outer planets much more affordable. We might not even need NASA anymore. Space exploration could come within reach of many other research facilities.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[halltk1983]

And because I go home everyday... I never go to work?

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Anonymous Coward]

"The liberalisation of the global airline market over the past 20 or so years has seen prices on transatlantic flights remain almost constant."

And do you know why? Massive government subsidies go to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Bombardier, Airbus, Concorde and a handful of others. These companies, and by extension, the entire airlines industry would not exist if it were not for the governments of their respective countries' governments.

The airline industry itself received a $15 billion bailout from the federal government in the single year following Sept. 11, 2001. Why? Is this what you call "liberalisation of the global airline market". In a free market, should it not be sink or swim?

Any large corporation receives government handouts...this is why our system is called a welfare state (ie. state capitalism)

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[Moofie]

No, but in one semantic sense, unless you don't return, you haven't LEFT.

Re:Get rid of the bean counters

[khallow]

I disagree. It's pretty clear that investment in space tourism and other private enterprise has gone up substantially over the pastdecade. Also, given that a number of the participants are publically traded companies, I'd say that "widespread investment" is trivially true though the investment is obviously concentrated in established companies. Also, IIRC, reaching low earth orbit takes about the same change in velocity as escaping from the Solar System. Ie, that's the reason behind Heinlein's statement that low Earth orbit is half-way to anywhere.

Owning an asteroid

[arrrrg]

FTFA: whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates . And exactly does one come to own an asteroid? Is planing a flag good enough? If so, I'm gonna start launching "ME" flags at all the nearest celestial bodies.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[rah1420]

I'm gonna start launching "ME" flags at all the nearest celestial bodies.

And as soon as you do, you can expect a visit from SCO's lawyers.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[FleaPlus]

And exactly does one come to own an asteroid? Is planing a flag good enough?

Space property rights are a very murky and ambiguous area, but one which should get resolved if we want to have any hope of expanding out there permanently. An article by Sam Dinkin in the Space Review on Property rights and space commercialization has a fairly nice overview of the issues. A quote:

Space property rights will probably not spark a space transportation boom that will rival the railroad boom, the airplane boom, or the automobile boom. But there will be no boom if there are no property rights. Leaving the regulatory regime the same is a recipe for continued sclerosis.

If we do nothing, space will look a lot more like Antarctica than Alaska. Without property rights there will not be adequate investment and space resources will be underutilized. Establishing property rights in space will cost millions, not billions, and can be done decades ahead of any commercialization or colonization. It's time to set the stage to break out of the exploration mode of Columbus and get on with establishing the regulatory regime to lay the foundation for the next Plymouth Rock.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Amouth]

I was thinking the same thing as i read that post..

if SCO was smart they would wait till he got it back to earth then show the violation of the claim, they are sneeky little basters like that

Re:Owning an asteroid

[jcr]

And exactly does one come to own an asteroid?

Pretty much the same way as happened with homesteading or mining claims. If you get to the asteroid first, and are capable of killing anyone who tries to take it away from you, I for one would say "it's yours".

Eventually though, the pioneers give way to the settlers, and the settlers, practicing the social division of labor, will establish an organization with more weaponry than anyone else in the area, which will enforce property ownership.

We may have a period of space colonization that generates a lot of entertainment and literature, just like the American West of the late 1800's.

-jcr

Re:Owning an asteroid

[ultranova]

And exactly does one come to own an asteroid? Is planing a flag good enough?

The same way one comes to own anything else: by being able to force everyone else to keep their hands off it. On Earth that is usually accomplished by borrowing states resources as your own via legal action, but on frontier environment like space you need to have a fighting force of your own.

Forget flags, and fill the surface of the asteroid with anti-spacecraft guns.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[someone1234]

No, he is working for SCO. Didn't you notice from the post???

Re:Owning an asteroid

[femto]

Won't space property rights also require space weapons? Given that a percentage of humans are greedy bastards who would kill their gandmother for a profit, property rights would seem to be only as good as the weapons used to back them up.

Maybe the solution is to pay people not to go into space? That way the greedy bastards will take the money and stay on Earth leaving the non-greedy people to fly.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Itchy Rich]

Space property rights are a very murky and ambiguous area...

It's murky until you realise that property rights in space are exactly the same as property rights on Earth. Property is established using the threat of violence.

In the case of personal property, that violence is distilled through the laws of a community, but the threat of being shot, beaten or dragged off to jail is still there.

In the case of national territory, the threat of violence is much less subtle.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Qzukk]

and can be done decades ahead of any commercialization or colonization.

See, here's the problem. We see it now with people patenting things they could never accomplish, paying a few thousand dollars in application and lawyer fees to obtain the property rights to things they'll never actually own.

Property rights in advance is foolish, stupid, dumb, idiotic, and any number of other names you can assign. Do you know why the Gold Rush was a Rush? Because people could go west and stake out a plot of land and own it. Do you want to know how to kill the Space Rush? Sell me 3554 Amun for a million dollars, so I can sit tight here and wait for someone to bring it back for me.

You want to see a space race? "Whoever sets foot there first, wins."

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Anonymous Coward]

And what the hell is wrong with Antartica? a lack of star bucks?

I don't see why we need to have a pissing contest on every part of the universe.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Lumpy]

no space property rights are not murky at all. He who has the most guns wins.

If you have enough weapons to repel any force from your mining facilities then you get to keep your asteriod.

Same as it was in the wild west.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Anonymous Coward]

"Space property rights are a very murky and ambiguous area, but one which should get resolved if we want to have any hope of expanding out there permanently."

You realise , you're completely and utterly insane don't you?

And since your thoughts are quite representative of the mindset you represent, let's hope this species dies out long before we ever get CLOSE to that stage.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Kjella]

Well, obviously the question is "Who has the authority to get the initial rights?" From there on out it'd be pretty standard business. We all know it's there, going there to plant a flag isn't exploration in any traditional sense.

It'd be like a ship dropping buoys in the ocean and claim this is now our property. International waters? Never heard of it, I just took this as personal property since nobody else had. Has having "international waters" stopped people travelling over it? Harvesting resources from it? Living on ships in that area? No? So tell me, why should space be different?

Re:Owning an asteroid

[a_nonamiss]

In all seriousness... build a rocket, fly to the asteroid, land on said asteroid and plant your flag. Develop the technology to mine it, and bring back the ore. I'm certain that most people will recognize you as "owning" that asteroid. (Assuming it is sufficiently small. If it's a large asteroid, you might have to plant lots of flags.)

Now, of course, once you have property, you must defend it. If I come to your asteroid, detonate a small nuke just above your ship, then walk around and pluck up all your flags and replace them with my own, most people would agree that I now own the asteroid.

Any property "laws" that we pass now won't be enforcable. I could sit here at my desk and claim ownership of an asteroid, but if someone else builds a ship, goes up there and does all the work to mine it, what court is going to enforce that his mining take really belongs to me? It's a lot like the people who "owned" the wreck of the S.S. Central America. Sure, it took up about 10 years in court, but the people who found the wreck were eventually awarded 92% of the take, and the people who "owned it" (on paper, at least) got 8%. (IMHO, 8% for doing absolutely nothing for 140 years is way too much. If I were in charge, they would have got the honor to pay the court costs for the defendant.)

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Anonymous Coward]

Do it like the Americans always have.

Get yourself a large gun - shoot anyone on Earth who disagrees with you, insist that America owns all native land/space, and kill anything you find out there as well, humans or animals.

Then bring in the carpetbaggers, the lawyers and the politicians.

And all the time, pretend to yourself that you are doing this for freedom and the American Way. Make lots of films that show you as super-heros (stealing from other countries' history where necessary) so you can justify all the greed as 'Manifest Destiny'. Look the other way if the hypocrisy gets too overwhelming.

That's an accurate picture of the last 200 years of American history. Why should you change the habits of three lifetimes?

Re:Owning an asteroid

[redmoss]

I'm guessing all you have to do is get there, kick off anyone else who might already be there or who has claimed it, and defend yourself against all other comers. Unless we get clearly defined prospecting rules, I suspect that the miners will the biggest guns will retain possession. Due to the instability caused by these kinds of issues, I predict that humanity's impending move off the planet will be extremely disruptive toward our existing laws and political arrangements.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Luyseyal]

Live Free in Antarctica or Die!

A sponsored message from the Antarctica Nationalist Party.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[kadathseeker]

How will people fighting in space over land be any different than now on Earth?

Space will be like the Old West, except forever. Why fight over land in space? It's not like there's a shortage. You just have your robotic miners spend another few years or so flying, go a bit further, and nab a different asteroid. No biggie. Fighting over land in space is like fighting over territory in the ocean.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[kadathseeker]

Except that it will never, ever, end (well, not before humanity does).

Why fight over territory in space? At about the time the technology makes warfare in space feasable, it will be easier to keep flying and find another rock.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[kadathseeker]

What's the point? By the time space combat is feasable it will be easier to keep flying and grab your own rock than take it from someone else.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Anonymous Coward]

If we do nothing, space will look a lot more like Antarctica than Alaska.

And how is this a bad thing ?

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Suidae]

If we do nothing, space will look a lot more like Antarctica than Alaska.

And how is this a bad thing ?

Well, for one thing, all that snow will block the view of the stars.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[InfiniteWisdom]

The parent was suggesting setting up the framework in advance, not allowing people to just point a finger and claim something as property. Acutal claims could then be laid like they were during the gold rush where you have to physically occupy the resource you're claiming.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[mfrank]

The *laws* can be established decades ahead of commercialization. Not ownership. The law would probably say the first entity that gets a working mine going on 3554 Amun gets to own it. When my ancestors homesteaded in Nebraska, they got 160 acres for free, but only if they farmed it and put a house on it.

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Anonymous Coward]

I pwned at asteroids!

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Keith McClary]

If we do nothing, space will look a lot more like Antarctica than Alaska.

Think of the penguins!
  Oh, won't anybody please think of the penguins!

Re:Owning an asteroid

[Keith McClary]

no space property rights are not murky at all. He who has the most guns wins. ...
Same as it was in the wild west.

Or Palestine, 1945-48.

Spain and the New World

[Anonymous Coward]

So far, I've seen a lot of negative comments about it destroying the Earth's economy. Sure, the short term effects may include major upheaval, but consider this: the gold Spain brought back from the New World ignited centuries of economic growth and propelled Europe into the dominant group of nations on the planet.

In the long run, more resources is good for everyone.

Re:Spain and the New World

[Telvin_3d]

Well, yes, if everybody means the same Europeans that it helped. Latin America is still paying for the exploitation.

And in slightly more related grounds, the wealth also destroyed Spain in the end, leading to an economy of bankers and people living the rich life on nothing but credit. There is a reason Spain isn't exactly on the forefront of the world economy anymore. In a very real way, the only people to benefit from all that gold in more than the short term were the British. They used the wealth they got to develop their own economy and make the big steps in technology that made them a world power.

Re:Spain and the New World

[Waffle Iron]

the gold Spain brought back from the New World ignited centuries of economic growth and propelled Europe into the dominant group of nations on the planet.

It was actually more like: the gold Spain brought back from the new world created a major glut that significantly devalued the price of gold, and the resulting inflation ended up devastating Spain's economy.

Since gold had little if any actual intrinsic value in those times (today at least we can plate electrical connectors with it), acquiring more of it had just the same effect as printing more paper money today: it created inflation, not any new real wealth.

Re:Spain and the New World

[plasmacutter]

Oo..

>>he wealth also destroyed Spain in the end, leading to an economy of bankers and people living the rich life on nothing but credit.

this accurately describes the US. Frightening but not unexpected.

Re:Spain and the New World

[happyemoticon]

Well, yes, if everybody means the same Europeans that it helped. Latin America is still paying for the exploitation.

Just like the Martians, living in their reservations deep underneath Mars' crust after trading all of their land away for a single bead.

Re:Spain and the New World

[Eightyford]

Since gold had little if any actual intrinsic value in those times (today at least we can plate electrical connectors with it), acquiring more of it had just the same effect as printing more paper money today: it created inflation, not any new real wealth.

Sadly, most people can't comprehend that.

gah - brain fart!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, metal, not medal. Brain fart.

Re:gah - brain fart!

[AndroidCat]

Oh! I thought you were talking about the Olympics.

And it better not hit the earth

[Animats]

2km of heavy metals. That would be at least as bad as the KT impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The discouraging thing is that we probably could, today, build automated spacecraft that could reach the asteroid and set off nuclear bombs to change the orbit. It would be profitable to nudge the thing into earth orbit. And if somebody screws up, we lose the planet.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[kclittle]

Oh, com'on, where's your greedy, capitalist spirit? What's a slipped decimal point or two in your thrust calculations compared to $20 TRILLION dollars? Be a man, take some risk!

(I am joking...:-)

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[plasmacutter]

Oh it's worse than that. Even if it does not crash it could still wreak havoc on tidal forces and ocean currents and turn the ecosystem upside down.

That said.. what about the impact of launching rockets with ore from this asteroid continuously? is that not "thrust"? that would change its orbit. I suggest the government make sure, especially with earth crossers, that at least 10 independent teams of engineers and physicists be used to thoroughly check any plans for reduction/mining of asteroids with regard to that problem.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[SEWilco]

So aim for the Moon and mine it there.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[1u3hr]

Oh it's worse than that. Even if it does not crash it could still wreak havoc on tidal forces and ocean currents and turn the ecosystem upside down.

Bullshit. You'd need a micrometer to measure its tidal effect.

Moon: mass = 7x10e22 kg, distance= 360,000 km
Asteroid: mass about 2x10e13 kg, distance (say) 100 km

ratio of gravitational forces:m1/m2* (r1/r2)e2 = roughly 1/270.

.. what about the impact of launching rockets with ore from this asteroid continuously? is that not "thrust"? that would change its orbit.

No. Rockets "push against" their exhaust, not what they launch from. However, if they used a mass-driver to accelerate the payloads, the asteroid would be pushed back. But it's a simple calculation.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[asdfrewq]

2km of heavy metals. That would be at least as bad as the KT impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

That's nothing! I once went on a roadtrip with a Slipknot fan. After 500km of heavy metal, I was praying for a meteor to strike me down.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[shmlco]

Given how thoroughly you missed the mark on all counts, I suggest that in the future you get at least 10 independent teams of engineers and physicists to thoroughly check any plans... that you make.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[bm_luethke]

I know I have a pretty large net in my basement, I'm hoping for the thing to hit right around me.

Though, to some reality, I wonder if this thing were to really crash into your property who would have it's mineral rights? Yes, I know the amount of destruction it would cause, but unless it destroyed the earth totally we have GPS coordinates for property and can re-establish what you own (well, we would still have them but no ability to read the numbers no matter what).

Heck, if you owned 80,000 acres and had an asteroid worth 20 million hit it and destroy everything it would probably be worth it (at least monetary wise - I'm also assuming you family/friends don't get wiped out which is likely without enough warning).

I don't know - kinda an interesting "what if" question. I guess not really that important on such a large thing - too destructive to care afterwards. But the idea exist and will, at some point, have to be answered. Just think how much your property might be worth if you have a 80% chance of a small celestial body full of precious metals making it through the atmosphere hitting your property (and being big enough to leave stuff, small enough to not cause too much damage to be unprofitable). Sell it now for speculators or bank on it hitting? Or am I missing something on how the metals will be deposited?

Eh, just a thought.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[plasmacutter]

very well then, i made the assumption that a heavy metal asteroid would have more mass than it really does, apparently erroneously.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[freedom_india]

Read this: http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_eart h_mp.html for enlightenment.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[afaik_ianal]

That would be at least as bad as the KT impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

You don't really believe that stuff do you? We all know that they were actually wiped out by the Great Flood.

(Oh c'mon - the OP was asking for a flat-earth joke; it was bound to come sooner or later)

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[1u3hr]

very well then, i made the assumption that a heavy metal asteroid would have more mass than it really does, apparently erroneously.

Sorry to have been too abrupt. I may well have made a mistake, but I assumed a ball of radius 1 km, density 5 (as for iron ore). If it were made of solid platinum, it would be about 4 times heavier; still negligible astronomically (unless it impacted, of course).

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[oojah]

From: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

Your Inputs:

Distance from Impact: 161.00 km = 99.98 miles
Projectile Diameter: 2000.00 m = 6560.00 ft = 1.24 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2750 kg/m3
Target Type: Crystalline Rock

Energy:

Energy before atmospheric entry: 4.84 x 1021 Joules = 1.16 x 106 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 5.1 x 106years

Major Global Changes:

The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass. The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.

The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.

Crater Dimensions:

Transient Crater Diameter: 24.4 km = 15.1 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 8.63 km = 5.36 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 37.2 km = 23.1 miles
Final Crater Depth: 0.879 km = 0.546 miles

The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 30.4 km3 = 7.3 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 65.1 meters = 213 feet

Thermal Radiation:

Time for maximum radiation: 1.99 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 31.8 km = 19.7 miles
The fireball appears 44.9 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 8.22 x 107 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 439 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 187

Effects of Thermal Radiation:

Clothing ignites
Much of the body suffers third degree burns
Newspaper ignites
Plywood flames
Deciduous trees ignite
Grass ignites

Seismic Effects:

The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 32.2 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 8.7
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 161 km:
VII. Damage negligible in buildings of good design and construction; slight to moderate in well-built ordinary structures; considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed structures; some chimneys broken.
VIII. Damage slight in specially designed structures; considerable damage in ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse. Damage great in poorly built structures. Fall of chimneys, factory stacks, columns, monuments, walls. Heavy furniture overturned.

Ejecta:

The ejecta will arrive approximately 184 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 75.8 cm = 29.8 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 6.91 cm = 2.72 inches

Air Blast:

The air blast will arrive at approximately 488 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 278000 Pa = 2.78 bars = 39.5 psi
Max wind velocity: 357 m/s = 798 mph
Sound Intensity: 109 dB (May cause ear pain)

Damage Description:

Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Multistory steel-framed office-type buildings will suffer extreme frame distortion, incipient collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[Jesselnz]

Slipknot isn't metal.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[Tango42]

You throw stuff out the back of your rocket while you're near ground, that stuff is going to hit the ground and transfer its momentum. Until you're far enough away for the exhaust to disperse before reaching the ground you effectively push against the ground - you'd get the same thrust without the ground there, certainly, but the ground still recoils. It's a pretty small consideration, though - you can launch from alternate sides of the asteroid if you have to.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[Anonymous Coward]

What if a planet identical to the earth collided with our planet at the speed of light?

Your Inputs: Distance from Impact: 1.00 km = 0.62 miles
Projectile Diameter: 12756300.00 m = 41840664.00 ft = 7921.66 miles
Projectile Density: 5515 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 299792.00 km/s = 186170.83 miles/s (Your chosen velocity is higher than the maximum for an object orbiting the sun)
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 2750 kg/m3
Target Type: Crystalline Rock

Energy: Energy before atmospheric entry: -NaN x 10-NaN Joules = 6.43 x 1025 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size is longer than the Earth's age.
Such impacts could only occur during the accumulation of the Earth, between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago.

Major Global Changes: The Earth is completely disrupted by the impact and its debris forms a new asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Venus and Mars.

Yeah, baby!

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[niXcamiC]

No, Rockets don't have to push against anything, they accelerate because of Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." The exaust shooting out of the rocket doesn't have to push against anything, it just has to come out really fast, and the rocket will go in the opposite direction.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[1u3hr]

don't have to push against anything,

That's why I put quotemarks around "push".

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[niXcamiC]

You did say they "push" against their exaust though, it just sounded like you were saying that the exaust that comes out of the rocket pushes against the exaust that is floating out in space, which isnt true, but if you werent, then all is good :)

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[tarkas]

No. Rockets "push against" their exhaust, not what they launch from. However, if they used a mass-driver to accelerate the payloads, the asteroid would be pushed back. But it's a simple calculation.

Erm, no. No difference between the two. Both exert a force to accelerate matter in one direction to accelerate themselves in the opposite direction (a reaction force). Force=mass*acceleration. That is the force exerted to accelerate the mass in a direction, generates an equal but opposite reaction force on the source body (ie a rocket). The acceleration observed on the 2 elements depends on the mass. Very high accelerations on gas but small on the rocket.

Oddly enough, although light has no mass it can trasfer momentum, and so also acts as a reaction exaust. It's just very very small so you need one hell of a lot of photons.

Geez, I learned this stuff in grade school reading Niven and Asimov long before I got to HS, let alone an engineering program.

Back to Physics 101 for u.

-Tarkas

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[ceoyoyo]

Note that you don't so much land on a 2km asteroid as you dock with it. So chances are very little of your exhaust would actually be directed at any particular side of the asteroid.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[sloth jr]

Dogs and Cats:

Living together

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[1u3hr]

Back to Physics 101 for u.

Fuck u. This all began because I was trying to explain something to someone using words they were familiar with rather than introducing a lot of terminology that probably would have meant nothing to him. I did Physics 101, 201 and 301, FYI. Not to mention 321, 341 and some others. If I just wanted to be a jerk I could have written a correct, concise explanation and communicated nothing.

Re:And it better not hit the earth

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Erm, no. No difference between the two. Both exert a force to accelerate matter in one direction to accelerate themselves in the opposite direction (a reaction force). Force=mass*acceleration. That is the force exerted to accelerate the mass in a direction, generates an equal but opposite reaction force on the source body (ie a rocket). The acceleration observed on the 2 elements depends on the mass. Very high accelerations on gas but small on the rocket.

There is a big difference actually, a mass driver on a planetary/lunar/asteroid surface is much more efficient. That's because the planet is much heavier than the rocket and doesn't get accelerated significantly by the rocket as the rocket pushes off of it; but gaseous exhaust does tremendously; and the gaseous exhaust ends up going very fast and carries away lots of energy (energy is proportional to speed *squared*; whereas momentum is only speed times mass.)

Actually if you do the maths for minimum energy you want the heaviest reaction mass you can get.

$20 Trillion?!?!

[ChrisGilliard]

We might actually be able to pay off the national debt!!!

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[HermanAB]

Why would you want to pay off the national debt? One man's debt is another man's investment.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

But would you rather be the debtor or the creditor? It's true that a portion of the national debt is worthwile, but it'd be nice if the US wasn't wasting something like 15% (old statistic from college days, probably changed since then) of its budget just to pay the interest and not even the principal. If the debt didn't exist, taxes could be cut by 15% without cutting a single program. People would get to keep 4-5% more of their income. That would be kick ass.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[GoofyBoy]

Because you care about what will happen to your country in 10-30 years from now.

Think about an individual being in too much debt, now is that "an investment" in the person? Think about junk bonds at a low interest rate, is that "an investment"?

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Itchy Rich]

We might actually be able to pay off the national debt!!!

After the first trillion dollars of precious metals they might not be so precious any more.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[illuminatedwax]

The Spaniards were thinking the same thing with the New World...

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[dpilot]

If my President and his administration aren't concerned, why should I be?

(Interpret this post as a bash, as humor, as sarcasm, as anger, as sadness, as anything but serious.)

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Peldor]

Isn't the Treasury Dept in DC? Let's just drop this asteroid off there.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[zerocool^]

Only if we use mining drones and have something bigger than a Badger Mark II + Hull modification 27.12% cargo expanders for hauling. And we'll only have like 2 hours to come back and get our jetcans. Plus, what if Gurristas show up?

~W

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice Eve-Online reference :)

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[elrous0]

what if Gurristas show up?

Duh, that's why you have your corp buddies there with Ospreys and Blackbirds to actually DO the mining--mining ability AND firepower, my friend.

-Eric

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Let's go on the gold standard. When that asteroid gets delivered, I'll be able to pay off my house with the equivalent of a gold-plated paper clip. Of course, I'll need a dump-truck full of gold bricks or a paper certificate with about 12 zeroes on it to buy my weekly groceries.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[corbettw]

Think about an individual being in too much debt, now is that "an investment" in the person?

Yes, it is. Whatever bank loaned that person the money has made an investment, for which they receive interest accrued monthly, annually, or at some other interval.

Think about junk bonds at a low interest rate, is that "an investment"?

It might be Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They don't exist, either.

"Junk bond" and "low interest rate" simply don't belong in the same sentance. The two are mutually exclusive.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[ChrisGilliard]

Why would you want to pay off the national debt? One man's debt is another man's investment.

There are a number of reasons to do this:
1.) Lower national debt would mean lower interest rates
2.) Lower national debt would mean the goverment would have to spend less money on debt service which would free up money for other programs, etc or taxes could be lowered.
3.) As you said the debt is an investment. If that investment option wasn't available, people would need to invest in businesses, real estate or other investments that can create jobs more efficiently than government can.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[aminorex]

the federal reserve system requires the formation of new debt in order to increse the money supply. dollars are issued by a private corporation to the feral government of the us in exchange for bonded interest bearing securities. dollars are issued to national banks by the federal reserve banks in the form of loans at an interest rate established by the board of directors at the open market meetings. there are no other sources of dollars. thus, it is in fact impossible to pay off the national debt, considered as the sum of the obligations of the federal government and the national banks. the debt can only increase, draining the wealth of the nation into the hands of the directors of the federal reserve banks.

the nominal national debt is the sum of the secured obligations of the national treasury, which principally takes the form of treasury bonds. this debt can, theoretically, be repaid, if the treasury were to generate enough income. doing so would essentially destroy the national economy, unless it were acheived by external acquisition, such as invasion of a large oil field, or capture of a metal-rich asteroid.

but the notion of 20T$ of precious metals as a lump sum, with instantaneous presence, is incoherent. it would not be possible to sell it, and if it were, the strike price would be a tiny fraction of that. nonetheless, any nation or enterprise which can capture such a prize could dominate the global economy for decades.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[HermanAB]

A lot of the national debt is held by 'old people' in the form of bonds. Treasury bills, GICs, RIFs, Annuities, Mutual funds and so on. The bond market is a thousand times larger than the stock market. If you would suddenly pay back all bonds, it cannot be invested in stocks - there aren't enough going around. You cannot just give them all of that back in cash either - it will cause massive inflation. Anyway, where else are people supposed to invest, that is safe?

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[ChrisGilliard]

it will cause massive inflation.

I would argue that paying off the national debt would reduce the risk of inflation and I believe that's the concensus. Obviously, it would not be done overnight (even if we did capture this asteroid). The reason for this is that decresing the amount of national debt would reduce the number of debt sellers while the debt buyers would remain the same as you you've stated. This causes interest rates to go down which in turns reduces the risk of inflation.

Anyway, where else are people supposed to invest, that is safe?

There would still be a number of safe options. Treasuries are not the only things that are safe. For instance FDIC insured CDs are just as safe because they have the government guarantee (just like treasuries). There's no reason the Goverment could not continue to guarantee CDs. Also, there are Government backed securities like GNMA. These are mortgages that are guaranteed by the government. Again, just as safe as treasuries. There's no doubt that significantly paying down the national debt would cause an increased investment in the stock market which would stimulate the economy which is also good.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[hardburn]

Bugger the Guristas. I'm coming in a suicide kessie.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Cyno]

It would probably cost us $40 trillion to mine it with nukes and try to catch all the falling pieces in our giant nets. The giant nets might cost us that much if Haliburton has to make them. I think Iraq will be cheaper in the longer run, if we're talking about the USofA mining asteroids in space. Besides, who's going to prevent the space war over so much valuable material? If ANYONE attempts to mine it national security alerts will sound in every competitive (and greedy) nation.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. Seriously. Fucking Will Dunn Space Goats.

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[ceoyoyo]

Nope, it's slavery. Okay, okay, indentured servitude. ;)

Re:$20 Trillion?!?!

[GoofyBoy]

>Yes, it is. Whatever bank loaned that person the money has made an investment, for which they receive interest accrued monthly, annually, or at some other interval.

No it isn't. If the person is in too much debt, and then wants more debt, its stops becoming an investment and starts becoming a gamble. "Will he pay it back, with interest, before he defaults?" (With the US its a bit of a different gamble, since they print their own money.)

>"Junk bond" and "low interest rate" simply don't belong in the same sentance.

Thats because the risk/reward is not worth it and therefore its not an investment. Lottery tickets have a horrible risk/reward and therefore are not considered investments. Its gambling.

As the US gets more in debt, the risk of them defaulting or doing something funny (see below) becomes greater, and others will start asking/demanding for better rewards (higher interest) for their investment. The US can work their way out of it, but its like studying last minute for an exam or trying to lose 20 lbs in a week.

(But the US can print their own money, so it becomes an rising inflation issue or a rising interest rate issue, either of one is not so good for you, as the US taxpayer/currency holder.)

Sounds disrupful to the economy....

[ShyGuy91284]

Depending on how valuble each amount of metal is (are we talking 5 tons of pure silver, or 5 pounds of platinum?), this sounds like the kind of stuff that could destabilize economies.....

Re:Sounds disrupful to the economy....

[Wyatt Earp]

Cobalt, Platinum family metals, Iron and Nickel.

"There are three key things to know about 3554 Amun: First, its orbit crosses that of Earth; second, it's the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroid yet discovered; and finally, it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals." - FTFA

"3554 Amun is an M-type Aten asteroid (meaning it crosses Earth's orbit) and a Venus-crosser. It was discovered on 4 March 1986 by Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at Mount Palomar Observatory."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3554_Amun

Re:Sounds disrupful to the economy....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it'll be like when Spain imported all that gold from the New World! Oh, wait... we stopped using precious metals to back our currency a long time ago. Welcome to the 21st century.

a better idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

close NASA, shutdown everysingle zany corporation which is hellbent on flying to space and back. Take all that would-be capital and invest it in research for a transmogrifier here on EARth. I bet with such a device you could make the meaning of a trillion dollars completely abstract

Expense and difficulties ...

[b0r1s]

Expense and difficult problems pave the way for high tech research and funding.

Just like war: the people who benefit most are in the high tech fields.

Get tha truck!

[garrett714]

contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal

MA, PA, GIT THA TRUCK! Der's gold in 'em 'ere asteroids!

astroid question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this astroid possess naquida?

Re:astroid question

[AGMW]

Does this astroid possess naquida?

No, but it does contain e

Why go to space

[SEWilco]

There's a simpler reason to go to space.

Get our eggs out of this nest at the bottom of a gravity well.

Re:Why go to space

[Anonymous Coward]

Get our eggs out of this nest at the bottom of a gravity well.

Don't forget to take some sperm as well or those eggs will be useless.

why, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

here's one

gandhi owned a loincloth and a pair of glasses when he kicked off

how about tesla? living-starving-in a cold water flat at the end when the feds ripped off his notes

gw carver? turned down 100gs a year in the 1800s to keep working on his ag patents for the good of the planet?

Let's turn it around, how many incredibly rich guys actually got there without being total jerks or without being born into it, ie, big nothings?

Re:why, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, sure, there are anecdotes and examples galore, but my point stands, though: you don't work for Gandhi (who wielded immense political power which is equivalent to wealth by any reasonable measure) or Tesla (who was crazy, not poor). You work for someone who is wealthy enough to pay you. If we're going to visit other worlds -- and possibly save this one from an asteroid collision -- we're not going to do it by chanting archaeo-leftist slogans and moaning about somebody else getting richer.

Nietzsche said it best. Man is a thing that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?

Re:why, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well, sure, there are anecdotes and examples galore"--ya, that was my point, there ARE a ton of examples of where poor people did some pretty amazing stuff. And a lot more who were perfectly content with enough to get by on, and not much more. Einstein? Was he ever all that well off?

and since when were they "chanting archaeo-leftist slogans and moaning about somebody else getting richer" And when exactly did I do that or advocate that?

Wouldn't it be easier to admit you posted a stupid and just get over it? Concede a point? It doesn't hurt any...this is a freeking bulletin board and you posted Ac anyway...

  Wealth has little to do with worth as a human being. The accumulation of it though can become a destructive obsession.

And I'd like to see it, name some really rich dudes (we'll class really rich as billionaires in todays dollars, adjusted for time) who weren't or aren't more or less jerk offs.

Now, I can think of a small handful, but not too many, and even those might be controversial to the max, hmm, say henry ford. Pretty good innovator, smart enough business wise to get the car on the road, decent enough to price it so that his workers (the masses guy)could afford one, wanted to be ecological about it and use ethanol for fuel and plastics for the body made from indistrial hemp, etc.(he lost on the last two but tried anyway) But,he did some other stuff, too, kinda turned into a fascist as well. See, it's hard.. It's easier to come up with the very poor or middle class folks who were coolguys *consistently*.

Human beings seem to hit a threshold after which they lose touch with reality and humane-ness. Some seek solace in philanthropy, but in a lot of cases it appears to be a guilty conscious and tax dodges as much as anything else, borg of gates for instance, mellon, rockefeller, heck, al capone.

Re:why, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

And a lot more who were perfectly content with enough to get by on, and not much more. Einstein? Was he ever all that well off?

Like both you and me, Einstein (and the other guys you mentioned) was materially better off than 99.999% of all human beings who have ever walked the earth. ...and since when were they "chanting archaeo-leftist slogans and moaning about somebody else getting richer" And when exactly did I do that or advocate that?

Well, you're the one who trotted out the old "rich get richer" cliche in a thread about space exploration. I merely responded to point out that if we ever get off this rock, it won't be through the efforts of the masses. (Unless, that is, I get to tax the middle class into oblivion to support my pet scientific pursuits... a notion I'm becoming less and less comfortable with over time.)

If it's going to be done, it'll be done by wealthy, ambitious people who are -- yes, in some peoples' view -- jerks. (That's mostly a property of a large social surface area, not of a large bank balance.)

Re:why, yes

[all_the_names_are_ta]

When you're comparing the super rich vs the poor, there is a far greater pool of poor people to draw from.

Furthermore, the acts of the rich stand out far more than the acts of the poor thanks to the scope of their influence. Case in point would be Bill Gates. On the one hand there's his huge philanthropic donations, on the other there is MS. MS isn't really that evil (compare it with SCO) but it stands out due to its size and market dominance.

I think that you can find good and bad in everyone, it's just that you're focussing on the virtues of the poor, and the evils of the rich.

For example, Einstein was an awful husband. But you don't mention that. Gates donated billions to wipe out childhood diseases. But, no, he's from MS he's eeeevilll. In fact he's had a social conscience pretty much all the way along (most of his early political donations were to left leaning causes).

Anyway, back to your post:

"And a lot more who were perfectly content with enough to get by on, and not much more."

What's so great about being content with enough to get by on? Why is this an admirable trait? How do you know these people actually were content and weren't just failures?

Your post seems to imply there's something virtuous about being poor. I have no idea why anyone could accept that. At the least, having money gives you the resources to do something about what you care about. How many people can fund research like Bill Gates?

"And I'd like to see it, name some really rich dudes (we'll class really rich as billionaires in todays dollars, adjusted for time) who weren't or aren't more or less jerk offs."

Warren Buffett - he's donated a few billion to charity, is one of the world's richest men, and still lives in the same, small house he's owned for years.

Re:why, yes

[mcvos]

And I'd like to see it, name some really rich dudes (we'll class really rich as billionaires in todays dollars, adjusted for time) who weren't or aren't more or less jerk offs.

The founders of Google?

20 trillion us dollars, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 20 trillion inelastic US dollars of formerly precious metals.

The Two Fallacies: Ore grade and interest rates

[Baldrson]

People who look to asteroid mining of metals for terrestrial use miss two fundamental factors:

1. Ore grade just isn't that good compared to what you find on earth. Extracting platinum from a solid block of nickel amalgam is really energy intensive, and the other "stony" asteroids have not gone through the hydrothermal concentration of metals of the terrestrial deposits.
2. The time it takes for a piece of capital equipment to return any materials to earth from an asteroid is enormous compared to the delivery of lunar mass to earth orbit. Since any mass in earth orbit is worth hundreds of dollars a pound and the time is so short for delivery, it makes a lot more sense to use lunar material in earth orbit than it does to use asteroidal material on the earth's surface.

Re:The Two Fallacies: Ore grade and interest rates

[WolfWithoutAClause]

1. Ore grade just isn't that good compared to what you find on earth. Extracting platinum from a solid block of nickel amalgam is really energy intensive, and the other "stony" asteroids have not gone through the hydrothermal concentration of metals of the terrestrial deposits.

True, it's energy intensive, but solar furnaces are available 24x7. It's just a big bit of bent aluminum foil- *really* lightweight to pack. Several thousand degrees... (surface temperature of the sun). Costs very little. And platinum is very expensive (it's used for catalytic converters for cars, and cars are popular, so at a few hundred dollars a gram, so it doesn't take many tonnes to turn a profit.)

2. The time it takes for a piece of capital equipment to return any materials to earth from an asteroid is enormous compared to the delivery of lunar mass to earth orbit. Since any mass in earth orbit is worth hundreds of dollars a pound and the time is so short for delivery, it makes a lot more sense to use lunar material in earth orbit than it does to use asteroidal material on the earth's surface.

Depends. The delta-v to return stuff from say, Phobos or Deimos is much less than that needed from the moon though. And it's not entirely true that mass in earth orbit is worth hundreds of dollars, if you deliver stuff from asteroids/moons; delivery can be much cheaper than that.

Re:The Two Fallacies: Ore grade and interest rates

[jcr]

Extracting platinum from a solid block of nickel amalgam is really energy intensive,

Sure, but there's also quite a lot of energy available at an orbit of 1 AU. Half of a silvered-mylar balloon supported by a very light framework can concentrate enough sunlight to melt the asteroid. If you want to smelt metals out of the asteroid with lower temperatures, you can just bag it and pump in carbon monoxide, which will pull the oxygen off the metal ores.

If you want to get the metals to the earth at a low cost, you form it into shapes that have a great deal of surface area, and use the pressure of sunlight to slow their orbital velocity to a very low speed before they hit the atmosphere. If you dropped a 100 meter diameter disc of .1mm-thick gold foil into the atmosphere, it probably wouldn't even melt on the way down. The fiery re-entry we're used to seeing when spacecraft enter the atmosphere is mostly due to their tiny surface area to the energy they have to shed.

At any rate, I agree that the greatest value of metals in asteroids isn't the potential for getting them back to earth, it's for using them in space.

-jcr

Why do the poor set the speed?

[TheBismarck]

It's going to be a sad day for humanity when exploration and progress are hindered because some sweatshop in India can't keep up. Companies weren't born rich, they became rich because they didn't sit on their arses all day, complaining "Why do the rich keep getting richer? Life suck. Boo hoo hoo". It's the rich that send rockets into space - they should be the ones to claim the profits - the last thing society needs is a generation dependent on welfare hand-outs, simply because the rich have too much money and the poor needs to catch up before any work is done.

She's a gusher

[KFury]

The day astronomers discover an asteroid with oil reserves is the day the US diverts half its military budget to the 'peaceful exploration of space'.

Re:She's a gusher

[FleaPlus]

The day astronomers discover an asteroid with oil reserves is the day the US diverts half its military budget to the 'peaceful exploration of space'.

FYI, the moon Titan is pretty much covered in "oil reserves."

Re:She's a gusher

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and prove that maybe i do see Aliens.

Re:She's a gusher

[dfjghsk]

your own link contradicts you:

It has long been believed that Titanian lakes or even seas of methane might exist on the surface. However, while many of the surface features could be explained as the products of flowing liquids, no conclusive evidence has yet been found for the presence of liquids on Titan's surface at the present time.

When the Cassini probe arrived in the Saturnian system, it was hoped that hydrocarbon lakes or oceans might be detectable by reflected sunlight from the surface of any liquid bodies, but no specular reflections were observed.

The findings of the January 14, 2005 landing on Titan by the Huygens probe do not show any open areas of liquid ...

Re:She's a gusher

[FleaPlus]

your own link contradicts you:

I might be misreading it, but I'm under the impression that while its still uncertain whether or not there's liquid hydrocarbons on the surface, there's almost certainly hydrocarbons in Titan's thick atmosphere.

Re:She's a gusher

[Big_Breaker]

If you can get to Titan than you shouldn't be too excited about Methane, certainly not as a energy source. Getting to Titan means that you are probably using at least nuclear if not fusion energy production techniques. I guess organics are tough to come by in space so it might be a useful source of C and H.

Anyway if you want to burnt he methane... you'll need to bring a lot of oxygen anyhow and it will have almost the same mass as the methane.

More Gold... Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, what the world needs now is for us to spend 10 trillion dollars that could be used to help the underprivileged, on a space trip to collect 20 trillion dollars worth of shiny metal, none of which will be spent to help the underpriveleged. Tell me, how exactly does this increase in 'wealth' help anyone? IT"S JUST A BUNCH OF ROCKS PEOPLE!!! WE NEED INFRASTRUCTURE, NOT MORE ROCKS!!!

This economic rationalization is so much more offensive than any scientific one yet discussed.

Re:More Gold... Yay

[EnsilZah]

The fact that you think gold is only good for shiny oranments is ignorance on your part.
Precious metals like gold and platinum have many applications in electronics, medicine and science in general.
And you know what, i really do think that there are better things to do for humanity than spending the money to feed some poor people in a country you've never been to.
And by the way, it's metals, not rocks.

Lost In Space, and What is IT worth?

[EternityInterface]

The Pres I Dent Just forgot about EARTH

Available jobs at private spaceflight companies

[FleaPlus]

A number of private spaceflight firms mentioned in the article are looking for people to hire. These companies are looking for folks with expertise in a variety of areas, from web design, to aerospace/mechanical engineering, to programming. Here's a few links (courtesy of RLV News, listed roughly in order of available resources), with descriptions of what the company does:
 
* Bigelow Aerospace: Inflatable space station modules for orbital research and tourism. Despite being inflatable, their modules are better at withstanding space debris than the ISS, as they're made of a material twice as strong as kevlar. Out of all the private spaceflight firms, they probably have the most resources.
* SpaceX: Orbital rockets which are drastically cheaper than the competition, with plans for building manned orbital rockets. They should be launching their first rocket next month.
* Scaled Composites: Burt Rutan's company and winner of the X Prize. They're currently working on building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic.
* SpaceDev: They build microsatellites and propulsion systems.
* Blue Origin: Suborbital vehicle company started by Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Author Neal Stephenson also works for them, hoping for the "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel."
* Rocketplane Limited: Suborbital spaceplanes
* Masten Space Systems: Suborbital launch vehicles.
* TGV Rockets: Suborbital launch

Yup...

[Anonymous Coward]

BUSINE$$ as usual.

Lets just capture valuable astroids, and add all this MASS to the Earth.

Why not?

Look at all the Money to be made.

Who gives a crap what happens to the Earth over time from all this added mass.

Re:Yup...

[AlphaBlade]

It's a conspiracy by the people selling diet foods, I tell you! No one ever suspects them!

Re:Yup...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's got to be one of the most feeble trolls I've seen in quite some while. The Earth weighs apprx 6x10^21 tons. Say they bring down a billion tons of material. Do the math.

Is methane good enough?

[MichaelSmith]

The day astronomers discover an asteroid with oil reserves is the day the US diverts half its military budget to the 'peaceful exploration of space'.

Because Jupiter and Saturn have heaps of methane (many times the mass of the Earth) and Neptune and Uranus are practically made of the stuff.

Re:Is methane good enough?

[brxndxn]

So that's why your anus is green.. But who wants to mine your anus?

Re:Is methane good enough?

[StupidStan]

Whynot? It worked in MAD MAX!!!

Re:Is methane good enough?

[iggymanz]

no, not when its at the bottom of a huge gravity well, the energy cost to raise it is too fearsome. What there IS out there is more solar energy than a thousand worlds could ever use.

Re:Is methane good enough?

[MichaelSmith]

no, not when its at the bottom of a huge gravity well, the energy cost to raise it is too fearsome.

There is that, but it also applies to a large extent to the original joke about extracting oil off Earth.

What there IS out there is more solar energy than a thousand worlds could ever use.

40% of which we get at each point on the Earth, anyway. Anything you can do in space (by way of solar power, etc) I can do in central Australia for vastly less cost.

Of course if I had the chance to do the work in space I wouldn't be pointing that out before hand...

Will it really be worth $20 trillion?

[artifex2004]

If you suddenly flood the market with all these extra resources, it will be entirely a buyers' market, and other sellers and the countries who rely on them heavily will start collapsing.

Re:Will it really be worth $20 trillion?

[eggstasy]

deBeers anyone? :P
Just sit on it and sell slowly over time.

Re:Will it really be worth $20 trillion?

[imsabbel]

Well, just imagine the million tons of titanium, vanadium, nickel, iron, aluminium, ect you will need to build up the kind of space infrastructure needed for that kind of endeavor and it should even itself out quite nicely.

What is the earth passing anyway?

[xylix]

3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass

hmmm.... I am just not up on all the current trends and stuff... What is this pass of which you speak? Is it like a hall pass to go to the bathroom we had in school? "This pass is good for the earth to take one rotation outside of its normal path"? Or is it pass as in 'pass a ball to a team mate'. In which case, who the hell is the earth playing with.. and what is the game? Playing "my global warming can beat your global warming" with Mars perhaps? Or is it a pass as in some kind of nounification of 'pass a kidney stone'... or 'pass gas'. Does the earth leave little turds in its wake that this asteroid is going to happen upon?

From the article: " it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals. In other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates. "

What exactly is "platinumline" anyway? Honey I love you so much, here is a platinumlike ring with a diamondlike stone which will perfectly accentuate your femalelike hand. Some years ago Platinum was the name of the theme used for the Mac OS 8 and 9 GUI. We all know that Windows tried to copy the mac experience, but there is one platinumlike that is of far less value (to me anyway) than the real thing.

Re:What is the earth passing anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

thats the most unfunny and babbling ramble message that i have ever read

and im bushitlers speech writer!

Re:eek:ality

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, they went to a credit, military might and oil based congame standard.

Amd, BTW, it will be collapsing within this decade, inevitable now.

This is real economics, you can't keep printing up IOUs and have it work forever. When it gets to the point you have to point guns at people to get them to keep taking your IOUs it's already headed down.

Gold is still valuable today, like it was thousands of years ago. Until we have atomic rearranger replicators (not soon), or this pie in the sky asteroid mining gets ridiculous cheap (not soon), gold will always be pretty valuable stuff. Central bankers are just paper snakeoil salesman, hucksters on a grand scale, and it's such a great con of course all areas went for it, that's what ruthless and powerful people do. It's a way for governments to control their people through taxes tied to social engineering schemes and for the already wealthy to stay there.

62000 miles

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

I know this has been mentioned before, but exactly what sort of speeds are those space elevators expected to maintain?

100 mph? Well, just under two years transit on freight wouldn't be too bad, I guess.

10 mph?

That would take real long-term planning to do much with.

Maybe I should go hit google before I get all cynical.

Maybe 3554 Amun could be the counterweight. Oh, wait, somebody's thought of that one before. Sorry.

One thing to worry about is what would happen if it snapped? Would it wrap around the earth like yarn? Would the counterweight be launched in some unpredictable path (away from the earth, at any rate)?

Sounds like a toy my son would like to play with.

Re:62000 miles

[Ihlosi]

100 mph? Well, just under two years transit on freight wouldn't be too bad, I guess.

If anything, the space elevator is going to take stuff to a place in geosynchronous orbit (~30000 km, iirc), but of course it could be possible to leave early.

After that, it's rockets all the way, and they go a lot faster than 100 mph.

Re:62000 miles

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

I found the wikipedia entry, and it looks like they are thinking in terms of 200kph at low altitudes, and centrifugal forces would indeed induce rocket speeds beyond geosynchronous.

Lengthening the cable enough to remove need of counterweight is mentioned as a possible way to launch things out of earth orbit.

Rocket speeds tangential to the cable? I'm sure they've thought that one through, though.

Re:62000 miles

[jrockway]

> Rocket speeds tangential to the cable?

Since the cable is a line, the tangent is the cable. Maybe you meant orthogonal? (Although I'm not really sure what you're talking about :)

Re:62000 miles

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, 620 hours (at 100mph) is only 26 days. I've taken vacations longer than that before.

A very good reason (for me at least)...

[Meneguzzi]

is that a lot of the mineral reserves in our planet are under rainforests or other ecologically significant portion of land on earth and/or in areas where conflict fuels and is fueled by the pursuit of mineral reserves. In Brazil at least, disputes over land in the Amazon for control of areas with potential for gold and iron is intense for years, if you look at Africa, you got a similar situation with regards for gold and diamonds. Finding an economically viable way of tapping into space minerals would provide a way of pushing down prices so that these earth-based conflicts become meaningless, and would take out most of the reasons why some people insist on destroying ever scarcer forests. I might be saying complete rubbish, but it seems to me that once we find a cheaper way of sending the machinery out in space and of negotiating space-scale distances a bit faster. We could do most or all of the processes of refining and even manufacture outside the earth's atmosphere, and getting stuff back down is less of a problem once you got the materials processed in space. And I bet that moving tonnelades of raw minerals across space would be much cheaper than doing this on the surface of the earth. That does not seem to be such a blue sky dream to me at least. This last bit might be somewhat of paranoid of me, but it is indeed unfortunate that the US is the only remaining super-power, because they don't have anything but corporation lobby to foster them and innovate on many technological fronts. So if we got companies that are doing just fine in the current model, the US is unlikely to invest significant amounts of money for breakthroughs in these technologies. Now why am I talking about the US, because they are probably the only ones who got a big enough budget and a level of political unity to try and do a coherent project of this magnitude. The EU push into space technologies has been too meek if you ask me, and the russians, who have the knowledge, don't have the money. China perhaps would do this, they are communists, but they know how to go after the big bucks. (If you read up to here, I congratulate you, you got a lot of patience!)

Re:A very good reason (for me at least)...

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, a great place to go space mining is the Moon itself. Moon rocks contain a lot of very valuable minerals, especially titanium, a highly-useful metal for low-weight/high-strength applications (small wonder why the aerospace industry loves this metal).

The first company that figures out how to mine and refine titanium cheaply will make a mint, that's to be sure.

Re:A very good reason (for me at least)...

[Drakai]

Hadn't you heard? For centuries Man thought the moon made of cheese and long to go there. Upon arrival Man discovered it was just a dirty old rock and never looked back. Also the refinement of titanium at teh parts per million or parts per billion level is damn close to spinning straw into gold for most people. Seeing the breakers in a strip mine operation is a rude awakening to how modern mining works and future mining may work. Crush everything and run it through a fine fine sieve/chemical bath/extraction operatus. Bleh, but so it shall go.

There is gold up there!

[Nuffsaid]

I tried to get some information about this asteroid, bu as soon as i read the word "Au" small $ signs appeared in my eyes and I was unable to read further.

i pity the fools that mod this informative

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry just cause you never learnt calculus doesnt give you an excuse to go expostulating about your incorrect world views

All that is needed is a clear goal

[HuguesT]

I read a lot of negative comments on NASA on this board. It's now fashionable to complain that this agency has become a huge inefficient cesspit of wasted opportunities and money. Since the last shuttle disaster NASA is not looking very good for sure.

People assume that things will fare better if profit-driven private enterprise runs the space exploring show.

To a great degree I think it's not as simple as it looks. First the obvious cheap routes to profit from space are already taken : putting satellites in LEO and geosynchronous orbit. There is already a lot of competition on that market between the US, Europe, Japan, India and China. Unless someone comes up with a space elevator that works or similar disruptive technology, this is not likely to change much.

Essentially private space exploring enterprises is now at the level NASA was at in 1950 or so. It took a huge financial effort and a large dedicated team of incredible people to go to the Moon in 1970 or so (and bring back small samples of rock). While not all of this is lost, and I believe it is possible to repeat the feat, I can't see much profit in that particular endeavour. Colour me doubtful with respect with space tourism. It will be a while before this is safe enough for companies to ship people for small leaps above the atmosphere without getting sued out of existence at the first accident.

Getting to the Moon and the asteroids and mining them has been a mainstay of science fiction since it has existed. Everyone knows many asteroids are metal-rich and could turn a nice buck if they could be exploited. Everyone knows the Moon is littered with He3, and theoretically achieving sustained nuclear fusion might be easiser there. However various governments have known this as well, for decades. In contrast to starry eyed reporters and somewhat naive slashdot users, they have run the numbers and found that with current technology their exploitation is simply not economically feasible. Again we need disruptive technology and it's not there yet.

While I'm not a particular big fan of governements either, and not particularly the US's, I'd like to remind everyone here that so far, in spite of their failings, it is them who have driven investments, research, exploration and exploitation. They are so far ahead of any and all private space exploration outfits that it's not funny.

Even with the help of billions and indeed, trillions of dollars of private funds it will take a very long time for private enterprise to catch up, let alone leap ahead. I don't doubt that if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined their wealth they'd be able to build a Saturn V equivalent in a small number of years, but I can't see anyone succeeding in convincing them it would be a good and sound business proposition.

It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. While private enterprise is busy gathering investors with nice sounding business plans and pooh poohing all that we learned in the last 50 years or so of actual space exploration because, you know, gov't did it and that's not relevant, NASA and the others are still exploring the solar system, last I checked. Apparently there's a plan to go to Mars, or so I heard.

Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding. What many people seem to be missing here is that in spite of searching and thinking hard that plan was never found. The rest followed.

Re:All that is needed is a clear goal

[MichaelSmith]

People assume that things will fare better if profit-driven private enterprise runs the space exploring show.

I don't think anybody believes it will be safer, just easier to justify in the long run.

While not all of this is lost, and I believe it is possible to repeat the feat, I can't see much profit in that particular endeavour. Colour me doubtful with respect with space tourism. It will be a while before this is safe enough for companies to ship people for small leaps above the atmosphere without getting sued out of existence at the first accident.

Space adventures are said to be building a base in the UAE. Liability may be less of an issue. Some people will pay big money to take a risk, but the supply of these people may run out quickly. OTH it may last long enough to bootstrap services at a lower price, and perhaps make them sustainable in the long run.

I know that there are a lot of maybees in that paragraph. But a shot at a private space program is better than relying on NASA. I don't think NASA has any reason to be in space, other than retaining a long term capability for the USA to do manned space flight if it becomes an important requirement.

Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding. What many people seem to be missing here is that in spite of searching and thinking hard that plan was never found. The rest followed.

Apollo was a cold war thing. Shuttle was apollo era technology. The cold war has finished. The ISS is an extension of '50s SF ideas, combined with the idea of doing skylab2. There is no reason to be in space at the moment, and NASA's approach to Shuttle and ISS shows it.

Realistically why would the USA want to go to the moon or back to mars? I can't imagine my Government wanting to do those things, as much as I would want them to try.

Re:All that is needed is a clear goal

[demachina]

You kind of gloss over a lot of basic problems here.

First off yes NASA is doing some wonderful work, especially out of places like JPL or on its great observatories. But these are a small part of NASA and not getting a lot of money. The manned space division is consuming the lion's share of NASA's resources and that division hasn't really accomplished anything noteworthy in the last 30 years.

You belittle private industry in space but private industry hasn't had 200-300 billion dollars to squander in the last 30 years, NASA's manned space program has.

Unfortunately that division completely lost its way in the wake of Apollo. Was it entirely NASA's fault, no. It had enormous help from a succession of Presidents and Congressman. But the fact is it did lose its way, and has been spending substantial quantities of money and has in fact been regressing, not progressing. It has regressed to the point that it is severely challenged now just to launch men in to low earth orbit.

NASA does have a permanently manned space station which I guess is something but it came at an enormous cost, NASA can't even support it properly thanks to the grounding of the shuttle, and the station is largely dependent on the Russians to keep it operating. And worst of all it has NO clear mission or reason to exist. The Russians have a far superior record in manned space stations, did it at a far lower cost for far longer.

"Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding."

Well I hope it is that simple but I really doubt it. Mike Griffin appears on the surface to be a vast improvement over previous administrators and maybe he will turn around NASA. But NASA's manned space divion and the corrupt contractors that leech off it, are a completely disfunctional bureaucracy at this point and once organizations go as bad as it has, its really hard to fix. It is mostly just a bunch of little risk averse fiefdoms seeking to preserve their budgets and their jobs programs, seeking to accomplish as little as possible with as large a budget as possible. It would take a small miracle to turn it in to a capable motivated organization accomplishing things like it did in the Apollo era.

Now could private industry do better. On its own probably not. Its unlikely a private venture could sink 8+$ billion into space every year the way NASA does thanks to taxpayer generosity. You need huge capital investment to make huge leaps in space and it is very high risk which means its not something likely to happen in the private sector, unless the funding comes from someone with a dream and billions of dollars to squander on it.

But I would suggest NASA's manned space program needs to be largely dissolved and a new organization formed from the ground up. It might draw people from NASA and its current contractors but it would have to be a completely redesigned organization with STRONG motivations and rewards for success and taking big risks, along with disincentives and penalties to prevent it from becoming a disfunctional bureaucracy bent more on self preservation than doing anything useful.

Kelly Johnson's skunkworks or Rutan's scaled composites are the correct model for a space program. It needs to be kept to the smallest size possible and still accomplish the goal. It needs to minimize overhead and paperwork to an extreme level. It needs to have visionary engineering leaders setting the goal and then doing whatever it takes to get there as quickly as possible. It needs to be designed to prevent political interference in year in year out operations. Once a goal is set and funding established politicians need to be largely cut out of the loop other than basic auditing to prevent fraud waste and abuse. A key problem with NASA today is they HAVE to keep the current bloated shuttle and ISS going because key senators and congressmen wont allow laying off all the dead weight at NASA because of the economic impact on their states. This alone turned NASA in to an ineffective jobs program and not a space program.

Re:All that is needed is a clear goal

[khallow]

To a great degree I think it's not as simple as it looks. First the obvious cheap routes to profit from space are already taken : putting satellites in LEO and geosynchronous orbit. There is already a lot of competition on that market between the US, Europe, Japan, India and China. Unless someone comes up with a space elevator that works or similar disruptive technology, this is not likely to change much.

Actually, I believe the only two government competitors are the EU and Russia. China and the US aren't in the market any more. Japan and India never were.

Getting to the Moon and the asteroids and mining them has been a mainstay of science fiction since it has existed. Everyone knows many asteroids are metal-rich and could turn a nice buck if they could be exploited. Everyone knows the Moon is littered with He3, and theoretically achieving sustained nuclear fusion might be easiser there. However various governments have known this as well, for decades. In contrast to starry eyed reporters and somewhat naive slashdot users, they have run the numbers and found that with current technology their exploitation is simply not economically feasible. Again we need disruptive technology and it's not there yet.

Let's not forget that what's not "economically feasible" for a government isn't the same as what's economically feasible for a private business. Governments can afford to fritter away enormous resources on boondoggles like the Space Shuttle or the International Space Station. A cheap rocket launched in volume will be all the "disruptive technology" you need.

It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. While private enterprise is busy gathering investors with nice sounding business plans and pooh poohing all that we learned in the last 50 years or so of actual space exploration because, you know, gov't did it and that's not relevant, NASA and the others are still exploring the solar system, last I checked. Apparently there's a plan to go to Mars, or so I heard.

You'd be incorrect here. The current proposed private launch vehicles are loosely based on proven 50's techniques, but they use modern design techniques, modern materials, and advanced electronics. We also have the big rockets from the military-industrial complex which are privately owned, even if funded heavily with public subsidies and contracts. NASA's exploration is being launched mostly on private vehicles.

Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding. What many people seem to be missing here is that in spite of searching and thinking hard that plan was never found. The rest followed.

My take is that this plan has yet to materialize. The Mars expedition may survive G.W. Bush, but I don't see it being viable long term because it depends on NASA launch vehicles. The heavy lift vehicle in particular will see infrequent launches, which I think alone rules it out on economic grounds. These vehicles also reuse some of the more expensive technology of the Shuttle, namely the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engines). I am very dubious that this will ever amount to anything unless they reduce their dependence on specialized launch vehicles.

Also, this ignores the political nature of NASA. I don't see any reason this will change. We need a more reliable source of funding for space development, and private industry is the obvious place. Ie, if there are profitable applications in space, then these applications will by definition be self-funding and can provide seeds for future developments in space. So then the big question is why are we backing a NASA program that doesn't assist private industry in the development of space?

ugh. lost me in the opening...

[eshefer]

"The Apollo era was heroic, but beating the Soviets to the moon never provided a compelling economic reason to return. (We didn't even get Teflon or Tang as spinoffs--both were invented before 1960.)"

I may be nitpicking here, but the premiss is plain WRONG.

  America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter. The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU. intel would'nt have been if it were not for apollo (or at least would have come much later).

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[0123456]

"The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU"

Influenced, perhaps, but if I remember correctly it used off-the-shelf ICs. It's a pretty neat piece of hardware and software for its time, but is hardly responsible for bringing us Pentium chips.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[A beautiful mind]

"America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter. The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU. intel would'nt have been if it were not for apollo (or at least would have come much later)."

Actually the issue here is a bit more complex, it started a bit earlier. The "shitting-our-pants-from-sputnik" education reform was the most important step in the base research of electronic equipment. What you see from the 60ies till today is the refinement of that base research. The space race triggered the education reform.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[Reality Master 101]

America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race.

Unless you have some direct evidence of this (like a company spun off from NASA or something), this is totally wrong. The 4004 was created by Texas Instruments for a pocket calculator by a Japanese company. Semiconductors in general show a steady progression from the invention of the transistor is 1955 to ICs to today, completely independent of the space race. The fact that the shuttle computers still use early 1970s computer technology should tell you something.

Unfortunately, NASA paying for itself by giving us all sorts of wonderful technology is a total myth. A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much. Most of the popular notions are NASA propaganda, as you point out.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[RexRhino]

I don't think the whole Apollo thing had a lot to do with the development of ICs and microelectronics. Most of that was developed for ICBMs and such. Apollo borrowed a lot of technology from from the ICBM program.

Monitoring and oordinating the launch of thousands of unmanned missles, who need to hit their target with relative precision, all at a few minutes of notice, is something that would drive microelectronics more than the Apollo program. When I was at the Smithsonian not too long ago, looking at their computer artifacts, it seems pretty clear that ICBMs were using advanced microelectronics before the space program.

However, there is a falacy in thinking either one is a great investment. If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology. Especially if the research was being completed by private companies trying to fufill consumer needs and demands.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[barawn]

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[barawn]

If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology.

That sounds logical, but is it true? Suppose you tried to invest money into research for, say, I dunno, teleoperated construction machinery. Also suppose there wasn't really any need for it - there's no real demand.

Are you sure that the research would still continue?

Now suppose instead that same research is being done for lunar construction techniques. Which sounds more interesting? Which do you think is going to actually get more people interested in doing it?

Your response might be "if there's no demand, it's pointless" which is wrong, as inventions often create demand after they're invented - because people didn't see the potential beforehand.

I guess, in some way, you can say that "pure science is what we do to keep smart people interested." Which seems fair to me.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[lennier]

"America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter."

You may prefer to think of the Space Race as purely civilian and scientific, but that's a sepia-toned fiction. It was actually a side project of the missile race. The Mercury shots were on Atlas/Redstone ICBMs. The design of the Space Shuttle was driven by Air Force requirements. Admittedly the Saturn heavy-lifters were an anomaly since they were never used for military payloads - but I think that's because the payloads shrunk, and automation got unexpectedly good enough fast enough that the need for having humans in space to control functional military hardware vanished even as the capability for human-rated launchers was achieved.

The goal of the Space Race was to gain the military high ground for reconaissance, communications and strategic bombing. Science, propaganda and civilian communications was a bonus on the side, not the main reason for funding. In typical 1950s-60s DARPA fashion, there were multiple parallel projects to accomplish these goals. By the end of the 1960s, the third wave of ground-based ICBMs - Minuteman - had pretty much locked up the strategic nuke goal. Apollo had demonstrated the ability to get humans to the moon, but despite being spectacular that turned out to be a pretty useless capability. The Air Force's Manned Orbital Laboratory was scrapped because automated satellites could do the job more cheaply.

The Shuttle carried on the legacy of Apollo in a vastly cut-down form sort of as a "just in case" measure, because the 1970s military simply didn't need the whole Von Braun heavylifter fleet / 2001 doughnut station dream now that it had transistorised / integrated circuit guidance computers and the work of launching missiles and satellites could be mostly done remotely from ground stations. That's why the post-Apollo human spaceflight program has constantly struggled against funding cuts and weird conflicting requirements - because nobody wants to kill it completely, but it's doing a job that doesn't actually fill a major strategic military role.

"We come in peace for all mankind" was a diplomatic little white lie. "We have dominance of cislunar space, we don't know what to do with it, but damned if anyone else will get there first" is a better translation.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[ceoyoyo]

I guess if you're happy with civilization becoming nothing more than consumers getting ever cooler toys.

I kind of like all hokey exploration, advancing mankind stuff. But to each his own. I would have given Columbus his three ships too, by the way.

The NASA budget is pretty insignificant compared to a lot of much less significant stuff people pour money into. What was it, American women spend more than enough on makeup each year to fully fund the space program? Something like that.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[eshefer]

the 4004 was intel's chip, not TI's - it was released at 1972. it was made for busicom, a japanies calculator, so that part you got right - intel, however developed it in house - the original request was to make a chipset that could do calculations - the guys at intel thought it was a good idea to integrate all the functions into ONE chip, since the process technology evolved to the point where it was possible to do so.

still.. the point of what I'm saying, which you missed, apparantly - is that the space and arms race excelerated Americas R&D in the IC field - so america were leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, they STILL are. one of the direct result of this lead is that Intel - which was a bunch of people who left fairchild semiconductors - was able to be the first to come out with said 4004.

Incidentily... guess who supplied the IC's to the onboard computer on apollo.

it wasn't TI.. it was fairchild semicon.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[eshefer]

it was one of very few applications for said IC's, the others were ICBMS and other millitary uses.. no applications = no market = no IC's.

Re:ugh. lost me in the opening...

[Reality Master 101]

the 4004 was intel's chip, not TI's - it was released at 1972

Jesus, you're right. What the hell am I babbling about, of course it was Intel. I don't know what part of my ass I pulled TI out of. I really need to not post when I'm sick.

Anyway, my point is that I don't think you can point to Apollo as the primary investor in microelectronics. It was permeating everything at that point, from transister radios to pocket calculators. Or to put it another way, if Apollo hadn't happened, would IC progress have happened significantly differently? I don't think so; I think it would've marched ahead more or less the same way.

Something like IAEA

[S3D]

Whoever is sitting on the near-earth passing asteroid is in fact in command of weapon similar to clean nuke. And having transportation to earth orbit is equivalent to having long range ballistic missile. So space property will probaly be supervised by some international body, like International Atomic Energy Agency. It would be logical if the same agency take care of registration and distribution of space property rights.

Re:Something like IAEA

[FireFury03]

Whoever is sitting on the near-earth passing asteroid is in fact in command of weapon similar to clean nuke.

How exactly are you going to change the orbit of a few million tons of iron significantly enough to hit the Earth, let alone be able to aim the thing at a particular location?

Re:Something like IAEA

[afidel]

Ion thrusters at a great distance would allow you to change the orbit by the degree or fraction of a degree needed to hit the earth. I'm pretty sure that the mechanics of landing something in space in a specific spot on earth are fairly well understood, we do it all the time with returning astronauts.

Re:Something like IAEA

[mfrank]

Ion thrusters are the last thing you'd want to use to move an asteroid. Mass driver would work far better. Your limiting factor would be the energy to drive your reaction mass, not the availability of reaction mass.

Uncle $crooge's Money Bin!

[ereshiere]

$20 Trillion, that sounds about right for all that money Unca Scrooge dove into!

Now, let's get Gyro Gearloose on this thing! We don't want the Beagle Boys getting to it first!

20 Trillion Dollars?

[NeuroManson]

Jeeze, they're going to need at least 20 Bruce Willises to mine that puppy. What a time for Bush to outlaw cloning.

Re:20 Trillion Dollars?

[kickedfortrolling]

hmm.. theres puppies up there too?

Re:20 Trillion Dollars?

[Vo0k]

Or three and a half of Chuck Norris. Gosh!

20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[StrawberryFrog]

That's 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal at current prices

You can guarantee that if you manage to mine this rock, prices would go down. Supply and demand.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[jellomizer]

But you will need to figure the extra expense to mine in space will make up for it.

If the asteroid landed safely on earth and hole, then that could be true.

But the cost of space travel, will rise the cost of the material. The space miners are not going to work at say at around $60,000 a year. They will be paid closer of $1,000,000 a year to do the work. Plus there is cost of travel, and living conditions where all living conditions will need to be provided, Air, Heat, AC, Protection from radiation, Food, Water, Health Care, Exercise, communication with family, etc... Doing this will not be cheap and any change in supply will be easily off set by production costs. And remember when you pay a billion dollars for a Space Ship, The money doesn't go into the space ship it goes to the people who make it.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[StrawberryFrog]

But you will need to figure the extra expense to mine in space

Why? I didn't claim that this needed to be done in space. But then, mining in space vs. safely landing a 2Km-wide rock: I wouldn't know which is easier. And nobody said that conventional mining was free either: I wouldn't know which is cheaper.

But I do know that if there's more platinum around, platinum will cost less.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[Anonymous Coward]

How many trillion barrells are left? At $60 a barrell, that's a few trillion there. Getting it out will take ~20 years, though.

Oddly enough, that doesn't seem to be depressing the market for oil.

Neither does the Saudi discovery they have many trillions of barrels more in reserve than they said before.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[foniksonik]

What's beautiful about your comment is that it points out the relative nature of resource economies. Before the age of 'economics' people did what needed to be done and used what resources they had available to do it. In this modern era, people don't even start planning the actual project until the 'economics' are worked out regardless of whether the project can be achieved if the people involved can have their needs met... and are willing to exchange their time for the benefit of working on a grand project... ...in fact the only surviving example of this old-fashioned agreement is our military. People sign up knowing that they will be taken care of to a relatively high standard, with excellent health care, benefits, housing, etc. and after proving their dedication they receive allotments of each in greater and greater amounts, with review processes and status bumps for exemplary performance. This works. Great Achievements are made.

A return to this method was briefly seen during the dotcom days of old, in a limited fashion... and some really great things were created. Can't we find a sweet spot between the perceived totalitarianism of the military, the too-far to the hedonistic dotcom variation and the common salary and benefits of Joes Corporation down the street?

Let's see a company that sets out to mine an asteroid and does what is needed to do so.... hires dedicated and skilled people with a passion for the project, provides them with both a modest salary they can put towards savings for the future and a high standard of day-to-day living through 'economies of scale' and astute purchases of relevant assets (housing, land to build on, rec rooms, theaters, etc. like a university campus... even vehicles and vacations... with enough benefits to attract young skilled individuals)... and just sets out to achieve their goal with a timeline that is sensible (start at ten years).

It may fail miserably but it would be an interesting ride... and learning experience for doing such things as operating an outpost on another planet... where you must operate in such a manner due to the time commitments involved.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[khallow]

Most uses of oil destroy the product. But with precious metals you have very levels of recycling.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[khallow]

hrmmm, very *high* levels of recycling.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[khallow]

I don't buy that space miners will be paid that much more than terrestrial miners. Part of the reason is that there would be a lot of people competing for a few jobs. And you'll need to train whoever you end up hiring anyway. That is assuming you end up needing anyone in space at all. Currently, it would be very expensive to have anyone in space. Launch costs are extremely high and we don't have a proven design for any of the habitat or equipment needed for humans mining in space. As another replier noted, it's more likely that we'll bring the ore to Earth unprocessed. Landing a 2 km hunk of ore at once would IMHO be a really bad idea, but there's no reason that you couldn't drop a few hundred tons of ore at a time.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[khallow]

What's beautiful about your comment is that it points out the relative nature of resource economies. Before the age of 'economics' people did what needed to be done and used what resources they had available to do it. In this modern era, people don't even start planning the actual project until the 'economics' are worked out regardless of whether the project can be achieved if the people involved can have their needs met... and are willing to exchange their time for the benefit of working on a grand project... ...in fact the only surviving example of this old-fashioned agreement is our military. People sign up knowing that they will be taken care of to a relatively high standard, with excellent health care, benefits, housing, etc. and after proving their dedication they receive allotments of each in greater and greater amounts, with review processes and status bumps for exemplary performance. This works. Great Achievements are made.

The principles of economics might not have been formalized long ago, but they certainly knew about them Nothing has changed except that there's a lower threshhold for a few people make great achievements.

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[CAIMLAS]

Eh, actually, if we actually managed to get into space with the capacity to efficiently mine asteroids, there would be a significant increase in the demand for metals. There would likely need to be fairly extensive permanent or semi-permanent living structures in space due to the fuel cost of gravity well transversal, and then of course the machinery required to do all the mining. And, of course, there are other asteroids out there... so with the increase in demand there would be an increase in the use of metal for earthly construction instead of wood (which is, IMO, a good idea).

Re:20 trillion US dollars at current prices

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

You can guarantee that if you manage to mine this rock, prices would go down. Supply and demand.

Wouldn't that only be true if more than one company had access to the rock? If there's only one supplier, they can dictate the price despite whatever quantity of resource exists.

Diamonds are cheap stones

[Colin Smith]

DeBeers buys most of the uncut diamonds which are produced. They put them in a big vault somewhere and trickle out stones at a rate which guarantees an artificially high scarcity and therefore an artificially high price.

Just because you have something doesn't mean you have to sell it, especially when it's not in your interest to do so.

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[FirienFirien]

I find that hard to believe... a diamond seller would be able to sell large numbers of diamonds at a slightly lower price; sure, the market would devalue, but DeBeers wouldn't survive if it was paying its suppliers anything near cost price, so those same suppliers should easily be able to sell at a markup from the sell-to-DeBeers price that would still give a profit over their production price.

Where's the flaw?

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[skubeedooo]

I've often heard this argument, but as it stands it is incomplete. To be a good strategy, the price of diamonds would have to increase faster than supply gets decreased. For example, if the quantity sold halved, the price would have to more than double to compensate. Since this doesn't usually happen in other products (especially commodities), is it true that this happens in the diamond industry, and if so, why?

(And saying "because they did lots of clever marketing" isn't enough - everyone does this)

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[skubeedooo]

Since this doesn't usually happen in other products (especially commodities)

Actually, I take that back.

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[Anonymous Coward]

(And saying "because they did lots of clever marketing" isn't enough - everyone does this)

Let me know when I'm expected to spend two months' salary on a carrot instead of a carat to celebrate having a girlfriend who isn't going to date anyone else.

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[Professor_UNIX]

I find that hard to believe... a diamond seller would be able to sell large numbers of diamonds at a slightly lower price; sure, the market would devalue, but DeBeers wouldn't survive if it was paying its suppliers anything near cost price

That would be true if De Beers didn't own most of the diamond mines in the world. They hold a near total monopoly on the diamond industry. If you want a diamond, chances are it came from a De Beers mine.

Re:Diamonds are cheap stones

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true. HowStufWorks.coma and Wikipedia.com will more then enough information on this. Diamonds aren't nearly as rare as we are to beleive; that all ahs to do with marketing. Look it up. It's a fine bit of marketing savvy.

Just drop it out of the sky :)

[bobamu]

As long as it only lands on the "bad" countries it wouldn't be a problem. :)

Could you go over the economics?

[Colin Smith]

Of a space elevator please? People keep saying it'll be cheaper than flying rockets but they also keep failing to explain how it'll be cheaper.

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[Silverlancer]

10 dollars a pound to go into geosynchronous orbit instead of 10,000 dollars? That a simple enough explanation?

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of a space elevator please? People keep saying it'll be cheaper than flying rockets but they also keep failing to explain how it'll be cheaper.

The same way an elevator in a skyscraper is cheaper than using a plane to get to the top floor.

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[YayaY]

It would be much more efficient to send a payload to space using a space elevator compare to a rocket. Simply because a traditional rocket launch is mostly a giant fireworks. You get a lot of noise and a lot of heat but not much uplift power. With a space elevator we would have almost no lost of energy, all the energy would be converted to gravitational potential energy.

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[AJWM]

10 dollars a pound to go into geosynchronous orbit instead of 10,000 dollars? That a simple enough explanation?

No, it's far too simple. The $10K/lb figure is easy enough, but where'd you get the $10/lb figure? How much does the elevator cost to build, how much does it cost to operate, what's the mass rate it can maintain (thus, what's the cost to operate per pound). How's the financing on the cost to build - how much revenue to you need to generate to pay that back? Over how many years are you amortizing those costs? What's the expected lifetime of the elevator, and what will it cost to replace? What will liability insurace cost?

Give us some answers to those questions and we might believe whatever $/lb figure you come up with -- as it is, $10/lb barely pays the electric bill.

(You might as well quote conventional launch rates soley in terms of fuel costs -- which is probably more like $100/lb.)

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[AJWM]

Energy is cheap (relatively speaking). What are the other operating costs?

I'd be thrilled if we could get rocket launch costs down to the energy (ie fuel) costs.

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[YayaY]

Once a space elevator is in place, I think the main cost would be energy and then safety/mechanical inspection. Both would cost far less compare to a space shuttle. The design of a "lifter" would be far simpler than the design of the million components space shuttle, hence much simpler to repair and inspect. It would also suffer less from the stress of the launch.

I don't see how, once build, a space elevator could cost more than a space shuttle.

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[AJWM]

I don't see how, once build, a space elevator could cost more than a space shuttle.

Talk about damning with faint praise...

But I didn't see a single number in your analysis. Come on, I did an analysis of building a beanstalk on Mars (and a pipeline from the polar icecap) with less handwaving than that ;-)

Re:Could you go over the economics?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "power bill" for most is solar energy. So it is really only man power that has to be determined. The building of the whole elevator is a sunk cost once you reach that point. So in theory, if the elevator can carry a lot, the equivalent cost according to accounting could even be less than $10/lb. Not being an accountant tho, i'm not entirely sure if that holds water. Do correct me if it doesn't.

Now if you're not doing creative accounting, and go normally, you take the cost, say the elevator cost $10B to build. It can carry more than likely several metric tonnes, I would estimate that to be a bit low, but I'll run with the figure. Now we say that scientists, guards and engineers are running this thing, there is a team of them that costs $1000/hour to employ. We won't take air/naval defense into account in this case. You determine the rough life span of the project, say at 25 years. And we will estimate that it takes a full day to put the carrier into orbit (24 hours) and that only one carrier can be used, so only 1 run every 2 days.

$1B dived by 25 is $400,000,000 per year as your fixed costs. 365 days per year means 182 runs per year (365/2 rounded down). That makes your fixed cost total $2.2 M per run (that's rounded up). For each run you have $48000 in staffing costs. So roughly speaking it's costing $2,248,000 per load to put in orbit.

Now, one metric tonne = 1000 KG

So if the lifter carries:
5 metric tonnes = $449.60/kg
10 metric tonnes = $224.80/kg
20 metric tonnes = $112.40/kg

For those using the imperial system:

1 metric tonne = 2 204.622 621 849 pounds

5 metric tonnes = $203.94/lb
10 metric tonnes = $101.97/lb
20 metric tonnes = $50.98/lb

So I realize it's not quite as low as $10/lb, but hey, it's still pretty cheap. I know that all my numbers are guestimates, but find better ones and disprove it.

And it's not economics, it's business :)

half-price, but...

[bulach]

...no freight included, sorry... Anyone?! btw, I just called named myself ((c) by myself), not "me", as the legal owner of this asteroid.

Energy.

[aug24]

There's a lot missing in this equation as presented.

The asteroid, small as it is on the scale of things, weighs a lot. A real lot.

This means that changing the delta-V to get the metals to Earth will require a lot of energy. We may well be able to do that with the Sun one day. However, there is also the gravitational field energy to be considered. Merging the gravity wells will release an awful lot of energy, which will then need to be soaked up somehow, or we'll make carbon emission worries look like wondering vaguely if you left the gas on.

In short we'd better build that space elevator and a portable solar sail before we even think about mining asteroids on a grand scale.

Justin.

Re:Energy.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, there is also the gravitational field energy to be considered. Merging the gravity wells will release an awful lot of energy, which will then need to be soaked up somehow, or we'll make carbon emission worries look like wondering vaguely if you left the gas on.

IANAPP (professional physicist), but this seems wrong on several levels. Are you just spreading FUD, or can you explain how this would happen?

Re:Energy.

[Kjella]

IANAPP (professional physicist), but this seems wrong on several levels. Are you just spreading FUD, or can you explain how this would happen?

Well, let's say you have the asteroid travelling in earth's orbit, slightly trailing us but within earth's gravitational pull. Velocity difference ~0. Now earth is pulling it in. On a quick guesstimate, how hard do you think the impact would be? Ok, so it's not the "destruction of all mankind" kind that a head-on collision would be, but it would not be gentle...

Re:Energy.

[Tango42]

Why is this asteroid of yours in Earth's orbit? Seems like an odd example... It probably wouldn't even impact - co-orbital objects usually avoid eachother by one speeding up and one slowing down and thus changing orbits slightly (I believe their are moons of Saturn that do exactly that - try Wikipedia). It would have to be very close to Earth to start with for there not to be time for it to move round.

You pull something towards Earth, yes, it'll speed us. Just as a space shuttle does on re-entry, just as meteors do, it's a simple matter. We use aerobraking to slow things down at the moment, we can do that with the mined goods - just put them inside a reusable heat shield and let them lose their extra speed against the atmosphere.

Re:Energy.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the capability to mine space asteroids, why in hell would you want to bring them back to earth? Where's my zero-g fab?

Glad there's another space elevator skeptic.

[Colin Smith]

ok so you now have a "cable" travelling at thousands of km/h in contact with what? wheels, rollers on a lifting platform/pod. Maglev? More than that, it's more than likely a carbon based cable so it'd better not get too hot, the carbon will change state, sublimate etc. and we're talking lots of power and lots of energy, therefore lots of heat.

The truth is a space elevator will have to travel at tens of miles per hour and then the huge distances we're talking about become a big problem, it'd take days to get into orbit. That's not a problem? ah well, except that we have tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of space elevator to pay for, maintain and operate. It has to be able to handle lots of lifts to pay for itself.

Space elevators sound like a great idea until you realise the scale of infrastructure you'd have to build to operate one economically.

Re:Glad there's another space elevator skeptic.

[jscharla]

The cable is not in contact with any moving surface. It's anchored to the Earth in some way. It then extends out past geosynchronous orbit so that the center of mass is located at geosync distance. Climbers are expected to take a couple of weeks to make the full climb to the end of the tether at which point anything they release will actually be moving fast enough to escape Earths gravity.

There is a ton of good info about space elevators out there - check out http://www.elevator2010.org/site/primer.html for a decent primer.

Re:Glad there's another space elevator skeptic.

[barawn]

ah well, except that we have tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of space elevator to pay for, maintain and operate.

True. But why did the elevator cost that much? Launch costs.

Once you've got one elevator, the next becomes much cheaper. (It actually just becomes the pretty much cost of the interest for the debt that you've paid to build it. If it was built by a government entity, then it'd be virtually free.)

It has to be able to handle lots of lifts to pay for itself.

Which means you just deploy more elevators. Once it becomes economically feasible to launch the first elevator, pretty much regardless of its lift capacity (within reason), it should be reasonable to scale it up to handle any climber speed.

Re:Glad there's another space elevator skeptic.

[bjomo]

...you now have a "cable" travelling at thousands of km/h...

The current serious space elevator concepts have cables that are stationary.

The truth is a space elevator will have to travel at tens of miles per hour...

Give me a break, you are pulling numbers out of the air to support your argument. You don't even seem to have a grasp of the concept of how space elevators work (see the moving cable comment above).

Space elevators sound like a great idea until you realise the scale of infrastructure you'd have to build to operate one economically.

I have no problem with people who are critical of space elevators for whatever reason (as long as it is based on reason), but for goodness sake, have a clue before making these kinds of claims. I would suggest reading Brad Edwards book, "The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth to Space Transportation System". The book discusses the economics of the system in addition to the technical aspects. Armed with this information you should be able to make an argument for or against space elevators that is at least based on some research.

Re:Glad there's another space elevator skeptic.

[Mr. Foogle]

Space elevators sound like a great idea until you realise the scale of infrastructure you'd have to build to operate one economically.

Some of us have thought about the scale and still think they're a pretty good idea.

Your cost estimates are pretty wild - a great deal depends on how much the thing really will cost. Edwards said 10 billion but he was (probably) just guessing based on notepad calculations. Double the value and it still wont' be that expensive - 40 billion isn't chickend feed but it's within the realm of the finaceable.

Mining it makes more than ALT-PRINT KEY

[cheekyboy]

To mine 50billion worth, takes $30billion of effort, ie people, mechanics, geoogists, transports, refiners, etc...

To print $50b in TBILL/BONDS, takes 2 seconds on a FED RESERVE table offer monthly, all it does is TRUELY devalue the present
currency. Spending REAL $$$ to min $50billion (one years worth btw) takes effort and real people benefit, unlike
T-BILLS.

Go read financialsense.com

Fake wealth = monetory inflation at 10% with credit interest rates at 4.5% = 5.5% spread gains, out of 10trillion, thats 550billion out of thin air each year without it effecting inflation, for now....

Go check the current M1/M2/M3 money supply charts at the FED charted over 20 years, vs stock market prices... inflation finds a home, today its the stock market + oil prices and not wages/consumer goods.

Interesting points but...

[99luftballon]

554 Amun may well have billions of precious metals inside, it'll be easier to reach than the moon BUT it's also moving at a fair old whack and actually parking it in orbit is going to be a whole different problem. Somehting 2km in diameter is going to take a lot of stopping. The only way to do it with anything approaching today's technology would be to dump a series of engines, possibly ion drives or even a solar sail, on the rock and slow it down so you could pick it up on the next circuit. Looks like we'll all have to wait a while longer to knock Bill Gates off the rich list.

There isn't an open market

[Colin Smith]

And that's how you make money... Restrict the market. You're making the assumption that there's a free market for diamonds, there isn't. You might have a million tonnes of gold in your back garden (or in space) but if you sell it by the ounce it won't have an affect on the world market.

e.g.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

Re:There isn't an open market

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting article. Mod parent up. At least the metals in the asteroids have an intrinsic value.

On a side note -- which is why I'm posting anonymously since my girlfriend knows my /. id -- my girlfriend has totally bought into the advertising myth for diamonds. At my income level I should buy her a $16,000 engagement ring according to the "two months salary" guideline! She drives a 15 year old car. I could buy her a inexpensive car or put a 50% down on a new, nice car or just pay off half of her school loans! Instead I'll be throwing away thousands of dollars on something that she can show off to her friends...

Oh well, there's a reason I hate just about everyone in the marketing/advertising business.

Re:There isn't an open market

[SnapShot]

I like how that article ends:

Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources [Zaire and Australia] may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices. If they do, the diamond invention will disintegrate and be remembered only as a historical curiosity, as brilliant in its way as the glittering little stones it once made so valuable.

Unfortunately, the article was written in 1982. In the last 24 years it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

Re:There isn't an open market

[Anonymous Coward]

AC to AC (wink-wink) - My wife also loves diamonds. It's just not a logical thing...

So I bought her a 1.5 carat moissanite ring off eBay for Xmas 2004. The price was ~$800.00 w/shipping. She took it in to have it appraised last spring. The jeweler assessed the value at $9000.00 and couldn't tell that it was not a diamond. She didn't tell him.

As a result, we were able to afford a new car for her birthday last summer. And she has a (ooohh shiny) trinket to show off to her friends.

Buying into the DeBeers marketing scam is a choice we make (or not).

--

Re:There isn't an open market

[Anonymous Coward]

That jeweler is an idiot who's liable to be out of business soon. It is ridiculously easy to tell Moissanite from diamond if you know anything at all about gemology (which anyone doing appraisals damn well better!) and have a loupe. Silicon carbide is double-refractive.

Re:There isn't an open market

[BeanThere]

Perhaps the eBay seller (or his/her jeweller) had it wrong, and it was real after all?

Re:There isn't an open market

[BeanThere]

"Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources [Zaire and Australia] may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices."

The thing is it wouldn't be in the interests of those "new diamond producers" to collapse world diamond prices --- WTF would they do then, make a loss?! Why would anyone in their right minds sitting on something valuable want to cause the value to drop? Not a friggin chance --- they want in on those inflated prices, so all they do is join the De Beers cartel. They have some leverage over De Beers too as they have power to theoretically increase supply and thus lower prices. But *no* diamond producer wants to really start a price war, because slashing margins is a never-ending race to the bottom where all producers lose. So they all just get together and ALL keep making big money. Makes sense, no?

Re:There isn't an open market

[SnapShot]

No disagreement. I would collude with my competitors if I could get away with it as well. But, after reading seven pages of "De Beers was incredibly successful at manipulating the market but now, maybe, their nefarious reign of terror is over..." it was humorous to realize that 24 years later they are still going strong and we're all still buying into it.

Diamonds, like Beanie Babies, are only really valuable because marketing has convinced us that they are valuable (with the exception of industrial cutting and polishing where they are, in fact, pretty useful).

Re: The Financial Future of Space Travel

[Anonymous Coward]

> contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal.

Granted, some of these metals have actually useful physical properties, but given they are precious mostly because they are rare, introducing such a huge quantity of them would drop their price significantly, and make the "20 trillion US dollars" obsolete.

Re:+tagging beta

[BadAnalogyGuy]

"tagging beta" is an acronym for "tea bagging". I can't be the only one who caught that.

Re:+tagging beta (more OT than your momma!)

[thc69]

Wow...imagine what would happen if Steve Ballmer met Dick Cheney. Or, let's combine Steve Ballmer with Dick Cheney...we could call it The Terminator and send it to take care of our wars...

Knowledge is more important than precious metals

[digitaldc]

3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal

But the knowledge gained from exploring Space and the Solar System is priceless.

There is no reason to be in space at the moment,

[dpilot]

There is EVERY reason to be in space, now. It just happens that we aren't pursuing the correct reasons at the moment, leaving them neglected in favor of pursuing silly reasons.

How it falls

[ringman8567]

In Mercury by Ben Bova it was broken at geosynchronous orbit. It wrapped from Equador across the acific and ended in the Atlantic. I think he's wrong.
In part it depends on what it's made of but it has to be designed of materials good under tension, I guess lose the tension and it behaves like string. The downward force on the middle would be greater than at the top so there would be tension at the top end.
Consrevation of angular momentum suggests to me the top would move east as it fell but the tension would pull against this.
Then there are wind effects. Does the anchoring at the base hold?
The simplest case should be solvable, no air resistance, ground anchor holds, uniform mass distrubution with height, infinitly flexible, infinite tensile strength, non elastic etc. Any applied mathematicians out there?

Re:How it falls

[ender-]

In part it depends on what it's made of but it has to be designed of materials good under tension, I guess lose the tension and it behaves like string. The downward force on the middle would be greater than at the top so there would be tension at the top end.
Consrevation of angular momentum suggests to me the top would move east as it fell but the tension would pull against this.
Then there are wind effects. Does the anchoring at the base hold?

How hard would it be to build safeguards into this? Perhaps something along the lines of a failsafe system where if the counterweight ever broke free, the anchor would disconnect, and rockets at the top [or various locations along the length] could fire to lift the entire thing out of orbit. That is assuming of course that we had a system powerful enough to lift it [I hope so if we've got the tech to build it].

It wouldn't be pretty and lives would still probably be lost [poor schmucks caught halfway up when it went], but at least we wouldn't have a cable falling from orbit across the entire planet.

Just a thought anyway. I'm sure there are ways to make it 'safe' [where safe is some reasonable cost effective definition of safe for the companies building it of course.]

3554 Amun

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.matter-antimatter.com/asteroid_3554_amu n.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3554_Amun

No need to main it in orbit. Just crash it into the Moon and collect the pieces.

Precious metals?

[GeorgeMonroy]

What people fail to realize is that the more you have of anything the less it is precious or valuable. Going into space for these precious metals will devalue them overall. It will make the ones on earth far cheaper in comparison to the high priced metals from space.

That's the spirit

[lheal]

Where NASA was in 1950 or so ... It will be a while before this is safe enough for companies to ship people for small leaps above the atmosphere without getting sued out of existence at the first accident.
[...]
While I'm not a particular big fan of governements either, and not particularly the US's,

It's such prudent thinking like that kept your ancestors in Britain.

It's not 1950, and the knowledge required to design and build a space vehicle is no longer in the realm of research, but of engineering. For one thing, my Palm Pilot has many times more computing power than the computers onboard those spacecraft. And a single PC today has more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions.

Tourists can be told to sign a waiver:

This trip will cost more than it's worth. You won't get to see much or walk in space. You will probably be sick. There's no shopping. There's no Oprah. This vehicle will probably crash. If it crashes, there won't be any of your DNA left. The risk is yours.

By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do.

Re:That's the spirit

[demachina]

"By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do."

Thats a pretty weak argument. If the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone maybe you would have a case. Of course if the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone people outside the U.S. probably wouldn't dislike it so much. But the U.S. doesn't.

For example with the U.S. rendition program the U.S. has taken upon itself the right to snatch citizens of other nations off the streets of other nations and fly them away to secret prisons to be tortured. It has been established they have done this on more than one occasion to innocent people, not terrorists. This is the most blatant violation of national sovereignty and basic civil liberties imaginable by the U.S. government. As a result citizens of those nations have a pretty legitimate reason to criticize the U.S. government. The fact that the U.S. government now sanctions torture of citizens of other nations is another.

Similarly the fact the U.S. routinely unilaterally takes upon itself to overthrow sovereign governments of other nations is likewise a legitimate reason for people outside the U.S. to have something less than positive to say about the U.S. government. You see the U.S. is a huge fan of sovereignty and democratic elections except when those sovereign governments aren't pro American and pro business at which point they are fair game for overthrow.

Re:That's the spirit

[HuguesT]

Just a few points, first I never said I didn't like the US governemnt in particular, just that I'm not fond of governments in general. This seems to be a pretty widespread opinion around the US and elsewhere in my experience.

Also my post is not about being prudent or not. I just pointed out that everyone on /. is expecting to pick up space travel pretty much where NASA and the Russian agency left it at their peak but that nothing would be further from the truth. Private entreprise in the US and elsewhere doesn't have the means and the motivation to go to space at a spectacular rate right now.

With all due respect to them, all private endeavours so far show good spirits but are nice little amateur shows compare to what NASA and other government agencies have achieved long ago. For the foreseable future, in spite of NASA's failing it is still the place where things are happening as far as new space exploration is concerned.

Missing A Big Possibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the comments concerning the devaluation of precious metals is entirely valid there are others uses for Platnium. Correct me if I am mistaken but isn't Platnium used as a catalyst in certain fuel cells, which makes the design price inhibitive. This asteroid, if a method for cheaply mining it were made available, could solve that problem. When only considering the standard uses for these metals the thought that it would decrease the overall value of it is accurate, but when you have an abundance of something you tend to start to experiment with it. You begin to find new and unusual uses for it, which help to restore its value.

BTW the US economy, unless I am again mistaken, hasn't been based on precious metals in quite a few years as someone earlier had suggested.

What are the actual numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Construction costs / number of pounds launched over its life expectancy) = $10? How cheap do you think it will be to build, and how many pounds do you think will be launched over its life expectancy?

Spreading our diseases around the galaxy

[EvilPickles]

Now, something that has always been a point of mine to make about mining space, is that if we continue to do this, our planet will eventually get bigger. If we want to maintain the size we have (For some weird reason) we would have to put some matter equally as much back into space. This soil or whatever it is, will cost a lot of put up there, and will be thoroughly infested with microbes and insects. The insects may die out, but the microbes will hybernate in that soil until it strikes some planet or moon or whatever. Bacteria has been known to survive in space. Astronauts found a piece of foam on the moon, and it had bascteria on it, from when a technician sneezed back on Earth. They discovered this 5 years after the mission that placed the foam there went up. Our planets gravity would increase, the magnetic field might get stronger, who knows what might happen! I predict that the Earth would also warm up, because of the excess matter/surface area.

Re:Spreading our diseases around the galaxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Idjit! The earth gaines several tonnes of dust every day, and your worried about a few pounds here and there?

Use the asteroid for space use.

[gte910h]

The asteroid should be used for space use. Getting a refining factory up there would be MUCH cheaper than taking all the metal down unrefined. And once you have refined metal in space, why should you have to bring it down? That would be the perfect place to build craft that don't ever have to land on a planet. Sure, you'd still bring the electronics and plastics up, but there is no reason to ferry the bulk of a ship up there. Same goes for habitats.

Re:Use the asteroid for space use.

[prurientknave]

do you have any idea how much o2 it takes to refine ores? no? ok then let's leave the back of the envelope calculations turned space policy to the professionals.

Re:Use the asteroid for space use.

[AJWM]

do you have any idea how much o2 it takes to refine ores?

Same as the amount of damage a bulldozer would suffer if it ran over Arther Dent: none at all.

To use a terrestrial example, in refining aluminum from bauxite, you're pulling oxygen out of the ore. Ditto with many other e.g. smelting processes. (You weren't seriously thinking he meant with a blast furnace, were you?)

In metallic asteroids the interesting metals are in metallic form -- go look at a meteorite collection sometime, siderites are essentially high-nickel steel. If you want to separate them out there are plenty of processes that work great in space given the enormous energies available (solar at 1 kilowatt per square meter of reflective surface) -- zone refining, fractional distillation (of metals, yes) etc.

Or you could use carbonyl gas processes which, yeah, use oxygen (but not O2) as part of the CO gas -- but that gets recovered when you plate out the metals.

no? ok then let's leave the back of the envelope calculations turned space policy to the professionals.

My thought exactly. Although s/the professionals/those who know what they're talking about/.

Re:Use the asteroid for space use.

[prurientknave]

Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to discuss the extraction of minerals from siderites to boost the validity of your argument?

I guess the sun's energy could be harnessed with giant, focused mirrors or something?

Too Late

[QMO]

We may have a period of space colonization that generates a lot of entertainment and literature, just like the American West of the late 1800's

Except that a lot of that literature has already been generated in anticipation.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

"we can not stop terrorism in any way with money. WE can only stop it with extreme force or extremely trained small fire teams."

This extreme force, and these highly trained strike teams are free?

Furthermore:
"we can stop all terrorism by simply nuking all of the middle east"

Wnhy do you think that all the terrorists that aren't in the Middle East would collect there just so you could nuke them?

incorrect quation for tidal forces

[peter303]

The tidal force is CHANGE in the force of gravitation with distance, not the force of gravity per se. Newton recognized this in order to explain the second, anitpodal tide each day.
The tide force formula then is the cube of distance. That explains why the moon, a 26 million times less massive than the sun, but 1/400th the distance have comparable tides.

Little practical application?

[Andy Dodd]

Ever heard of gold plated connectors?

Gold-on-gold contacts are very corrosion resistant. (Gold-on-other-metal contacts will cause the "other metal" to corrode faster though. So if you want gold plated electronic connectors, make sure BOTH sides of the connection are gold plated.)

Re:Little practical application?

[AviLazar]

Ever heard of gold plated connectors?

Ever heard of comprehension of what you are reading: "which has very little practical application". "Little" does not mean "nothing". Yes I know of gold plated connectors, and I was thinking EXACTLY of that while making my post. I was actually joking to myself that maybe Monster Cables would be cheaper. Does any decent audio/video component producer actually not use gold anymore? I mean, other then the low end stuff.

Re:Little practical application?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually gold has tons of applications, not just audio cables. After all, it's a metal that's easy to work and doesn't corrode. At the moment very few of them are *practical* applications, because they're too expensive to be worthwhile. If we were to get a few megatons of gold delivered to, say, Arizona, the price might drop from hundreds of dollars per ounce to a couple of dollars, and suddenly lots of applications would become practical. Upsetting to gold bugs, South Africa, Russia, and a few other folks; pretty good deal for the average Joe.

Re:Little practical application?

[uberjohn]

> Ever heard of gold plated connectors? The interesting thing about such materials in space is that their usefulness changes radically based on that environment. Gold itself is incredibly valuable in space for its ability to block radiation more effectively than lead. As radiation creates a somewhat sticky human survival issue this changes the economy of gold somewhat dramatically. As well, gold is commonly used in space applications to protect sensitive electronics from radiation, which expands this survival aspect to human and automated space applications. As I see it, the true value is in the "platinum group" metals(iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium), which while a smaller percentage of the asteroid are of far more practical value in a myriad of applications. Access to such an increased supply of exotic metals could change the very nature of what constitutes feasible technologies. The iron, nickel and cobalt content of the asteroid are probably of enormous economic significance, but in a more limited way. I can't see much economic gain associated with safely delivering quantities of those metals to Earth, as the costs of doing so would be fairly high, which somewhat insulates the Earthbound economy. But such readily available supplies would be very welcome for any future space born industry. So as a very rough and very conservative guess, I would wager only a 6 trillion dollar return (based on the value of the platinum group metals, with the other materials being only profitable enough to cover operational costs) over a time scale of 12 to 15 years (three times normal open pit mine lifespan to account for new environment and technique adjustments.) How much money would you be willing to invest to make $6,000,000,000,000.00? Our civilization will move into space, for private economic reasons if for nothing else. And this move will dramatically reshape how our economy works as a human whole. Everything else is speculation.

Re:waste it on space travel rather than wars...

[gregm]

Why was this modded as flamebait? Which part isn't true or overstated?

Re:$20 trillion ... Earth's core is an onion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. Another article suggested that the core of the Earth is made of Plutonium - perhaps there are layers of different elements at the core?

Re:Artificial diamonds

[NewKimAll]

I've heard that one of the best uses for non-flawless artificial diamonds are in the cutting department. My father, a former owner of an excavating company, would by diamond blades just for cutting things like pavement or concrete. The blade would last a long time if you treated it with respect and it would produce beautiful cuts. The diamonds in the blade were dark, but they were still diamonds. Unfortunately, artificial diamonds are still expensive, but I would expect that to change as it becomes easier to produce them.
--
Diamonds, they're not just for jewelry anymore.

What makes people think we own those meteors?

[RickySan]

Just because it passes by our planet doesn't mean we own it, on that basis i'd own every frickin' car that passes by my house.

Re:What makes people think we own those meteors?

[multiplexo]

Just because it passes by our planet doesn't mean we own it, on that basis i'd own every frickin' car that passes by my house.

Who the fuck else owns it then dipshit? The Martians, the Jovians, or perhaps the Venerians? If you're going to post something so transparently stupid then at least post AC.

Politics of space property

[amightywind]

Space property rights are a very murky and ambiguous area, but one which should get resolved if we want to have any hope of expanding out there permanently.

Space property is also a very political idea. It is not a coincidence that NASA is building fully domestic exploration and landing infraststructure at a time when competing space programs in Russia, Europe, India, and China are in their ascendancy. The US may not make territorial claims of celestial bodies like the moon unilaterally, but it will influence international property rights agreements from a position of strength.

Copper?

[Megane]

I did some quick research on 3554 Amun, and it is expected to contain Iron, Nickel, Cobalt, and the Platinum group including: platinum, osmium, iridium, palladium, etc.

What I noticed missing was the Gold group, with Copper, Silver, and Gold. These are the metals that we need for their electrical properties. In particular, copper is slowly getting more and more expensive, and a good source of that would certainly be nice. (Not that the Platinum group metals aren't nice to have for their catalytic properties.)

Re:Copper?

[Overzeetop]

And don't forget - Nickel. It's (one of) the expensive part(s) of stainless steel.

Re:Copper?

[Megane]

And don't forget - Nickel. It's (one of) the expensive part(s) of stainless steel.

I said Nickel already. I'm talking about the important metals that the asteroid apparently doesn't contain.

Re:waste it on space travel rather than wars...

[ScentCone]

The budget part is true. The implication that we just wander the earth "invading small countries" is nonsense. Afghanistan involved the removal of the toxic Taliban, and Iraq wouldn't have been an issue if Saddam hadn't invaded Kuwait. Were you thinking of Japan, maybe? Or Germany? Do you have any sense of history about where the western democracies have "invaded" and where they have not?

If the US thought nothing of invading small countries, we'd have long since turned Cuba into an annexed vacation spot, turned Hugu Chavez into valet parking attendant, paved over North Korea, etc. But we have not. Much, no doubt, to your rhetorical disappointment.

Never mind, of course, the considerable overlap in raw research dollars, logistical support, and technology applications that NASA enjoys with the military.

I call BS

[SlashSquatch]

Let's not wax sentimental about our space exploits thus far.

The shuttle and the international space station continued this record of dismal return on investment.

The article starts with a misleading statement. The premise is no return comes out of the space technology and practices. Wrong. Communications, GPS and weather forecasting all have satellites in common. I'm sure there's many more industries than what I come up with.

You bet someone's making a bunch of money off that.

Now I know who's blowing themselves up halfway around the globe. Great. So I got that going for me.

Re:eek Diamond DRM

[saskboy]

So you're saying Diamonds are going to have a DRM broadcast flag? Diamond Restrictions Managment?

Wait, I have an idea!

[s_p_oneil]

We should send a space probe up there to steer the asteroid toward Earth. If we can manage to steer it to land in my back yard, I'd be a trillionaire. It might literally kill two birds with one "stone" by knocking down my house, which needs a lot of work. ;-)

Those astroids could fix economic instability...

[xxdinkxx]

Those astroids could fix economic stability if we are careful with how to extract it. Currently the US dollar is not based on anything but confidence. If we pulled just enough gold to make out dollar worth gold. That would help tremendously. Additionally, No one in their right mind would "flood" the market with that much gold or any metal over night. However, over a time-elapsed period, you could begin to see the economy expand to the point, where we would have as many trillionares as we currently have billionares.

The metal will remain precious

[gurps_npc]

Some of you are making false assumptions.

1) You are thinking that the owner of the metal will sell it all at once, and the price drop is a bad thing. No. We are talking about decades to mine out of the asteroid. It is not 20 trillion instantly hitting the market, destroying it. Instead it is spread out over many decades (if not centuries), and during that time we avoid starting newer mines in less profitable loads, because it would not be worth it. I doubt the value of the metal, if we could mine it, would drop more than 10%. But that is a POSITIVE effect for most of the world. It means that manufacturing costs go down, for greater profits for everyone - except the owners of earthly mines that don't get a piece of the action.

2) You are also assuming we have to ship the stuff down to earth. Forget that foolishness. We use the metals to start a manufacturing plant in orbit, that begins to build earth satelites and space ships to explore the rest of the solarsystem.

Re:eek Diamond DRM

[AviLazar]

LOL. They already do. Diamonds, from reputable sources, are laser inscribed with a serial number. All they have to do to these diamonds is add an additional letter at the start/end....N for natural, M for manufactured - or whatever else they want to designate. And I think in this case it is perfectly fine. How uncool would it be if last year you spent $30,000 on a diamond, only to have it valued at $5 because someone can manufacture diamonds at an insane speed.

Not exactly

[thelexx]

The experiment in unbacked currency has only been going on for about thirty years. There is no historical example of it working over a long time frame for any government, ever. It's simply human nature to screw it up eventually. And see my sig.

I don't want him pricing my mining stocks

[J.R. Random]

"The automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, the Internet, the cell phone -- all took decades to reach their full potential, and none would have taken root without stubborn entrepreneurs who refused to heed conventional wisdom."

The author fails to note that the automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, and the cell phone were all profitable within a few years of their introduction, even if they had no where near the level of refinement and volume of use that they have today. Space travel is now decades old but still only Earth orbiting, unmanned satellites have any economic justification.

It costs hundreds of dollars per pound to get things into space, and the costs of doing anything once you're there are enormous. Planet Earth has hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of nickel, iron, platinum, gold, etc., but just as for that asteroid most of it costs more to mine than it's worth. Of course, talking about a trillion dollars worth of platinum is silly -- if you actually had such a large quantity it's price would plumment.

how to exploit gas giants?

[gr8dude]

The gas planets consist of a mixture of gases; there is no actual surface one could walk on.

How will it be possible to deploy some sort of a mining construction in such an environment? [not to mention its hostility: the temperatures, enormous gravity (ex: on Jupiter)

Re:how to exploit gas giants?

[MichaelSmith]

How will it be possible to deploy some sort of a mining construction in such an environment

Scoop mining. You shoot a spacecraft through the outer atmosphere of the gas giant planet. It compresses and liquifies the gas then returns to earth. See "Imperial Earth" by Arthur C Clarke, which proposed using the technique in the much easier environment of Titan.

Of course the vehicle has to be made of, and powered by, unobtanium.

Off-world mineing helps the Environment too!

[Teancum]

Not only does the cost go down, but by driving the costs down for metals like this from off-world sources it will make terrestrial mines for similar materials to be forced out of business.

For the most part this will be a good thing, as most of the current mines are located in what is today largely wilderness... for exactly the same reasons why people go there to search for these metals: They don't have to deal with purchasing property at huge prices (like downtown Manhattan or Tokyo) in order to extract the minerals. Fights over mineral rights and appropriate methods for extracting those minerals lose one of their main justifications: If we don't to it here, where else are we going to get it?

Mines like the Kennecot Copper Mine in Utah is an example of something that will be a relic of the past. If you ever fly into or out of Salt Lake City International from the south end of the airport, you will fly right over this mine and be rather low to the ground as well. You would miss it only if you didn't pay any attention to it at all. The residents of Salt Lake City realize the large number of jobs this mine represents, and it has been there for more than a century, so they don't really mind too much that the mine is there. Still, it has had a devistating impact on the wilderness of Bingham Canyon, not to mention that the canyon nor the mountains that were next to it even exist anymore. The tailings hill left from mining these mountains is a permanent feature to Salt Lake Valley that has also had a major impact on the local environment that is not to be ignored either.

All of this damage, and under control of U.S. mining regulations that are hard to deal with, yet the mine is still profitable. This is a mine that would definitely be shut down due to extra-terrestrial mining efforts, and no similar mine would ever be started either. Oh, some limited mining would still occur because of national priorities, welfare service projects (keeping people employed through government subsidies... although it might be cheaper to simply pay the miners directly and close the mine anyway), or simply because of the need for a specific mineral that is required for a certain industry from a very reliable source. That and it will take centuries for extra-terrestrial mining efforts to really be developed, so something needs to keep businesses operating in the meantime.

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny as hell!

OT: "feral government" (was Re:$20 Trillion?!?!)

[synaptik]

...the feral government of the us...

Did you intend that as political commentary, or was it just a humorous misspelling of 'federal'?

This goes both ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would actually pay a premium for a manufactured diamond, because it would guarantee that none of my money would end up in deBeers hands.

Mineral Rights on my property?

[toy4two]

If I own the mineral rights to my property, and a space rock lands in my backyard, hopefully a small one that doesn't kill everything in a 10 mile radius. Let say its a chunk of gold, do I get to keep it, or do some gov't spooks take it away and I get nothing?

Re:Not really

[WhiplashII]

If you look at such things, the average joe is the person least hit by currency devaluations - essentially currency devaluations remove all the value of money from those that are holding it, and the average Joe just doesn't have much money. That's why it is so appealing to Socialist to cause huge inflation - it is a great way to steal from the rich to give to the poor. The only problem with currency devaluations / inflation is that it destroys the economy, because no one is willing to work anymore.

That said, as others have pointed out, currency is not linked to metals of any type - and the economy would be improved, not hurt, by cheap metals. There are two ways to make Joe happier - one is to pay Joe more, and the other is to make Joe's life less expensive without taking away anything. This would be the second option.

More resources... YAY!

[MasterShake]

Ok, I'll respond to the troll. Ignoring all arguments about ethics, buisness and whatnot, even if we spend all our resources/money on projects here on earth the world cannot support 6.6bln people at a first world level.

Take copper for instance, an average first world person consumes over 300KG of copper per year. WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT! Silver is another precious metal that is used in everything from electronics to photograph to medicine. 1 troy ounce of silver costs near $9.50US. This is up from $7US about a year ago. The cost is going up BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING OUT. If you truly want to bring the whole world up to first world levels we need new sources for things like metals, ALL of them. The Earth is getting tired, we have used all the easy resources and there aren't enough deposits projected to begin to bring everyone up to the standard of living that we enjoy. We need to get to the resources in space before we no longer have the resources to go anywhere.

Now, a side note. If we can move our heavy industry to orbit and use materials that are already in space (asteroids) we can quit makeing such a d@mn mess of our planet. Do you know the environmental impact of mining metals? Between the giant holes in the ground, the massive amount of energy expended in processes such as smelting and the chemicals necissary to tease metal out of lower and lower grade ore? It's truly horrifying. In space we have all the free, uninterruptable solar energy we could need. Smelting would just requre a big mirror to focus sunlight on an asteroid. Sending down finished products is essentially free. Many asteroids are free metal that do not need to be chemically reduced. The benefits are amazing when you sit down and research them a little.

sorry to remind you all

[can-o-worms]

For starters mining mars and comets and stuff is never gonna happen with fossil fuels. And if it even looked possible with any of the alternatives then there would be more going on that just some solar sail. nano space ladders? whatever. . . . and does anyone still even believe we went to the moon?

Move people.

[Kitt3n]

Well if we did ever make it to the moon and if we ever can build space ships, maybe they can find another habitable planet out there to transport some people too so they can quit killing people for population control here on Earth. Maybe they can transport all those people from those foreign nations we keep sending food too but they never gain any weight. They can start over on a new planet and farm for their own food.

Re:Move people.

[KeensMustard]

Hmm. There's the whole problem of displacing people, Soviet style, to another place where they've never been and don't want to go to, simply because they happen to be poor and we happen to be rich. Think about someone doing that to you, might give you a bit of a grasp of why a lot of people are so angry in the world today. Secondly, no habitable planets within a lifetime of travel anyway - the nearest solar system outside our own is something of the order of 16 years worth of travel - even in the best possible scenario, people would spend barely more time once there then they spent getting there. Chances are most or all would die in transit. Thirdly, the poor are poor because it is necessary for the rich to exploit some people in order to be rich - that's the way the economic system works. If you sent the poor away, a group of rich people would need to be selected from the ranks of the rich to be poor in their place. Otherwise there would be chaos - who would work in the sweatshops/sell us cheap oil/work as our servants?

Re:Move people.

[Drakai]

Hah! Move people! That's silly :) You don't move people, you provide a place for them to move to and overtime they will go to this place, if it's a good place to be. I have heard that S. Korea will build an empty city and then round up 8 or 9 nearby villages and force them to live there. It's an unfortunate practice but necesary for S. Korea to modernize itself. And they are committed to modernization. They have intense cellular and broadband infrastructure for these reasons, as well. The problem with the poor people that can't seem to grow there own food isn't the people. It's the weather cycles and the corruption. I suppose if there were always good weather they would survive ok and be less civil war and strife. But the cycles of famine seem to have broken their ability to be at peace. A farmer manages to grow a crop only to have it burned or stolen by a local warlord. Not too mention the ravages of diseases, foreign and domestic. And how often is it that they are not allowed to flee or given a place to flee to? A friend of mine wants nothing more than to hop on a spaceship and leave this miserable rock behind. So don't assume that it will be the poor, lost or homeless that journey away from mother earth when the opportunity to do so arrives.

Re:Artificial diamonds

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Unfortunately, artificial diamonds are still expensive, but I would
> expect that to change as it becomes easier to produce them.

Didn't you watch the De Beers PBS Frontline special? Artificial (and natural) have been cheap for decades. They're rippin' ya off, man! Wake up!

get that rock to pay off our debt

[KungF00]

The US gov't absolutely needs to get that chunk of $$$. It should be NASA's primary focus. 20 Trillion would give our children a future.

Re:waste it on space travel rather than wars...

[Anonymous Coward]

Iraq wouldn't have been an issue if Saddam hadn't invaded Kuwait

Uhhh, WTF are you jabbering about? Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991. Iraqi forces were ejected from the country that same year by an international coliation of forces.

Then 12 years later the US invades Iraq without U.N. consensus (oh, I forgot Poland) because of something they already got their asses kicked for. That seems reasonable to you?

Well, at least the US forces were welcomed as liberators. Wait, what? Oh, dang now we really do have Vietnam II. Gee Dub's idiocy FTW!

ummm

[KeensMustard]

No, sorry. I don't see the connection between space travel and mining nearby asteroids. I mean, it's not as if having decided to mine the asteroid we would need humans in space to make it happen. Siting and plunking some form of engine(s) on the asteroid doesn't require a human to be there. Slowing it into orbit around the earth doesn't require direct human intervention. Mining the ore, refining it, launching it into the earths gravity well certainly doesn't either. Why is this justification for "Space Travel"?

Re:ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a list of things that can go wrong or be just plain unexpected while we do all these things that don't need no frickin humans in space, and I'll give you a price for all them machines that can deal with all those situations.

Mining Barge

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was, "Man we need to get a Covetor out there for that asteriod."

(Business 2.0)

[Keith McClary]

"(Business 2.0)"

So has anyone worked out a quantitative business plan for this project?
Seems to me it would produce very expensive iron and way more cobalt and platinum than we have a use for.

maglev? days?

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

maglev has been considered, apparently.

Given that the expected speeds have to be in the thousands of miles per hour along most of the distance, I'd prefer non-contact.

And days to orbit? Not at tens of mph.

I guess, even if it were a year to geosynchronous, if you had enough climbers running at once, it might be worthwhile. Mostly for structural materials, I'd suppose.

falls like a feather

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

At least, that's what the wikipedia entry said some people expect. It's a monofilament of carbon, remember?

Still, the length of the thing, and the strength of the cable, even if it doesn't crush what it falls on, I would not want to be trying to get out from under it.

Re:eek:ality

[khallow]

This is real economics, you can't keep printing up IOUs and have it work forever. When it gets to the point you have to point guns at people to get them to keep taking your IOUs it's already headed down.

I don't see any more force being applied now than in the 30's.

Thank you

[lheal]

I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. My response to your original post was a trifle insulting, for lack of a better word, and I want to thank you for the rare grace with which you responded.

I actually think you are correct in your assessment of the current state of private space flight. I also think you underestimate either the power of the profit motive in general or the perceived profit potential in space travel. It's not about tourism, but resources. The initial ventures may be touted for tourism, but I think that's a sideshow. The real money will come later, when Some Bright Lad figures out how to get something valuable from extraterrestial locations, e.g., the moon or Mars.

And I wish I'd had the decency to say it that way.

Re:Thank you

[HuguesT]

And in turn let me thank you as well for your own interesting reply.

I also think the profits are there for the taking, no questions about it. Think of the absolutely mindboggling methane resources in the Saturn area ; not to mention rare metals and whatnot, or just the idea that once humans are out of the craddle they shall become far more resistant to global upheavals of all kinds. Yet this is all science-fiction.

I simply think people vastly underestimate the resources needed to get out of Earth's gravity well and survive there for any length of time, let alone travel anywhere interesting. Chemical power & known tech can barely barely get us to the Moon and back with a few pounds to spare (for rock samples). This was with a rocket we don't know how to make anymore (Saturn V). I don't believe anyone can survive 6 months in deep space between the Earth and Mars, land there, live there for a few months and ever get back with a chemically-powered vehicle. People who think otherwise simply haven't done their maths right.

We will not get out of Earth in a commercially viable way before some kind of cheap space elevator becomes available. The space elevator will not happen unless vast amounts of basic research resources get spent in public and private labs. This might take a few decades and is completely out of reach of any private endeavour right now, simply because no one except government can employ the 10,000 profs and PhDs for the 20 years that this effort will require.

Then once we have that stuff, actually building something substancial in orbit becomes possible. Then we can build Orion. This nuclear-powered vessel can travel in the solar system at 1G throughout. Going to Mars is a matter of a few weeks. In days one gets to the closest asteroids. Going to Jupiter and Saturn is possible and survivable. In fact there is no other possible know way to do it, and we already know Orion is feasible (although HARD!)

However it is not possible to build Orion on the ground, even for government. This is highly dangerous stuff. Building it in orbit with current tech is impossible even with the current combined wealth of all governments on Earth, by far. Building Orion would cost in excess of 100 space stations. Tens of trillions of dollars! Name a corp that can do that.

Hence true space exploration and exploitation of the solar system will not happen for decades, and it will not happen commercially except of short tourist joyrides and eventually competition to the US/European/Russian/Chinese satellite launch systems. Forget about asteroids, *except* if some kind of disruptive technology I don't know about (obviously) becomes available eventually.

There are other things that could be done, such as entirely robotic exploitation system. However I can't see any private endeavour getting to the level of expertise and experience of the JPL anytime soon, yet this is the best we have, and what JPL does, although awe inspiring, are only baby steps on the way to space exploitation. This would cost far less, yet is still, IMHO out of reach of any and all corps.

I'd love, really love to be proved wrong on this.