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Billionaires and Polymaths Expected To Unveil a Plan To Mine Asteroids
dumuzi writes "A team including Larry Page, Ram Shriram and Eric Schmidt of Google, director James Cameron, Charles Simonyi (Microsoft executive and astronaut), Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot), Chris Lewicki (NASA Mars mission manager), and Peter Diamandis (X-Prize) have formed a new company called Planetary Resources, and are expected to announce plans on April 24th to mine asteroids. A study by NASA released April 2nd claims a robotic mission could capture a 500 ton asteroid and bring it to orbit the moon for $2.6 billion. The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."
A study by NASA released April 2nd claims a robotic mission could capture a 500 ton asteroid and bring it to orbit the moon for $2.6 billion. The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."
And when the mission makes a mistake and an asteroid goes plummiting into a major city it will cause trillions of dollars in damage and massive loss of life and potentially create a cloud of dust that will cause an ice age.
I'm sorry, but no, this isn't a good idea. If you don't even have the technology to completely destroy an asteroid yet, then you can't fully control it and shouldn't be trying to "bring it to orbit". Maybe the first team will succeed because they have the smarts, but then when its shown to be profitable, the morons will get involved with fresh VC, etc.
Somebody saw DR. Evil's plan in that film!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93gBDFPwgcA
Well, I think those people are just indulging in a pipe dream, But hey, as long as it doesn't involve taxpayer money, more power to them.
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
And a shorter distance.
And with an atmosphere.
And so on and so forth.
I suspect their real target is taxpayer subsidy.
Do they understand what this would do to the price of gold (not to mention platinum and palladium)? Most of the gold bugs make themselves feel good about their investment with the mantra 'you can't print gold.' It's trading in the stratosphere as it is, and the Wolfram Alpha link in TFS uses the current commodity price of gold.
First, there are other uses for an asteroid in orbit with thrusters on it. Namely, ramming comets or asteroids on a collision course with earth. Second, why bring the resources to earth? They can be used for orbital construction.
Wouldn't the major benefit be the availability of raw materials in orbit, so we don't have to launch 500 tons of material into space to build stuff?
Ultor Corporation. or maybe UAC.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
But I'll take this, too.
Why the moon? Why not bring it into low orbit around earth? What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously though, gold is a bubble metal. It has very limited practical value and is desirable only because it's desirable. Bring back billions of tons of the stuff and it ceases to be desirable, or at least will be no more special than iron or uranium. Mining an asteroid actually uses up real resources so is not a paper shuffling exercise that creates financial paper products. It had better result in something actually productively useful to pay for itself.
Going out to mine an asteroid may seem like a real bad idea at first, but for the exact same reasons that going to the moon seemed like a bad idea. There is no real monetary gain from doing so, in fact its a huge money sink. Also, it could be dangerous. However, the mission to the moon forced us to invent so many new technologies and research a lot of different avenues in order to make it happen. Without the mission to the moon there is no doubt we would not be as advanced as we currently are. I would argue that embarking on a mission to mine an asteroid would have a similar effect. In order for this to work we have to improve on the autonomy of robots, we have to figure out how to control an asteroid and establish an orbit around the moon (possible application not only for mining, but for preventing an asteroid collision with the Earth) and we also need to figure out a more efficient way to travel in space. All good things, and I don't doubt we would make all the money back by exploiting the new technology we have to develop.
So Titanic is is gonna be the funding for human expanse past the moon? So the women were right the whole time...
Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot)
Thanks for explaining that; we would have never figured it out on our own!
If this does nothing else but push the science of rocketry and space travel further then I'm all for it. If they succeed though, I can't wait to see what comes next. Haters be damned, I love that people still want to explore and see what's out there. You can't move the species forward by taking no risk at all.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Control of a sufficiently sized asteroid could potentially make the men and women who control it rulers of the entire planet.
1. How are they suppose to get 500 tons of anything to the ground? 2. What would be the best resource to get? Gold? for what it would just cause a drop in the gold market. Perhaps some resource that can be used in a massive scale to lower the cost of launching the mission ( both energetically and monetary) 3. How cheaply can they do it? Space X might simplify the math but it would still be in the hundreds of millions just to get stuff up. 4. how many times an already launched vehicle can be re-used?
It's all about finding better ways
Aaa but what if it was 20% Unobtanium ?
Maybe we'll finally get that out of our system.
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
The diameter of earth is less than 13'000 km. The distance between earth and moon varies (elliptical path) but even when the moon is at its closest, the distance is more than 363'000 km. That's nearly 30 times the diameter of earth. This picture illustrates it pretty well. I think that a lot of people fail to grasp that scale due to having seen very deceiving images of the solar system (all planets and the sun presented relatively close to each other) at the classroom walls when they were young.
Even factoring in the earths gravity, you need to miss by quite a lot before you accidentally hurl something at earth.
Is not to particuarly mine for Earth, but for space. Having resources up there means not having to lift them from earth surface. And not only scientific space stations, or satellites, could be built up there, factories, solar panels and other ships could be built there too.
You only make a small part of the money involved in capturing an asteroid on commercially-viable minerals/metals like gold.
What people will pay for a space rock is way more important than what people will pay for gold. A 500 ton asteroid could be 500 tons of rock. But that would make millions of lumps of Space Rock that could be sold by The Franklin Mint in a special collectors set.
The study wasn't talking about mining the asteroid to return the material to Earth! The asteroid mass would be used to generate water, hydrogen, and oxygen (primarily) for use IN ORBIT, where it is far more valuable than returning x amount of minerals back to earth. It would also be used as a test bed for advancing mining tech, becoming more efficient, and driving down the cost of the next operation.
However, long term, it could very well end up being economical to return materials to earth. If any initial effort at mining of materials that are useful in orbit succeeds, then there will be an existing industrial base for mining asteroids, and the incremental cost of the next one will be less. As mining methods are refined and become more efficient and the industrial capacity in orbit expands, it becomes possible to create more and more of what you need in orbit instead of launching it from earth (which is where much of the expense comes from). Then, when all you have to do is turn the less valuable parts of an asteroid into shipping containers, load it with the more valuable stuff, add an electric propulsion system, then it might be worth returning stuff to earth.
But the bottom line is that mining asteroids is going to be most useful for getting lots of useful material in orbit (be it lunar or Lagrange points or whatnot) without having to go through the process of getting out of earth's gravity well.
To use lunar resources you have to land and take off in a gravity well. Distance matters much less than delta-V for space operations.
Asteroids are differentiated. Some are mostly pure nickel-iron. Never heard of that being available on the moon.
"The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."
Which means the Amurrican Taxpayer will get stuck paying for this boondoggle!
Great, now we're going to have an asteroid arms race. The U.S. and India will be threatening to crush Germany with a huge rock if it doesn't capitulate to their demands and cease "construction" of its own "weapon of mass destruction" aka their own huge orbiting rock.
Welcome to the brave new world of tomorrow....
It's too bad that my "Hephaestus Project" was developed thirty years ago.
My question to you is, Where do you plan to refine the ore? Good luck with that one.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
sound like plot to a B moive
I doubt it. It's pretty much mutually assured destruction: even if they also had a spaceship and space station and were somehow certain those wouldn't be destroyed by the rest of humankind, they'd die much sooner living in space than they otherwise would. If they could wait out the planet to return to being habitable, they'd suddenly find their riches to be useless unless they had a self-maintaining and self-replicating platoon of robots to do everything required for maintaining their lifestyle. And if you've already got that, then asking ransom from the world seems pointless.
If they're really that psychotic there's no reason to trust them not to do it anyway for shits and giggles. The main goals of everyone else on the planet would immediately change to a.) figure out how we could possibly stop or survive it b.) kill absolutely everyone involved, and in the meantime capture and possibly publicly torture (depending...) all of their known family and friends in the hope that might somehow help.
Odds are most of the asteroids are made of lighter less valuable elements and the rest are mostly iron. The majority seem to be made of loosely assembled gravel. The only way it becomes cost effective is if you have a permanent space colony mining the resources that is self sufficient. Most of the expense comes from the Earth based resources it takes to mine the elements and return them to Earth. The other issue is the most cost effective way to return them here is to let them fall like meteors do with a disposable outer crust that would burn away. Now get permission to do this? Good luck. Robotics sound attractive but you are still talking about vast resources from this planet used to mine questionable resources in asteroids. It would have to add greatly to what we have now to make any sense. It'd make more sense to mine magma or black smokers on the ocean floor. I'm all in favor of mining asteroids but sending out robots to make a quick buck will loose money and in the end kill off any hope of doing it for real. We need to take the baby steps. Build a space elevator then you can cheaply orbit what's needed and potentially have a way to return the resources. They also need to come up with better ways to determine asteroid composition or else you are playing the lottery. You're hoping for 20% gold and you end up with 95% rock. Rare earth elements really are the reason to do it. They are likely in higher concentrations in asteroids and they are worth more than gold.
A 500 ton metallic rock will not break up and 'dissolve' in the atmosphere as well as a 500 ton space ship, and will still carry enough mass to obliterate what it hits. Sure, chances are low it will hit populated areas if the worst were to happen, but do you want to be responsible if it did ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sci-Fi at its best...& quicker than actual mining.
Why would they do that?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Until terrorist hackers drive the asteroid into Earth, sending humans the way of the dino's.
Table-ized A.I.
It's your currency that is heading towards worthless. The value of gold is a constant...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is it wrong that I hope to see a space war happen within my lifetime?
"The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."
They could simply leave the gold on the moon (makes stealing it a big expense), prove that it exists, and sell it to central banks here on earth; AFAIK central banks have a lot of gold in storage. Then these no longer needed reserves could be put on the market, but an additional 100 tons of gold will make the price go down, making it even more unprofitable. Whatever their decision, price will go down.
There are PLENTY of problems which need solving right here on earth.
But those are problems which might not be fun for these jerkoffs to
chat about at the next party.
As long as there are hungry people sleeping under a bridge in the US,
all the idiots involved with this bullshit plan deserve to get incurable
cancer ASAP, in order that they taste hopelessness before they die.
A committee has asked Michael Bay to make a film depicting the worst case scenario of this project.
Even under the most strict (and asinine) interpretation of international property claim laws, this would fall under salvage rights. The rocks are unowned and set adrift, and nobody can make a decent claim to ownership. Therefore any person who reaches them first is entitled to collect whatever salvageable goods they wish.
The real question will be whether they're allowed to make a claim to the asteroid to keep someone ELSE from mining it once they do the gruntwork of getting it in orbit. That could become a real barrier to growth in this area, given that current international laws prohibit any nation from laying claim to an astral body.
I suspect without a change in laws we'll start seeing wild-west style ownership take place in space, in the form of jammers and guns. "It's ours, because if you send a spacecraft here to take it we will shoot you down or disable your probe."
I think assuming it's going to be asteroid mining is premature. All we know for certain so far is that the company will be called Planetary Resources Inc. and that it will "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP". With those descriptors, I think solar power satellites or lunar mining are equally likely, and some more 'out-there' scenarios like Mars colonization or orbital fabrication could fit as well. Heck, maybe they think they have a working fusion reactor design, and are planning to 'mine' hydrogen in bulk from the gas giants.
This is to prevent a new ice age. We simply mine big chunks of ice off of Halley's comet and drop it into the ocean every 75.3 years. That should keep us going until 3003.
They're just preparing their escape Ark should Oracle establish a world where APIs are subject to copyright
lets say you get large scale mining going and decrease the moons mass ....and increase earths what would happen to the orbit?
how about mining other bodies and increasing earths mass , are we into this ? NO really.....messing with this can have catastrophic issues.
THE moon is moving currently away at a rate of about 4 cm a year......altering that in a negative way as in increasing the systems mass may well mean ...oh never mind these short term greedy bastards won't even think a this....I've yet to see a single person talk about gravity and mass , would taking mass form the moon and putting it on earth do what? what about just mining other objects and increasing earths mass?
Who cares for a gold asteroid, we got enough of the stuff, 500 ton of it arriving on the market would only make its true values (practically nothing) even more obvious.
Now how about some rare earth materials? No idea if they exist in asteroids but these materials don't just cost a lot, they are also in low supply and difficult to get at because of environmental concerns. IF, they can be found in space, the mere fact that getting them would break China's gridlock without having to tire up wild life reserves might be worth the high price.
It would be intresting to see the US doing something again. Although to be honest, I got my doubts these guy can pull it off. At least it means money is being spend on doing something rather then on stock swapping. That got to be worth something. If you don't try the impossible when it is impossible, it never becomes possible. Always waiting for the right moment just doesn't work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think people are getting a bit hung up on the "20% gold" statement. (i.e. that would ruin the gold economy or whatever). The point the article was trying to make is that given the expense, there isn't any likelyhood of the actual minerals being worth what it costs to retrieve them... Except for the fact that their location makes them valuable once extracted, which the article fails to mention.
Current cost to move a pound of material into earth orbit is ~$10,000. If they find an asteroid that is 20% water by mass (not unlikely) and install a solar-powered hydrogen/oxygen generator to separate it, they'd have about 220,000 pounds of rocket fuel in orbit worth approximately 2.2 billion in reduced transport costs. Not to mention the nitrogen (breathable air component), iron (construction material) and even rock dust (concrete base anyone?) that they'd likely be able to extract.
when we discover it's already been done.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Soon to be not, and already not... if this is an actual plan.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's starting.
RUN, COWARD!
Great, now we're going to have an asteroid arms race. The U.S. and India will be threatening to crush Germany with a huge rock if it doesn't capitulate to their demands and cease "construction" of its own "weapon of mass destruction" aka their own huge orbiting rock.
I can see it now: UN Inspectornauts
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You're thinking too big. They start dropping pieces of asteroid on major metropolitan areas one by one until the entire world capitulates.
The idea of mining the asteroids actually makes sense, even for iron rather than gold. The mistake would be returning the metals to earth. They are much more valuable in orbit, considering how much it costs to get each pound into orbit. Leave whatever you get in orbit, use it in micro-gravity fabrication, with most of the products reinvested towards exploration (and capitalization) of space,
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Let's look at the real numbers.
The asteroid belt is over a THOUSAND times further from the Earth than the Moon is. It's over 200 million miles away.
The asteroids in the asteroid belt are about SIXTEEN times further BETWEEN THEM than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
What that means is that going from asteroid A to asteroid B is about the same distance as going from Earth orbit to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit.
And that's just between TWO asteroids.
Getting to the asteroids in the first place is the same as going from Earth orbit to the moon ...repeat 1,000 times
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the moon
and back to Earth orbit.
To quote Douglas Adams:
If you haven't hollowed out the Moon before mining Mars before mining the asteroids then you do not have a grasp of how far away the asteroids are.
A team including Larry Page, Ram Shriram and Eric Schmidt of Google, director James Cameron, Charles Simonyi (Microsoft executive and astronaut), Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot), Chris Lewicki (NASA Mars mission manager), and Peter Diamandis (X-Prize)
Where's Richard Garriott? Or has he spent his entire fortune on old soviet space program junk already?
Why does the bulk of elitists have to be dragged kicking and screaming to empathy and compassion?
And when the mission makes a mistake and an asteroid goes plummiting into a major city it will cause trillions of dollars in damage and massive loss of life and potentially create a cloud of dust that will reverse global warming.
There. Fixed that for you.
-- Terry
Who will own the asteroid?
As things stand right now, no one owns anything in space that they didn't send up there. I may be wrong here, but it was my understanding the Outer Space Treaty stated that planets, asteroids, and pretty much everything else in space is not allowed to become private property or be claimed by any nation. There's nothing to stop some other organization or country from sending their own mining equipment up to the asteroid once it's put into place.
I'll be interested to see what becomes of this should this project become successful.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
to supply poly-dichloric-euthynol to the miners.
Haven't you seen the movie where we mine the moon and it ends up breaking apart and crashing down on our heads?
How big a sun-shade can you make out of a 500 ton asteroid? And, can they maneuver it to selectively shadow the ocean in the path of an oncoming Cat5 Hurricane? Effectively divert one of those away from a major city and you've made back your $26B, kinda hard to collect, but the players involved here don't seem like they really need ROI anyway.
I don't think the first foray into space mining needs to be profitable. Just think of it as R&D for future space mining projects. Everything learned from the first trip could make later trips much more efficient and worthwhile. How profitable was landing on the moon?
One danger would be that a badly managed project could kill everyone's interest in future projects.
that lead to stagnation, decline and extinction if humans don't get sufficiently wise and active about mitigating them.
_Wish upon A Star_ works in Disney movies. Mother Nature is unimpressed.
Oh, you must be that Neanderthal that they cloned from fossil DNA. Welcome to Slashdot!
I'd better tell you about this business of "We are competing, you and against me, me against you". That disappeared a few years after you became extinct, when something called "civilization" was invented. You'll probably really "WTF?" at this, but people realized that they would be able to do much more by cooperating with each other rather than competing.
I know the idea of "cooperating" must sound bizarre to a Neanderthal, but it's true. Heck, we even walked around on the Moon by working together. Amazing, huh?
Don't worry, you'll soon get the hang of it. And you may even begin to enjoy it when you see how civilization means that you'll not longer be infested with fleas and lice, and living your latter years with the agony of rotten teeth.
The oceans here on earth has lots of minerals barely explored and those people want to grab an asteroid. Geez...
Why transport it back ? Drop it. Use solar energy as an input, and build a lifting-body shape of foamed nickel-iron, around your primary payload, as well as a control and guidance package, and re-enter it all. Plan for an open-ocean splashdown, and the foamed metal should provide a sufficiently low overall density to allow it to float and be towed to your terrestrial processing and unloading port. . .
The upside is a private project in space would be a good step forward in developing mankind as a spacefaring species.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space.
Ok, let's say you are correct for the sake of argument and they want to work with materials in space. Let's even say they succeed and bring a large amount of iron ore into orbit. Then what? We have essentially no technology available to work with anything close to industrial scale ore processing in space, nor any reasonable prospect of developing it anytime soon. There simply is no reasonable economic case to be made here, even taking into account the high cost of escaping Earth's gravity well.
The problem isn't as simple as finding the ore and mining it (which isn't simple), you also have to have a space based industrial capacity actually do the work. This technology is not only not available, no one is even developing it. Why? Because there is no reasonable prospect of a market in which to sell it. You have to have a product to bring back to earth and sell. That product might be information, or ore, or something else, but if everything stays in space no one will ever finance it. There HAS to be a return on investment ON EARTH for any of this to happen. I just don't see any of this happening without some pretty major technological leaps forward.
Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid,
Oh, is that all? Do you know of some space worthy steel mill the rest of us don't know about? Some way to turn the iron into steel, to shape it, heat it, form it, etc? Some way to power all this? Iron by itself is of limited value in space. Bringing it into orbit is completely useless unless you have factories and tools also in orbit. We do not have that technology or even a near term prospect of developing it. And even if we did, you have to have some economically viable product to bring back to earth to finance the project. While I'm optimistic that the engineering could be worked out sooner or later, I very much doubt the economics will permit it within the lifetime of anyone reading this.
And all this of course completely ignores the danger that if a 500 ton asteroid that can be moved and aimed is essentially a weapon of mass destruction and that bringing it into orbit is actually a terrifyingly bad idea.
Earth's iron ore is the relic of an ecological catastrophe. Prior to the emergence of photosynthetic life, the atmosphere was reducing, and the oceans were full of iron, as nice, soluble Fe++ ions. Once there started to be oxygen this oxidized to Fe+++ and precipitated out. Bend, fold, & heat for a couple billion years and you get iron ore mountain ranges. Not so sure if any of this happened on Luna.
> Mine the Moon first it getting ore is your goal.
If freshy water is your goal (slightly more valuable imo), asteroids are the easiest way to get it.
Most of Earth's iridium is with most of Earth's iron, in the core. Ni/Fe space junk has lots. Ask the dinos.
OTOH, a 500 ton asteroid in earth orbit is a space station / tiny moon that they own.
Well, I see that I'm outvoted by incurable, irrational techno-utopians.
I too am optimistic, as it happens. But only cautiously so – not recklessly, like you people are. Given humanity's past, there is no reason to believe that we can't rise to the current environmental challenge. But we're taking our time seeing the problem, as evidenced by this frivolous chat about mining asteroids. Right now the world a half-century hence is looking a scary place, and even in the best-case scenario a lot of permanent damage is going to be done to the biosphere. If and when we solve this problem – mitigating the effects of consumption rather than finding resources for more of it – then we can perhaps start thinking about mining asteroids. Until that point, you are putting the cart before the horse.
I have a strange feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about, that we're not even on the same page here. That's sad, because I'm talking hard science, and the solutions will come largely from hard science too. They include energy tech, biotech and all kinds of innovation in farming, town-planning and architecture. They don't include mining asteroids.
Is this website legit http://www.planetaryresources.com/ ?
Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.
The economics are nowhere near that simple. Let's say you have a big store of rocket fuel up there and ignore (for a moment) the cost of obtaining it. Then what? You still need payload which mostly has to come from Earth and the key processing equipment which also has to come from Earth. You haven't escaped the cost of the launch, you've simply added to the complexity and thus the cost.
Then there is the problem of actually developing the technology to mine and process these resources. We don't have industrial scale factories that are space worthy. Even if we did, they still have to be launched into space. We don't even have anyone working on them because there is no reasonable prospect of a return on investment. To get financing you have to have a product you can sell back here on earth and there is very little prospect of an economic return in the reasonably near future. Most of the economic benefits to the private sector are indirect ones (spinoff technologies, etc) for the foreseeable future.
The document refers to 500,000 kgs, which is a metric tonne. However, the Wolfram Alpha link refers to 500 short tons. If you change it to metric tonnes, you end up with a 100 tonnes of gold being worth $5.284 billion.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.20+X+500+tonness%29+of+gold+in+us+dollars
What they WILL find, however, is a bunch of metal and such that doesn't have to be lifted out of a deep gravity well to be useful in orbit.
No, instead you have to lift all the (non-existent) processing equipment instead. Are you under the impression that a steel mill is somehow not very heavy? Of course none of this technology is being developed because even if you did get it into orbit, you need a product to return to earth to make the financing possible.
Ask the 1% what they would do with $2.6 billion and they say "Lets jump into the Spruce Goose and get us some space rocks".
Meanwhile, the other 99% are going to look up into the sky one day and say "Hey, that's not a moon..."
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
as long as the asteroids don't mine us , I am ok with it
Just refueling satellites with reaction mass would be worth billions.
Not if it is still cheaper to do it from Earth. If it costs a penny more than doing it from Earth, then it is worth nothing. And it is not remotely clear that it can be done cheaper than refueling from Earth even with the obscene cost of launches from the surface.
Yes, "WE are ALREADY in space", and we're going to keep going there
Barely. Orbiting the earth a few hundred miles up is kind of like sticking your toe in the ocean and claiming you have conquered the sea.
so why does trying to do it in a more efficient way make someone a 'space nutter'?
It doesn't. But most of the discussions I've seen have a rather poor grasp on the economics of the situation. There is an axiomatic assumption that mining materials in space will somehow reduce costs. Making that happen will require some rather major technological advances which no one is even seriously working on at this point as well as some economic return to the parties on Earth who are financing the whole thing.
It would be a small asteroid, the kind that hits the Earth all the time. It would be of the type that tends to disintegrate on reentry, and it will always be on a non-impact trajectory in case the system fails.
Hand me a pulse rifle and a space-suit and I'll keep those durned tresspassers of your land, boss. Yeehaw.
you don't have to be a billionaire or a polymath to realize there is one problem stopping all progress in space travel the cost per pound of getting something into orbit. solve that problem and everything else is easy.
Ok, I know this is a temporary fix that only takes care of the symptoms (not the cause) of global warming but...
Use the asteroid to build some sort of sunscreen!
Depending on the material of the asteroid, you could use it to build a solid (like very thin sheets of aluminum foil) screen or transparent refracting glassy "disks" (there was some MIT proposal that utilized this). Or, if the asteroid was mainly worthless "powder", grind ít up even further and SPRAY it into a cloud between the sun and earth, 500 tons of very finely ground material might be able to reduce solar radiation by a few percent over the entire earth. Of course it would dissipate but it still might buy us some time like a decade or so and at least you wouldn't have to worry about getting rid of it once we solved the underlying (CO2) problem. For this, you might want to put the asteroid not into LEO (too dangerous and difficult due to the delta-V) or Geosync but at L1.
If you're really lucky, and the composition of the asteroid is just right and you've got the proper manufacturing technologies to support doing this IN SPACE (i.e. with little water), you can make huge quantities of solar cells to block out the sun! Cut down on global warming AND power the earth (also cutting down on global warming!).
Honestly, although I am very happy to see these guys doing such a forward thinking thing, I'm afraid they're a bit premature; we still don't have cheap(er) access to LEO. Maybe if that Dragon spaceship works out (fingers crossed). It is such a shame that it requires private visionaries to do what should be a function of our government. Short-sighted politicians indeed.
By the way, any guesses WHICH asteroid they're going after? Must be a NEO and not too big. Sounds like Apophis?
Someone needs to read more Science Fiction. The concept has been out there for almost a century, only the technology has lagged behind. The ways and means to mine asteroids need to be simplified and robotic tugboats isn't simple. Why wast all that fuel going out to an asteroid and change its course to drag it into lunar orbit? Why not simply mine it in-situ and carry the cargo back, leaving the tailings where they are? That 500 ton asteroid now comes back as maybe 20 to 50 tons of fairly high-density ore at a far lower cost. Land it at a lunar refinery to smelt it down even more and shoot it to Earth with a rail-gun mechanism aimed for a controlled re-entry to a remote location. Costs are greatly reduced and the value is greatly increased. Or, as at least one other has said, keep it up there to use for assembling more spacecraft that don't have to fight Earth's gravity to start their voyage. Mankind can finally start exploring the universe first hand rather than looking through telescopes and saying, "wish I were there."
Well ...
I suspect that that rock in space hasn't yet been polluted by man-made pollutant
But I _could_ be wrong
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What are property rights for asteroids? If you bring an asteroid to orbit around the moon, are you now the owner of the asteroid?
The problem with the Earth and moon is that yes, they're big and there are lots of resources in them, but all the ones we're really interested in are heavy and thus concentrated at their cores. It's tough to get down there.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are small and their cores are readily accessible, not that you need to do that because they're not differentiated like planets and big moons are. Although if you do mine one from the inside out, when you're done you have an awesome space castle.
...It's pretty much mutually assured destruction....
M.A.D : Mutual Astroid Destruction.
"...would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."
Assuming that it's geologically possible, it would Tank the Gold market wiping out any potential profit.
Weak analogy of perceived value.
The only STUPID part of the article is the idea of bringing the metals or ores back to Earth. Considering what it costs to lift a gram of ANYTHING into orbit, wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to keep it up there? Or, "up HERE", given that the people who do most of this work will be UP THERE, building space stations and power satellites.
Up there, power from sunlight is free and essentially unlimited. (We can presume that we're not talking about LEO orbits that spend half the time in shadow,,,) There's no reason that some small but substantial fraction of the human race shouldn't be living OFF of the Earth within the next 200 years.
Just keep it in close orbit and start to build...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
is closer than moon's orbit. So put it there.
DRM. Your miner bot will not drill without the right Key.
So it's all about Sergey Brin, Larry page and Charles Simonyi mating?
I see, I see...
Electricity is the next step. Power beamed to provide propulsion and operating energy to other spacecraft. After that, beamed power to new space facilities, then gigawatts of green power to Earth.
Then water. Jim Head says "Follow the water." Find water sources that are at or near the top of the gravity well - Phobos, Deimos, Amor-Atens or Earth-crossing NEOs with high water content.
Those two resources enable reliable access to the Lunar and Martian surfaces. Minerals, lunar polar ice and many other elements are further down the list of needed (re: profitable) materials.
That said, such a well-heeled team has surely looked deeper into the specifics.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The problem is this isn't international but interplanetary, and the Outer Space Treaty is a lot more restrictive. It's a topic that's been the subject of a lot of discussion lately.
Just 6 years ago, many 'experts' claimed that SpaceX would never get off the ground. Likewise, if they DID get off the ground, they would have higher launch costs than all of the other subsidized nation's launch systems.
Yet, here we are.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If we want our future to be in Space, we need to get working on it TODAY, not tomorrow or a decade from now.
One mistake an that asteroid is going to impact earth... Well, at least this idea got some discussions going, which sometimes create new ideas nobody thought of before.
Both you and the article authors are making the assumption that they want to return the ore to earth, which is ridiculous as there's already plenty of iron ore on earth. The fact that one of the team members is NASA's Mars mission planner should be a clue. Mining an asteroid with robots and sending the ore to Mars is the cheapest way to get concentrated iron ore in one spot on Mars. It's more efficient than sending it from earth or mining it on Mars.
This iron could then be used for the construction of a large Mars base. These guys are planning a lot further ahead that you give them credit for.
cokane.com
current international laws prohibit any nation from laying claim to an astral body.
What about corporations? or private individuals?
So they can loose all their investment and just end up with a bunch of absurdly high cost raw materials, and hopefully allot of debt and leave them in well deserved misery.
We have plenty of resources on earth as it is... where we lack them is in high earth orbit. Move the asteroid to high earth orbit and keep it there. Mine it there to build things in orbit for orbital use. That way they don't need to be launched.
We need a source of resources off planet that are closer then the moon. A stepping stone. If we start moving asteroids into high earth orbit, cracking them for their resources, and turning them into the fuel for our space industry we can eliminate a lot of problems we're having with our gravity well. For one thing, we can use the waste material that we have no particular use for to insulate a better space station... one that doesn't allow so much radiation into the habitat.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteroid was 20% gold
Developing the infrastructure and technology to achieve the goal would provide you with a huge collateral resource. Don't under-estimate the money to be made from selling technology developed on the back of a bigger project. Even if the bigger project itself never actually comes to fruition, they could still make money from this.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Why send craft up to mine it, when you can bring the rock to earth? Just aim for somewhere like the middle of Siberia and hope you don't miss. Rock lands, wait for the dust to settle, then send in the mining crew to collect the remains. You'd probably lose a big chunk of mass to atmospheric burn and impact damage, but it'd still be a lot cheaper than orbital mining.
But gold's value isn't any more constant than any other commodity.
I just declared it as constant.
Therefore I am correct.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What about 'mining' all the crap we've already put up into space that's floating around our planet as rubbish now? I admit to ignorance but just the same I would guess there's enough there to be able to build a decent space station or lunar base.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
If a Slashdot equivalent existed during the time of the Wright brothers, and someone talked about human flight, the equivalent negative responses would all be about how they should stick to bicycles or improving trains, and how flight was not economically feasible, and that steamships and trains were the only long distance transport worth working on.
Time to change the Slashdot motto to "Whatever it is, we're against it!" (with apologies to the Marx brothers).
Why is Snark Required?
...if only to help push space engineering development.
Our future's out there; it's past time we went and got it.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
So this is how Cameron wants to find his unobtainium.
overly right wing? I think my opinion on this is left wing, actually.
WTF? Where did that come from?
because drill baby drill is right wing, that we should use resources.
and luna isn't prime candidate for the stuff we've been told we would run out first..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Where do "they" live? If it's on Earth, they would be hunted down by every nation of Earth.
In the real world, Lex Luthor was shot in the head by a special forces team.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Didnt someone say James Cameron wanted to shoot "Avatar 3" in zero-g? Now we know where he'll be getting the material to build his own film studio in orbit!
If the next two Avatar films make as much money as the first one did, he'll actually be able to pay for it! (Don't know what scale for actors would be in outer space, could be astronomical).
Are you done?
The reason it's valuable to have a billion pounds of iron ore in orbit is because...well....if you want to build something, it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper (in the long run, when we invest the initial money required to develop the technology) to work with an asteroid than to ship the refined material piecewise into orbit!
Just why the hell is this so difficult for someone to understand? Oh, I know--because you actually have to be thinking progressively about moving forward into the future, not spending all your energy and thoughts trying to keep things exactly as they are and naysaying every ambition plan someone comes up with.
The hard part of any space project is the first step of getting into earth orbit.
And the problem there is that chemical fuel have barely enough energy (that is exhaust velocity) to get there with tiny payloads.
But if you use laser heated hydrogen, the payload fraction to LEO goes up to about 25%. That massively reduces the cost per kg, down to less than $100/kg.
There is an awful front end cost to lift enough laser and power plant parts into space using conventional rockets to get this process started, but it looks like the investment would be repaid in three years by lifting 500,000 tons of power satellite parts a year.
If we have even one power plant in space and use it for lasers, the cost to build more of them is reduced to where they undercut coal as a source of energy. Of course there are military consequences to some country having multi GW propulsion lasers.
Keith Henson (login not working this am)
Well, I just defined "incorrect" as "anything SuperKendall says". So what you said is incorrect, by definition.
Exactly!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
>You'd probably lose a big chunk of mass to atmospheric burn and impact damage
Say, 99.8%.
in 1970s a conference at NASA Ames Research Center on Space Resources and Space Settlements. Attendees included Jacques Cousteau and Gov. Jerry Brown, Gerald O'neill was well known even in public media discussing space settlements (govt like NASA said "settlements" where private groups said "colonies" and reason is colonies was a bad term to use particularly for African nations that were colonized by Europeons). Actually I thought, and still do, think the concept of putting an asteroid in earth orbit, setting up mining ops (imagine one that has lotsa platinum, you will find lowcost HLV will get put into service ***now***). Or an asteroid used as a HEO space station, burrow deep inside and have considerable shielding.
from http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19790024063&hterms=1979+asteroid+retrieval&qs=Ntx%3Dmode%2520matchallpartial%2520%26Ntk%3DAll%26N%3D0%26Ntt%3D1979%2520%2522asteroid%2520retrieval%2522
Earlier scenarios for mass-driver retrieval of asteroidal materials were tested and refined after new data were considered on mass-driver performance, favorable delta-V opportunities to earth-approaching asteroids with gravity assists, designs for mining equipment, opportunities for processing volatiles and free metals at the asteroid, mission scenarios, and parametric studies of the most significant variables. It is concluded that the asteroid-retrieval option is competitive with the retrieval of lunar materials for space manufacturing, while a carbonaceous object would provide a distinctive advantage over the earth as a source of consumables and raw materials for biomass in space settlements during the 1990's. Immediate studies on asteroid-retrieval mission opportunities, an increased search and followup program, precursor missions, trade-offs with the moon and earth as sources of materials, and supporting technology are recommended.
PDF of report, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790024063_1979024063.pdf
mfwright@batnet.com
"Your momma?"
Seriously, as other commenters have already pointed out ad nauseum, your comment is rather juvenile. Please think before posting (PTBP!).
Anyone that played EVE Online as a miner knows that.
So lets build that ringworld at the asteroid belt, which starts just past mars. We'll cheat a little and include mars and use it's distance from the sun. Given the circumference around the sun at that distance, if we could build 1 mile of that ringworld every minute of every day without stopping, at the end of each day we will have completed 1440 miles of the ringworld. At that rate the ringworld will be complete in 5, 500 years.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
61 MJ/kg of potential energy for one thing (the depth of the Earth's gravity well). Raw materials to bootstrap space industry for another. Your average space rock is 40% oxygen. If you use VASIMR type plasma thrusters to fetch the space rock, and you use oxygen as fuel, you burn 2.3% of the total rock mass to haul it back. Thus the remaining 97.7% of the rock, including a lot of oxygen, is available to use or sell to other people *in orbit*, where any mass is worth $5000/kg at the moment.
Any mass you cannot convert to useful items like water, O2, or steel, still has value as radiation shielding, and stockpile for later processing. At first you will only be making a few products, but add more over time. The key point is as soon as you can extract a little O2 from the first space rock, you are self sufficient on fuel *Forever*.
If you want technical details, you can look at the 80% complete wikibook I have been working on: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods
OK - so you meant something different to the stupid thing you wrote. Calm down and don't take it out on me and don't pretend the critic of the stupid idea is the one putting up the stupid idea.
Explain why these raw materials would useful to an investor here at the bottom of a gravity well with access to cheaper raw materials to hand and no prospect of setting up a processing plant outside the gravity well.
Can you find a more sourced figure? Even if it's 90%, one-tenth might be worth more than a cheap ion-thrust robot.
I was being rhetorical, and based my figure on other replies that a 500 ton class C would burn up before entry. It's certainly possible that a more efficient retrieval would be cost-effective to bring down to Earth-- maybe you would add a heat shield manufactured from materials in orbit! -- but my guess is that the materials, will long have more value outside the gravity well, at least until and if scarcity on Earth increases 5-10 fold. For that matter, you'll likely mine the critically valuable materials in orbit (or lunar etc), and drop them.
FWIW. I haven't though about it enough, so I probably shouldn't post, but at least I'm not being a naysayer ;)
Good & Implementable idea. It also help to develop space technology & asteroid impact control technology.
I post as ... chaosnet3
I am very ..disappointed by you ..
a myth a fallacy perpetrated .. that humanity depends upon billionaires .. money a necessary prerogative for humanity progress
the idea of .. fucking profit .. behind each big venture .. as if humanity should wait for billionaires entrepreneurs for any big projects
no need for fucking money .. only the resources and ..the men and women .. devoted to that manner ..
humanity needs .. to put ..profit .. to the scrapheap of history .. render it ..completely a nonsensical word ..
it is a thoroughly inane concept .. which it's utility is surpassed in today's world ..
none of the big projects .. can be undertaken .. under its auspices .. the money auspices ..
the common denominator .. for each and every activity in today's world .. money .. ought to .. to bow out .. no longer offers .. alternatives ..usable for humanity's aspirations .. that can barely match
humanity's progress and vast potential .. imperatively demands .. money is stalling humanity's progress .. to a ..virtual halt ..
are you nuts .. to even considering .. thinking along the lines of .. money .. what money can afford ..
so .. restricting a concept .. that suffocates progress .. the framework of money .. no longer .. valid
out of pace .. with humanity's progress .. ought to be discarded .. immediately ..
the longer it is kept .. the longer would .. progress be stalled ..
what do you need for such projects .. resources ..and the people .. to bring to fruition the project ..
what the heck .. money has to do with that .. let alone ..profit ..
fucking billionaires .. what the fuck do they have .. paper money .. inflated bank accounts ..
how does that represent the resources that are needed .. the people that ..will work for that
what the fuck is money ..other than good will .. the belief .. that .. the individual
a purely ..make belief .. state of affairs .. situation .. that is constantly challenged .. in today's world ..
a myth that is perpetrated that is ought to be discarded ..
Its too bad space mining isn't that realistic at the moment. The real challenge will be coping with the cost of fuel.
If and when this experiment in commerice ever happens they'll have be use drone rockets nudge something like this to earth's orbit for dismantling, get re-entry vehicle to slap it into that land something this heavy on the ground. Breaking it up in orbit will be risky too, million pound rock being broken up into smaller pieces will likely create more space junk.
If commerical satelites or stations could be built in orbit, it could more fesible for extraction process. Start up cost is going be the other big headache if they want this become reality.
*Math.
FTFY.
It might be more profitable than rocketing metal from the surface of the Earth to the moon.... Making building habitats on the moon cheaper.
The one problem with ideas like this (other than all of the technical ones), is the simple issue of supply and demand.
As soon as you capture an asteroid of sufficient size and worth to make it profitable, it would no longer be so. What I mean is if you flood the market with whatever is currently valuable, it will no longer be so, or at least not as much. So even if the thing was a great big gold nugget 100% pure floating in space, really close, at a reasonable orbit, and we somehow discovered technology to mine the thing, what do you think that amount of gold would do to the gold market? It would crash, and so would any commodity brought in sufficient quantities. Unless of course you control prices, stockpiling the stuff, only releasing so much onto the market every year to keep the price stabilized, etc... That would be a pretty controlled market.
So anyway you look at it, those asteroids carry a deadly virus, and the name of that virus is Communism. So those free thinking maverick industrialists in America should oppose this idea, as they are champions of Capitalism and the Free Market, and Apple Pie, and everything else that makes the USA great!