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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."
The space shuttle has a mass of around 100 tons and is very fragile. A 500 ton asteroid would have a much better chance of surviving re-entry, but then you'd just have a 500 ton rock. We've got plenty of those already.
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.
They're not going to have the 20% gold problem, anyways. If you had bothered to read the study, you would have known that the asteroids targeted would be C-type, which are full of useful volatiles and organics that can be turned into handy things like water, and hydrogen, and oxygen (which also happen to be pretty good rocket fuels). Any asteroid mining isn't going to be returning stuff to earth. It's going to be using it for other purposes IN ORBIT. That's where the profit comes in: you don't have to launch 500 tons into lunar orbit at today's launch prices.
Plus, that 2.6 billion cost estimate was for a "Prime contractor design, test & build based on NASA-provided specs" with NASA insight/oversight. I'd be willing to bet that a wholly private effort could do a similar mission at a cost quite a bit less than that. (I would also point you to the NASA study that stated the cost difference between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and a NASA developed Falcon 9 was more than half.)
Don't forget about real-estate. A 500 ton asteroid would have nearly as much interior space as the ISS, so all you have to do is hollow the thing out (selling the resulting materials of course) then seal it, brace it, and bolt on some air tanks and maneuvering thrusters. You've constructed the world's roomiest space station!
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.
What do you want to bet this asteroid retrieval system will be configured to use a hydrogen/oxygen engine of some kind? They could refill and relaunch it off the first asteroid for a fraction of the original launch costs!
It looks like US science education has jumped the shark. Notice he didn't write isotope so there's no excuse there, and there's nothing wrong with his written English which indicates at least a high school graduate if not more. Maybe we need to get bands to wear those periodic table t-shirts on MTV or something.
Or we could, you know, do both. Radical idea, I know.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.