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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Why wouldn't there be a vein of iron ore on the Moon? There are veins of it on the Earth.
You have to find them first. If you're sitting on a giant nickel iron rock then no hunting is necessary.
You want to mine the moon? Fine. Gather up some money and go mine the moon. These guys, they want to go get an asteroid. It's their money. It's not like they're asking you to pay for it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't there be a vein of iron ore on the Moon? There are veins of it on the Earth.
The moon doesn't have veins of iron ore because it doesn't have an atmosphere that contains oxygen and never experienced the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, and thus does not have the banded iron formations which is the source of almost all the minable iron on the earth's surface.
Enigma
Stupid.
Ask the 1% what they would do with $2.6 billion and they'd say "invest in some hedge funds, HFT companies, etc." These guys want to do something that a) generates more actual wealth and b) advances our capabilities as a species.
I think a lot of people are used to space being a government endeavour. When it's NASA/ESA/JAXA/etc it's perfectly natural for the public to have an opinion, since it's their money being spent. It'll be interesting to see what happens as more private ventures move into space, and don't have to answer to a majority.
Not that it will stop the comments, of course. We certainly hear enough opinions about what Apple and Google should do.
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.
then you do not have a grasp of how far away the asteroids are.
If you: a) Think that all asteroids are in the belt between Mars & Jupiter. And b) think of space in terms of distance, not fuel/velocity/energy. Then you don't understand enough to comment.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.