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Planetary Resources Confirms Plan To Mine Asteroids
Matching widespread predictions, The Bad Astronomer writes with word that "The private company Planetary Resources has announced that it plans to mine asteroids for water, air, and even precious metals in the next few years. Your initial reaction may be to snicker a bit, but it's headed by Peter Diamandis — who established the X Prize — has several ex-NASA personnel running the engineering, and also has the backing of a half-dozen or so billionaires. So this is no joke — their plan looks solid, and may very well be the first step in establishing a permanent human presence in space."
Wise choice. From TFA:
I asked Lewicki specifically about how this will make money. Some asteroids may be rich in precious metals — some may hold tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in platinum-group metals — but it will cost billions and take many years, most likely, to mine them before any samples can be returned. Why not just do it here on Earth? In other words, what’s the incentive for profit for the investors? This is probably the idea over which most people are skeptical, including several people I know active in the asteroid science community.
I have to admit, Lewicki’s answer surprised me. “The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment,” he told me. “They’re basing their decisions on our vision.”
These guys aren't even making excuses, they're throwing money down a hole for the lulz. And if this is one of Elon's "playing the long game" ideas he's going to be really disappointed that this will never be profitable as long as spaceships are being pushed from A to B. The only material that could possibly be profitable to bring back to Earth would be He3 from the Moon for use in fusion power.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Fuck off and die -- it's not scary, because there's almost no conceivable way you can mess up popping an asteroid into Earth orbit that doesn't either leave it on a slow (LEO-like), grazing path through the atmosphere, easily burning/breaking up before it hits ground, or cause it to miss the Earth entirely. Orbital mechanics just don't work the way you alarmists seem to think, and the only way you'll get a weapon-like trajectory is if someone actually tried for that.
You don't see a difference between aiming a meteor to take up orbit and aiming it to hit the Earth? Like the GP said, that is HARD to do, and you really have to try to get it into that range. This is why for every Tunguska, there are at least hundreds of thousands of similar sized rocks that burn up or get flung away.
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
5 year, 25 year, 100 year?
The real return will not be from delivering things to earth, rather it will be delivering things to orbit and the moon to further orbital and lunar construction and habitation. Lifting metals and waters from the earth to orbit or the moon is very expensive. Getting those resources "locally" (local in terms of gravity well not absolute distance) is the way to go and someone will get very rich doing so. The problem is that a profitable mining enterprise is optimistically many decades in the future, more likely something for the next century at our current pace.