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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."
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
Most people are just going to babble nonsense in this article, but I'm going to try to actually give you numbers.
You can orbit a Kg for about "ten grand". However asteroids are already in orbit, and it takes a hell of a lot less fuel to deorbit than to orbit. So to a VERY crude first approximation the delivery expense is perhaps a buck per gram. Precious metals from the ground cost around one to two orders of magnitude more. So the delivery cost seems high in an absolute sense, but its not really a significant fraction of the cost of the metal.
Its kind of like complaining that you can't mine gold in South Africa because a 747 cargo plane costs $50M and $50M is a lot to spend for a little gold. Well, yes $50M is a lot of dough but you'd find that the cargo capacity of a 747 in gold is worth a whole hell of a lot more than $50M, so suddenly the airplane cost doesn't matter much.
The ROI killer is going to be the mysterious and unclear latency from when the $ are spent until the capsules of solid gold hit the earth. I would postulate that you're trading the risks of international and national politics (nationalization of mines, strikes, government delaying regulation, etc) for technology risks.
I think the ROI/risk is about as bad as opening a gold mine in South Africa. Much riskier than a diamond mine in Canada. Not as risky as a rare earth mine anywhere on the African continent. Its a plausible realistic investment.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I really kind of like this. A group of rich guys with a bent towards science fiction are doing a proof of concept mission that is - quite honestly - to risky for a big organization like NASA.
This is such a phenomenally more interesting use of their money than a huge yacht or a private island or buying a baseball team. I say go for it.
FWIW, I believe the target asteroid size is 500T, which is the same order of magnitude (barely, factor of 7.5) as the one that re-entered and blew up with apparently no ground damage over the US west coast last night.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
One of the ironies is that many materials are prized for their scarcity, but their scarcity actually makes them less valuable in the real world.
Take gold as an extreme example. There's not enough of it to be useful, so we don't really use it that often. Instead, its rarity is prized by people who value rarity and that's it.
Libertarians might think it's valuable as some post-apocalyptic currency. Me, I think gold's useless. Outside of plating electrical connectors (something silver's pretty good at too), it's only in my house 'cos my wife like wearing the stuff decoratively.
If we had lots of gold, on the other hand, we'd start using it. Copper wire would start being replaced by gold/copper alloys. We'd use it to plate large objects to protect them from rust - car components, train bodies (perhaps even train rails.)
The irony here is that by becoming abundant, gold would become useful. As such it would be valuable. You could build and fuel industries around it. There's not enough of it to build industries around it today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Jim Benson's baby, SpaceDev, had the same business plan in the mid-90's. They were players in the X Prize and the NEAR satellite, with custom satellite launches to fund their asteroid mining plan. Sadly, Benson died in the mid-2000's and his dream went too. [But not after I made lots of money trading small fluctuations in SPDV shares for 5 years (paid for my student loans!)]
Of course, he originally claimed there could be cobalt asteroids out there worth a quadrillion dollars. (No citation, but I remember the quadrillion # clearly.)
I really hope this new venture works, I think it is a feasible idea.
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