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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."
Hopefully they'll be very careful about bringing asteroids into Earth orbit. But the energy and mining industries are pretty safe and responsible right?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because we're just about running out of problems to solve here on Earth
when I see it happening.
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
The last article on asteroid mining said it wouldn't be profitable even if the asteroid was 20% gold. That was based on the ludicrous assumption that the material would be brought back to earth. Going to all the effort of capturing and mining an asteroid in space just to get a bunch of air and water seems silly until you look at just how ungodly expensive air and water are *in space*, after launch and storage costs. Producing life support materials in situ is the holy grail of space exploration.
How ironic that the predicted Asteroid Human-Extinction event would be man made?
This telescope will be used both to look for and observe known Near-Earth asteroids, and can also be pointed down to Earth for remote sensing operations.
"Remote sensing operations" being what exactly? /spideysense
Solid as a rock?
IGMC
Oh no... it's the future.
Interesting idea, but there's not _that_ much of it, it's scattered and in a lot of different orbits, so would require a _lot_ of energy to get each bit.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Actually, I think this is worth doing on a "because it's there" basis. If you've got the money and want to spend it that way.
For my values, it beats buying a football team or a casino.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Amazing how many things are the "first step in establishing a permanent human presence in space".
You'd think by now we'd actually HAVE one.
These guys aren't even making excuses, they're throwing money down a hole for the lulz.
The money put forth into space endeavors is NOT packaged up and shot into space. It's spent right here on earth. It employs people here on earth. It uses infrastructure and resources here on earth. It's not being thrown down a hole. Even if they are doing it for lulz, it employs people.
As long as they are willing to pay fro damages if an asteroids destroys some property, I have no problem and wish them luck.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, throwing money down a hole for the lulz. Just like space travel always was!
Seriously, are you so short-sighted that you cannot see how useful mining asteroids for water, air, and eventually precious minerals is? I'll give you a hint: absolutely, 100% vital to the continued development of the human race. This has nothing to do with doing something "for the lulz." It is all about advancing the state of the human race. Not for profit, but because humanity can and should expand. Asteroid mining is one step forwards in our expansion towards other planets, and if we intend to not go extinct, we need to do that. We may not need to now. We may not need to in a hundred years, but we will in a thousand, or a million, and we are only going to get there if we start at some point. Might as well do it now.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
True nothing wrong with doing this as rich guy entertainment, but any investors who are expecting a return are going to be disappointed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Everyone wondering how they could possibly make money on this forgets that in 2036 or 2040 there is a decent chance that the fattest multinational government contract ever awarded will go to whomever knows how to capture an Asteroid. AG5 or Apothis or some other yet undiscovered rock will need to be moved sometime in the future, we know this.
It actually is possible that a few billionaires actually do want to keep the human race from going extinct, as far-fetched as that sounds.
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.
The investors seems to be rich enough to sit down and think about life.
Money by itself does not have more value than the things you can buy for it and you can't take money with you when you die.
There is not really much reason to spend your life earning money that you aren't going to use. It's almost as bad as spending money you haven't earned.
It appears that some of the "investors" thinks that spending money on the space industry is a lot cooler than buying mansions and yachts. I wish that more insanely rich people had a hobby like that.
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?
And not just happening but turning a profit.
Those guys have enough money to throw at something like this and never show a cent profit ... for a while.
I think the fascination on /. with this is more driven by bad science fiction than by an understanding of the science behind it.
From TFA:
Okay, I can agree with that. Mining asteroids is not cheap.
Okay.
I'm seeing scope creep already.
And now we're getting into the "floor wax and dessert topping" area.
And that's where I think they will fail. They're hoping that the rocks that will be valuable are already in the "Near-Earth" and big enough and moving slow enough and ...
Kind of like hoping that a winning scratch lottery ticket is in your local store and in the game you're playing and within X tickets of the edge where the money you'll spend on them is X or greater.
It's their money and more space science won't hurt.
But I'd rather see them accomplish something visible.
Men, flying through the air!? Ridiculous! I won't be investing in that "enterprise".
As if you had the means or the opportunity.
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.
New hotness: taxing asteroids.
Them rich rocks gotta pay their fair share. I heard they're Dick Cheney fans, anyway, so to rubble with 'em.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
A lot could go wrong, but hopefully they're talking about dropping it at L1 and not actually bringing it into LEO/MEO. After all, we already have a rather large chunk of rock in orbit. A fair-sized asteroid at L1 would make a great place for a real space station, especially if it's ice and rock ... water, breathable air, and a place to build, and you don't have to do anything to keep it there. And the moon is a short jump away.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The machines may be doing the mining themselves, but once things are underway there will probably still be maintenance and operations stationed in space not too far from the asteroids. The raw materials mined from the roids can be used elsewhere in space as well - such as a permanent lunar settlement.
Not really. They are leveraging valuable materials to colonize space. If everyone thought the way you do, we'd have never bothered to explore the world. Hell, it was expensive to set up mining operations in Africa and the Americas. But we did it. And those operations made enough money to build vast cities. Might as well have sneered at Columbus because he would have had to take the vast riches back and forth across the Atlantic on his little carracks.
Never mind that in many ways, it will be easier to mine in space than it is on the Earth. For one, you can pick and choose among your asteroids. For another, none of the desired minerals have been taken yet. For a third, there is no need to dig miles into the Earth. Etc. etc. Yes, it is hard to get to space. But there are limitless resources available once we are there.
Eventually we'll have to declutter our orbit and we might just find a way to recycle most of it, although I'm sure there's a lot that's just easier to nudge into the atmosphere to burn up. But like you said, the amount of material up there is insignificant from the perspective of reusing it for something is. Some of the low cost ways to get it includes nets, inflatables and lasers so you don't need to catch up to every little piece.
I said the same thing in the latest poll but from a business standpoint it's still throwing money down a hole. If they're not doing it for profit it's strange that they set it up as a business.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My question is more along the lines of what is it that we cannot do right now that requires more platinum. Or that is prohibitively expensive based upon the current price of platinum.
Exactly. Bringing down more gold or platinum will initially depress the price of such. What, on Earth, requires more gold than is currently available?
The ROI on Columbus' voyage was in time measured in centuries.
Check your premises.
Now hold on - they obviously don't have profit as their primary motive. That doesn't mean they are throwing money away. It's an extremely high risk business, but it is still a business and could still return a profit in the very long term.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Isn't the plan to strip mine space and bring the resources to Earth?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
We already know where there is ice on the Moon.
Wouldn't it be easier to just set up on the Moon and process it there and then ship it to NASA if they want to pay for it?
But then you'd have a MOON BASE and the space station would look kind of redundant. Why not move the astronauts to the moon base and use the water there?
The Fed can print money much faster than you can build rockets to launch it into space.
I'm intrigued to see Diamandis involved, a guy who has dedicated a lot of effort to driving technological progress. It got me thinking that perhaps the objective here is less to actually create this technology themselves but perhaps to force the hand of governments and even some companies with large pockets.
The potential ROI for the first group (or country) who successfully builds a fleet of robotic miners could be..err.. astronomical. I imagine there's a number of smart people in government ministries around the world (China and Japan in particular, perhaps the US) who would not like to see this group get a head start on their nation. It could force these government's hand and force them to invest them in this technology, perhaps it might even spark a new space race.
If you were a billionaire interested in space, and unhappy with the cutbacks in funding of exploration, what better way to force governments to reverse course than by threatening to deprive these governments of the massive profits that may be available?
This could be a giant step towards getting humans out in to the universe. You want to solve problems on Earth? Well a whole lot of them will be solved by getting in to space and expanding our resource base.
Science fiction writers had envisioned we would already be at this stage in space commercialization by now. Since reality has been a far cry from fiction (and lags behind), I wondered if space commercialization would ever be realized in my lifetime. Cancellation of the shuttle (with prospects of a replacement uncertain) doesn't help...but, reading this article about asteroid mining brings me renewed hope.
I'm sure they're really scared that the UN might be really, really upset with them while they're sitting in space on their asteroid.
Talk does not cook the rice.
In order to accomplish a feat such as this you need resources, if those resources are not coming from the government or non-profit orginizations then they are coming from private individuals and private individuals would like a return on their investment.
Humans are quite an idiotic, selfish, and immoral lot. You can talk about how a project such as this greatly benefits humanity, but if you get no funding you get nowhere.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I think that anyone who is in a position to invest in them would, at the bare minimum, have information that the rest of us have access to. Like, for example, the quote "The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment." If you have a shit-ton of money to spend, there is nothing wrong with high risk/reward.
I hear North Korea is testing a bomb to see if they can burn it faster...
Hmmm... just for brief science fiction, suppose that... ...back in the Pliocene, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, just suppose there was one species that was, say, superintelligent. And suppose that species mined asteroids, and then one megalomaniac crashed an asteroid at a shallow angle, into Africa, right about where the South Sandwich islands are today (but crust-wise, at the location of the Vredefort.)
And, that location, perhaps, was just where there was a uranium-calcium georeactor in the mantle. And it blew.
And, just for argument's sake, suppose the crust completely shattered, and blew out about 1/3 of the moon's mass, and the exposure of the kimberlites in the crust created all those nice diamond mines in a big circle that includes Australia, Northern Italy, central Africa, and Brazil.
Much more recently than people imagine... but those U-U dates were thrown off by all the Uranium from the explosion.
And, just for entertainment's sake, suppose that the shock waves set off another explosion in a georeactor directly under the Hudson Bay, shattering that crust like a bullet shot through a pumpkin, and sending *that* mass into orbit as well, and creating all those kimiberlites that circle the Hudson in a 950-mile radius.
And, just for imagination's sake suppose there was yet *another* explosion, say, underneath a continent located, say, about where Polynesia was today, and that one threw out most of the moon's mass, and created a large enough hole that the continents slid far more quickly than anyone today realizes.
Just supposing... maybe playing with asteroids is a _bad_idea_.
Well, thank goodness that's all sci-fi, and there *aren't* kimberlites all around the Hudson, or in a giant arc that aligns well in Pangea.
Right?
Just suppose...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Don't forget leads to investments in research and development that give us idle little things like -- plastics, modern computers, lasers ... etc. Clearly, there is no value in space.
n/t
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
That actually improves their chances of success in my eyes. They're not getting money from duped investors (who tend to figure out what is going on eventually). They know this is likely to be a huge money pit with little short or even medium term return, but they know someone has to do it first to make it feasible for everybody else to follow in their footsteps.
Besides, if you're going to be filthy stinking rich, you might as well spend your money on projects like this instead of gaming the commodities market or buying outrageously expensive yachts or whatnot.
I read the internet for the articles.
Fortunately for science, running out of things to do, billionaires have decided to take up things to a new frontier... whether it be space x, blue origin or now this... maybe there is hope for the future of space exploration
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
I mentioned no such thing in my post, you bootlicking serf.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The guys with the money think they can cook the rice. It's their money and their rice, so lets wait and see what they make for dinner.
While money is fairly unlimited, resources are not. In particular, the fuel used to send a rocketship into space isn't ever coming back.
Water is by far the driving material resource. Metals are insignificant compared to water for human utilization. That Planetary Resources wants to track NEOs is also important. They have definitely done their homework.
When this news started to break last week it was unclear if they were just going after PGMs or had a more comprehensive strategy.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Exactly? Want to be remembered for something cool? Fund new space stuff. If the WG III carries the first people to Mars, people may finally forget about Clippy.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yeah, but for some people, it's more fun to play the casino on Wall St. or in Londontown.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Retrieval of Asteroidal Materials [1979]
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790024063_1979024063.pdf
BRIAN O'LEARY, MICHAEL 1. GAFFEY, DAVID 1. ROSS, and ROBERT SALKELD
Earlier scenarios for mass-driver retrieval of asteroidal materials have been 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. We conclude 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. We recommend 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.
insignia for this program? http://www.flickr.com/photos/45676693@N03/6959137824/in/set-72157629163524738/
mfwright@batnet.com
First, I believe they're talking about mining asteroids for construction materials and then selling those materials to, e.g. NASA, or other agencies, to use *in space*. They're not bringing it back to Earth. Interestingly I don't know if you can own, or even claim, an asteroid. So you go to all the work of moving it, or mining it and moving it to somewhere useful, and someone else comes along and appropriates it... I don't think you have legal recourse. All you can do is defend it by force, so ownership of the material is completely about your ability to defend it. (Barring legal changes here on Earth, of course.) So it would presumably be a better business plan to a) develop the technology for mining raw materials from asteroids and delivering them anywhere, and then b) demonstrating it on a small scale and then c) getting contracts to provide these services. You wouldn't want to be holding on to too much inventory in space, unless you really feel it's secure, or you can charge a premium for fast delivery because you already have it in stock.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
"If they're not doing it for profit it's strange that they set it up as a business."
There is the concept of limited liability as a business. i.e. if they screw up chances are people will sue the business, not them. the business goes under sure, but unless it is proved they themselves were incompetant they should get away with it.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Invest? Dunno. I might send a resume, though.
Much more profitable just to threaten to destroy the Earth unless everybody pays them. And they can do it again -- and again.
After all, it's not just the price of platinum that may plummet... it could be the platinum itself.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Even in the medium (10-20 years) term, it's got potential for profit. No guarantees, but if they just get lucky once, they could double the world's supply of platinum or something.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Well it is a better use of the money than running a hedge fund to manipulate markets with the effect of robbing your 401k - but it is useless, akin to burning a big pile of cash - of course they could have done something _useful_ with the money, other than just employing a lot of educated engineers to work on something that will never work, they could have employed skilled people to do something _useful_, like investing in medical research, where is that cancer cure anyway? how about understanding the molecular basis of aging, or new antibiotics or antivirals? sustainable agriculture or renewable energy? Nah! they are rich so they can invest the money in their childhood dream of being an astronaut and mining asteroids.
That obviously was just the warning shot.
The actual business plan is holding the earth ransom for one MILLION dollars!
One tiny asteroid contains more material than every satellite ever launched. Also, satellites generally don't contain water or similar useful materials for supporting human life... while they often contain various toxic fuels that would complicate reuse of the materials they do contain.
With oil, once you burn it it is gone.
With water, once you drink it you excrete it. A recycling system should be able to slow any loss to almost nothing.
And while the Moon does have a gravity well, the lunar lander successfully launched from it with humans and life support and a very small drive. Setting up a launch system that relied upon solar energy (lots of it there) should be cheap enough.
IT' is NOT too risky for NASA. IT's too politically risky for congress.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If flooding the market with a commodity lowers the price too much, then only bring enough to meet the annual industrial demand. Plus tell the Chinese to screw their monopoly on "Rare Earth" materials.
A lot of Gold, Silver and Platinum are sold for industrial users, silver goes into making solder and those hard plastic packages that are a pain to open.
Until recently the gold, silver and copper in electronics mostly went to landfill or was shipped to Africa where the heavy metals and chemicals in them are leaching into the water supply.
If I could mine all the asteroids and just park my inventory in LaGrange Point L1, then these become my reserves just as if I had them underground in a mine. Reserves are usually priced against the market value of the commodity, so my stock options become more valuable based on my reserves if I do not flood the market with more Platinum than industry can absorb.
Try re-asking your question what happens to Oil prices if they dump all their reserves on the market, and ask yourself why that doesn't happen.
This will be a net positive for the Solar industry if real industrial capacity moves into space.
Look what the did to Europe!
I drank what? -- Socrates
The reason people are asking "where's the profit" is because *operating at a loss cannot be sustained indefinitely.* If you cannot at least break even, your system *will* break down, and *will* fail as soon as you stop pouring money into it.
If you have a 500 liter tank with 300 liters of water in it, and you can add water at a rate of 1 liter per minute, but there's a drain at the bottom that removes water from the tank at a rate of 2 liters per minute, when will you overflow the tank?
That's because the scale of federal spending isn't nearly as massive as it was in the 80's or 30's-50's, and quantitative easing is the wrong approach.
They might send up the Space Cops.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I said the same thing in the latest poll but from a business standpoint it's still throwing money down a hole. If they're not doing it for profit it's strange that they set it up as a business.
Actually, it's not. They're setting it up as a business for what most likely will be an entire series of new inventions and innovations that will come out of the research and implementation of progressing to their goal. Had NASA retained all patents on everything associated with the space program that they developed or funded, NASA would have been running this type of show in the 80s.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Ha! You know James Cameron is going to figure out someway to link this project with Avatar 3!
Isn't the whole point of serious asteroid mining that we don't need to exploit Earth anymore?
And if some people leave Earth while it rots isn't that better than them staying here while it rots?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
And asteroids aren't scattered in a lot of different orbits, and don't require a lot of energy to reach? Get back to me when the simple Japanese Space Hotel of 1997 puts a single bolt in orbit before we start hallucinating ever bigger delusions.
Yes, much better no one dare dream big. Let's stay here on this rock with the investment bankers and high frequency traders who demonize teachers, firefighters and policemen for wanting a living wage and the pensions they were promised. Let's all industriously engage in bean-counting while neglecting the growing of more beans.
If nothing more, this Planetary Resources gig is at least a jobs bill for aerospace engineers. Hopefully it will inspire some youngsters to study hard and pursue careers in the sciences instead of non-productive market manipulation. Maybe it will engage some engineers in slowly expanding the human biosphere instead of building weapons to oppress and murder their fellow man.
nah, you're right, random jackass bloviating on the intarwebs, this is all just foolish moonbeams and useless spacenuttery. PHAH!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
of Weyland - Yutani corp?
Well the 10:30AM PDT webcast is coming up so no need to guess.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
It is a fabulously wonderful thing they are doing and it will profit themselves and the human race.
Maybe only these guys could do it.
I just had another thought for the naysayers of whom there are even some on slashdot.
Can you imagine a safer investment than strategically placed caches of air, water and refined platinum group metals, in a nonreflective wrapping, where only YOU know its exact location? And when YOU are the only people with an advanced swarm of lightweight explorer bots in space? Really any number of disasters, wars, political swings, bank imposions, plagues, tidal waves are as nothing to this. There is literally nothing that could wipe it out, even an asteroid could only bump into one of them. 100 years from now it will still be valuable, diamonds stored in a cold vault in the sky. Anyway its real value is in enabling manne missions and inhabitation of space and they will do that too.
Have they found a use for this terrestrially rare element that would justify such a venture?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
And that, BTW, is the awesomest thing ever. Fuck markets and fuck government subsidies: people want to do things. This is how progress really happens. Sometimes.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It is a long-term investment in basic research which will expand the capabilities of the human race. Without this research we'll have much less chance of building a space economy or of being able to deflect a future big asteroid. The amount of money they are talking about is less than one shuttle launch.
Engineering skills are not nearly as fungible as money - if we don't come up with some things for the aerospace guys to do, they're more likely to end up working at CostClub or Wall Depot than they are to become biologists or social workers or whatever it is you think is more important. That would be a pure waste.
You don't like it? Fine. Get cracking on what you think is important. But I think the guys at Planetary Research are way smarter and have more vision than people who think like you do.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
That's because the scale of federal spending isn't nearly as massive as it was in the 80's or 30's-50's...
LOLwut!?!?
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total
Can I buy some pot from you, Professor? (from "Animal House", for the young'uns)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Vision has a way of making huge financial windfalls. If you can get to the point where you've got robot miners mining, smelting and manufacturing (more robots among other things) in space, using abundant solar power and the asteroids as raw materials... Well, lets just say that opens up some horizons.Robotics are improving, as are computer vision, environment modelling and AI, or at least the processing power to run it is getting cheaper. There's still a ways to go, but these guys are capturing the first mover advantage. They're doing the first step towards what I described above. It may be that in taking the first step, the next step will present itself to them. At the very least, you probably want to consider that the value of the metal they mine will be more competitive with the prices of metals found on earth if you include the delivery fee to earth orbit or the moon for space ship/space station/moon base construction. It's probably cheaper to ship bulk quantities from the asteroid belt than it is from Houston, If you can build an asteroid belt branch office.
Spending money here on Earth and employing people to do something useless is throwing resources down a hole. It is destruction. That's what the old "broken window fallacy" is all about.
The important thing is that a small number of people (who fortunately have resources to risk) think this is not actually useless, even if it's not commercial viable. The "for the lulz" part is what matters. The lulz, not the jobs, is the real payoff. Best of all, while they may own the spaceship and the ores, the lulz are there for the taking, by everyone and no IP law can stop you.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
And why shouldn't they invest in their childhood dreams?
Do garbage dumps first. Everything we need is... well there!
While money is fairly unlimited, resources are not. In particular, the fuel used to send a rocketship into space isn't ever coming back.
The alternative is to burn up all that earth-bound fuel moving people and resources around on the earth for just a little longer until it's all gone anyway - and you have no way to get off the earth for more supplies. Because those resources are only limited ON EARTH.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Thank you, NASA, for spending the past thirty-odd years engaging in such banal, unambitious projects and thus setting the bar so low that an endeavor like this is now regarded as some sort of "laughable" pie-in-the-sky effort.
Liberty in your lifetime
Even if they are doing it for lulz, it employs people.
But is it productive to society as a whole? Does it encourage progress? Be careful how you state that or you might trip over the 'broken window' fallacy, even if inadvertently.
Life is not for the lazy.
They might send up the Space Cops.
no, it is the Space Patrol http://www.solarguard.com/sphome.htm
mfwright@batnet.com
That's because the scale of federal spending isn't nearly as massive as it was in the 80's or 30's-50's, and quantitative easing is the wrong approach.
That's bullshit
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's not the price of the platinum on current (or even future) market that is at issue here.
It's the price of mining that same amount of platinum, strapping it onto a rocket and shooting it up into space at escape velocity.
Getting stuff up there is what is expensive (ergo, profitable) at the moment.
Heck, they could be turning a hefty profit just by getting the step 2 working.
A water/oxygen/nitrogen supply depot means that every single spaceflight capable nation could simply refuel its satellites whenever it needs to.
Spy satellites which you can move around for cheap.
And that's just the orbital stuff.
Those depots would come in really handy for anyone building a base on the Moon or manning a mission to Mars and back.
No need to haul propellent - most of it is already up there. Get the rest from Mars.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, actually I am a physicist, I studied high energy physics and now I develop medical equipment - so excuse me when I don't give a fuck about how smart you think I am - in any event I have lots of use for good engineers - I am sure someone good a designing a space probe would be useful at doing a lot of things, we hire people with all kinds of backgrounds from nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, engineering etc... - do you have any idea how may different disciplines are needed to develop large pieces of medical infrastructure? tasks can vary from thermal calculations to antenna design, to developing structures to withstand high g forces - the point is good engineers are rare and will not end up working at costco - so wasting them on trying to reduce the price of platinum through an unworkable scheme seems stupid when compared to some of the other things they could be doing, akin to wasting math talent on derivatives trading or mortgage backed securities - this whole venture sounds like a few rich guys looking to fulfill their fantasies while trying to excuse the continued over-exploitation of the earth's resources
Yeah, because they're going to drive their asteroid through space with a giant V8 engine powered by gasoline.
I've no idea how they plan to move an asteroid, but even ignoring nuclear engines or gravity tugs there are about four million tons per second of free energy blasting out uselessly into space from the sun for anyone to collect.
The idea stands to reason: Asteroids being large bodies of rock, asteroids can be mined for their mineralogical contents. I expect that there could be a viable process for that made with a fully automated, robotic mining production line (with at least one manned repair station, perhaps in orbit around the earth.) I think it may be not so much a question of whether it's possible, then, but rather, a question of how it would be achieved (with economic viability, moreover).
Hmmm... just for brief science fiction, suppose that... ...back in the X=(Triassic|Jurassic|Cretaceous), when dinosaurs roamed the planet
There. Fixed that for you. In the name of humanity, please refrain from writing science-fiction. Otherwise, you'll get hired by Hollywood, bestowing upon us horrors like "A Sound of Thunder" or "2012".
No short term or medium term ROI for sure. And until commodity prices skyrocket on earth, not enough ROI to ship down to earth under any circumstances.
But the cost of shipping large masses from earth to moon is huge, so they can probably compete in the lunar market vs. resources shipped up from earth. Same for anything further out like Mars, etc. Of course, right now, there is no lunar market to speak of.
Another ROI could be acquisition of mineral rights in the asteroid belt. Buy them now and sell them high once there actually is a viable market. But to acquire the mineral rights they probably have to demonstrate at least a rudimentary capability to actually extract something from the minerals.
So bottom line is that an ROI is not impossible, but this is about as speculative as it gets. It's not just about a technological breakthrough revolutionizing an existing market, it's about multiple technological breakthroughs required to create a market that doesn't even exist yet.
We are the 198 proof..
I'm wondering if they'll be able to find a place on their station for an old tore-up space cadet who could benefit from microgravity. Hell, I'd push a broom for 'em. Tend bar. Whatever. Sign me up!
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
IT' is NOT too risky for NASA. IT's too politically risky for congress.
Its not politically risky, its just simply not possible. The timespans are out too long to fit into a single term of office. The moon happened for one reason, and one reason only -- a pissing match with the USSR. The space shuttle and ISS only survived 30 years for one reason -- it was strategically important to the US to keep a broad set of aerospace contractors in business and developing new technology, even if the waning years of the cold war wouldn't support them on their own.
The government has *never* been about space exploration for exploration's sake. Why do you think large-scale robotic exploration missions keep getting cut? If you take too much longer than a single term in office, you risk being cut, especially if you can't burn enough money fast enough to make it appear cheaper to finish than to stop. The missions that "work" these days are strategic to someone's congressional district, cheap, and fast to implement, so they avoid the congressional axe when their original supporter leaves office. (And even some, like the Webb, barely sustain on life support...)
Same reason we couldn't finish the SSC, why fusion research is faltering, and a hundred other examples.
Unless you're a very old billionare, or atleast getting old, and want to be sure you're forever remembered by the human race.
How much do you suppose that is worth to some people?
A few folks have alluded to Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" reg. lobbing asteroids at earth.
I think a more interesting/pertinent reference is to Delos Harriman in "The Man Who Sold the Moon"
We are the 198 proof..
... to see Mike Row's weightless expressions, when he does this Dirty Jobs episode.
Collector's Edition
hmmmm, if only somebody could discover a power source that could be tapped from anywhere in the solar system.
I agree though, it would be easier developing better access to such power sources before the age of cheap oil comes to a complete conclusion.
Of course, I expect peoples' views on fission will change rapidly once the oil's gone.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I guess nothing as long as you believe rich people should be able to spend their billions on whatever stupid ideas they come up with, it is just the rest of us that have to suffer from the massive misallocation of resources - just like everything else we do here
Liquid Oxygen and Hydrogen were burned by the shuttle engines and can be recycled over and over again by introducing sunlight into the perpetual motion device.
No need for precious hydrocarbons to be wasted on space.
Exactly. Think of the inventions that came out of a project like CERN. The big difference is you know they will be selling/licensing all these instead of giving them away.
if after we created the first asteroid mine tailings, that we notice the belt is already full of them.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You going to sell them from Europe? lol
I'll just paste in my post on the earlier thread:
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
History rarely celebrates those who funded the start of new industries, but instead those who use the money to create said new industries.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
That should make for an interesting pitch to investors: "Well, we probably won't make any money, but there's a lot of glory to be had. So who's ready to write me a check?"
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
this whole venture sounds like a few rich guys looking to fulfill their fantasies while trying to excuse the continued over-exploitation of the earth's resources
Well, that's pretty accurate. Personally, I would go with "Giant money pit for gullible investors that's never even going to get into orbit, much less to an asteroid."
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This sort of investment could probably give the greatest return on investment in the history of Mankind, it's just not going to break even for a very long time. The solar system is full of all kinds of resources and whoever has the infrastructure built to take advantage of it, quite simply wins.
It's amusing to hear people complain about the short term thinking on Wall Street, but be unwilling to consider the very thing that could end resource shortages only because some rich people want to invest in a very long term endeavor.
You know, I am not always in favor of people who are rich, because they can be real jerks getting there, but people who have had money and vision have made a lot of what we have now possible. They have the time and money to care about things that make the world better in the long run. The Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg could well have been an elitist asshole who hogged Mozart to himself in his lifetime, but now anyone can listen to his music because that prelate actually employed the composer and kept him fed in an age where even really good musicians were often no more than skilled tradesmen, as opposed to rock stars making millions. These guys may now be doing this for a vanity project, but if they do succeed, we all win.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
If we eff up this world we don't deserve to get off. At some point we have to to take a hard look in the mirror and fix ourselves rather than just spreading our misery across the galaxy.
They may even make some money as for some if they find a cure for Asteroids. Oh, wait a minute......
The ISS is only funded through 2020, though it may continue operations until 2028. I don't know offhand of any 'successors' to the ISS. Likely, it'll get defunded way before 2020, and allowed to deorbit shortly afterwards.
Hardly a 'permenant' presense in space, to my way of thinking. Anybody care to sanity check me on this?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It IS a business, and it could reap huge profits. It's just got high risk and a very long term break even. A bad investment for you and I, but for rich people who have nothing else to spend their money on, this is not a bad business plan. Just think about how rich a shareholder will be if this DOES work out. Although, honestly, it would be more like the founder's children or grandchildren who profits handsomely.
This is why you're just a poor physicist. Perhaps if you became a billionaire you could pursue projects you deem worthy. Titans of industry are the best group of individuals to pursue such a long term vision as space colonization. It's in their blood.
On the contrary, I'd imagine the vast majority of propellant used for chemical rockets ends up with sub-orbital velocity, so earth's atmosphere is exactly where it ends up. Hydrogen and other extremely light atoms that would likely escape the atmosphere in this case are unlikely to be significant portions of the spent fuel as they are generally reactants, not products.
Aluminum was very expensive a hundred years ago. Only the most wealthy could afford an Aluminum tea set. Now, a hundred years later, Aluminum cans cost pennies and are infinitely recyclable.
Good for them. That treaty has been one of the biggest legal barriers to space development ever created. It just has to go.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
That seems to be about how it works anyhow, so no net change? If they don't spend on mining 'roids, they'll spend on buying huge yachts, jets, etc. The resources will still be misallocated.
I see two problems that have yet to be surmounted to get government exploration/exploitation of space.
First off, it's easier to defund programs like NASA and use the cash for other 'more important' things, like buying votes in the next election. And there's always an election. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Second, there's that damned treaty that says everything outside the atmosphere can't be 'owned', and must be used for the 'betterment of mankind', which means, if some pygmie on the outskirts of the Congo doesn't directly benefit from it, it ain't allowed. Get rid of this treaty. Allow direct ownership of non-Terran objects. Keep it reasonable, say, only what you have direct control of. None of that nonsense of the Pope carving up the New World between Spain and Portugal.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I'm beginning to wonder if cancellation of the shuttle is turning out to be a good thing. How many bright minds came from NASA and are now involved in these ambitious projects? How many of them would still be at NASA for the job security if NASA still had a major orbital program?
... it is just the rest of us that have to suffer from the massive misallocation of resources...
The resources aren't yours and you don't have any right to them. Who are you to decide how they should be allocated or what is "misallocated"? Go make your own billions and then allocate / misallocate them however you see fit.
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
That's the lottery part. You buy the probe and hope that you find something.
And that the something you find is worth MORE than the cost of the probe AND the cost of mining it.
It's different because the investment to mine the asteroid is so HUGE in the first place.
So what is required is:
1. Near Earth
2. Moving slow enough to mine
3. Valuable enough to pay for the mining operation
4. Small enough to be maneuverable by weak engines
Hitting all four of those requirements seems pretty unlikely.
If you're planning on converting water into transportation fuel on the Moon then you're wasting a lot of resources.
Go with a rail gun (the Navy has one) and use cheap solar energy to power it.
Or use a laser to beam the energy to a remote vehicle and use cheap solar energy to power the laser.
There are lots of other ways.
I've no idea how they plan to move an asteroid
You should have stopped right there. Do a little math, why don't you? Ah no, calculus is HARD.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Wish I had mod points. I hear people talk about how we are wasting money on the ISS instead of spending that money on going to Mars. They should realize that if we really wanted to go to Mars, we'd need to be doing all sorts of research developing the tech we'd need to do so, which would require probably an order of magnitude larger budget going into the ISS or something similar first.
You are under the false impression, apparently, that engineers and scientists run NASA. NASA projects are managed by engineers and scientists, but it is run by bureaucrats which, like their brothers in the business world, must show measurable progress on a time scale which is shorter than is necessary for the public good. Without progress, there is no funding; without funding, there is no project. And failures are utterly forbidden.
I believe it was Golden who said that NASA needed to take more risks to advance science. We (the engineers) completed his sentence by adding, "but failure is still not acceptable." How many failures are you allowed in an eight-nines organization? Answer: not enough.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This, or something like it, is the only way that weâ(TM)ll ever have a chance of establishing a permanent presence in our Planetary vicinity. Itâ(TM)s not about getting the material back to Earth, itâ(TM)s about making it available on Orbit. And I get the point that you made about NASA being good at certain things with the logical next step of Private Industry picking up where they left off. As a long-range plan this has all the hallmarks of being do-able. Imagine. Larry Nivenâ(TM)s Belters for real.. Technical College degrees in Orbital Mechanics and Micro Gravity Mining Techniques. Very cool. Now all they need to do is pool the cash and buy the ISS, boost it into high orbit and Orbital Base One is born. Too bad Iâ(TM)ll be dead long before this all becomes reality, but at least it gives me hope for my Kids.
"If the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Donny Rumsfeld
I'm actually curious as to how big of a speck an asteroid at L1 would be and how many people would complain it upset their view of the moon. ;)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
You should have stopped right there. Do a little math, why don't you? Ah no, calculus is HARD.
Math has nothing to do with it, this is an engineering matter and there have been numerous perfectly viable methods studied for moving asteroids. I've no idea which they intend to pursue, but I've yet to see one which requires gasoline.
They're primarily talking about finding resources for use in space, not on earth. Sure water is easy to find on earth, but getting that water to the ISS costs a heck of a lot more.
I'm sorry, could you rephrase your nonsensical question in the form of a typical space nutter rebuttal?
"your mom" jokes are so passe.
behind every great fortune is a great crime - you think it makes sense for someone to make 10000 times more than almost everyone else - some shit runs a hedge fund an skims a few percent off of some pension funds and makes a billion and now he's a brilliant job creator and he gets to spend _his_ money his way - I miss a top tax rate of 70% then at least I will have some say in how the government misallocates resources, when you have an amount of money equivalent to 1000 lifetimes worth of skilled labor, it is not just your own fucking money anymore, your decisions effect thousands of people - and they do what with it, mine asteroids, build a fucking palace? - fuck this fucking aristocracy bullshit, go back to having a king - democracy cannot be sustained in the face of vast inequalities of wealth
I think a more interesting/pertinent reference is to Delos Harriman in "The Man Who Sold the Moon"
This. They're cash-flow positive already. I like their odds.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The only material that could possibly be profitable to bring back to Earth would be He3 from the Moon for use in fusion power.
Sure, once we actually develop fusion that can fuse He3. Which won't happen until some time after we get fusion power working at all. Just minor points, of course.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I approve of this message only so long as they name their consortium "Weyland-Yutani Corporation"...
I see you are forgetting the 12 tons of Aztec gold Hernan Cortes 'found' and shipped back to the Spanish crown.
It's a pain in the ass when they come out of nowhere while you're mining.
sudo eat my shorts
I really don't think you get it. This is not about the "lulz", and it's not about making money. They haven't entered into this blindly, and they know it's unlikely to turn a profit on any reasonable timescale, even "playing the long game".
Ironically, given your sig line, I think the best piece of text to read to try to understand why they are undertaking this venture is (with one line removed) the following:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Yeah, throwing money down a hole for the lulz. Just like space travel always was!
Seriously, are you so short-sighted that you cannot see how useful mining asteroids for water, air, and eventually precious minerals is? I'll give you a hint: absolutely, 100% vital to the continued development of the human race. This has nothing to do with doing something "for the lulz." It is all about advancing the state of the human race. Not for profit, but because humanity can and should expand. Asteroid mining is one step forwards in our expansion towards other planets, and if we intend to not go extinct, we need to do that. We may not need to now. We may not need to in a hundred years, but we will in a thousand, or a million, and we are only going to get there if we start at some point. Might as well do it now.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
Not to mention that no matter how far off, we have a finite amount of resources, nobody can dispute that. Even if something won't run out for 100 years, how will we make advances and learn how to mine in space if we don't start now? It's the whole mindset of people that think we can just ignore something for a 100 years and then magically have the technology in 100 years. You can't from A to C without going through B. We wouldn't have any of the amazing things we have today if it was for people who accepted "It can't be done" or people that couldn't see past the short term and see the long term goal.
Your reply is missing a noun and makes no sense, and yet you were still modded up, amazing.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
What great crime did Henry Ford commit to create his fortune? What great crime Mark Cuban commit? What great crime did Larry Page commit? They innovated. They took advantage of opportunities and the information that they acquired. They didn't do anything criminal to become wealthy.
From what i can tell you work on projects related to the medical field. Maybe you're doing it out of nobility (working for minimum wage?) or maybe that's just where you landed or maybe you're doing it because it's a living (probably a combination - not minimum wage, but less than you could get if you were elsewhere). I can see how you would feel that it is your work that isn't "getting a chance" because the money is being directed at some rich man's wetdream rather than towards your own desires. But this is just a feeling. It might be true (in this case it is), but you didn't earn the money. And worse, it might not even be totally true that you or your cause(s) won't benefit.
Just about any investment that is going to require a bunch of research and learning in order to provide a decent return is good for knowledge advancement. Shockingly, that advancement may be applicable to more than just "space mining". There could be industries that spin off of their work as well as products never before thought possible that come about through this type of exploration. Maybe even in your industry!
But let's not ignore the obvious problem with your wishing for the government to take the money so they could allocate it. Let's say it cost these guys $10 billion to get going. There is hope of them making many times that in years to come. At a 30% tax rate (forget the 70% you miss so much) the payback on that money pretty much comes in the first profitable year and then keeps on giving. Your desire to not have them spend this money now and to have the government do it for them instead would cost your cause untold amounts in lost tax revenues that could be passed along to your humanitarian cause. No doubt, I can think of a ton of worse ways to invest this money (allocate this money) and I don't even work for the government!
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
That's the lottery part. What if there aren't any asteroids that fit all four requirements?
That plan depends upon there being at least one (and that one having a payoff that funds the entire project) or more (with a total payoff that funds the entire project).
Kind of like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket at the shop you just drove to so you can pay off the car you just bought to drive to that shop.
Skip that.
If you can mine an asteroid then you can mine the Moon.
I expect that that they'd want to keep the full production process and the market, too, in space, for those volatile materials as much as for the ores and minerals.
Of course, there'd have to be a market in space for those raw materials, in order for it to be a profitable enterprise.
It would seem to introduce many questions and opportunities for new technology and new business development, overall. I suspect that the NewSpace industry - if supported in the endeavor, popularly/culturally as well as economically - may undergo some growth, in response to and in the wake of such proposals as that noted, above, from Planetary Resources.
It's all about style over substance. Why do you think Apple's doing so ell, selling half-assed stuff for twice what real tech costs, to clueless losers who can't even be bothered to check their slash dot posts for iPad fark before posting?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Well, Ernest Shackleton got enough funding using that model, and also plenty of volunteers..
It's actually a basic physics matter. F=ma hasn't changed. When m = several million tonnes of rock, you are going to need a F of a lot of force to start it moving, and another F of a lot of force to stop it moving. This is while completely ignoring the energy required to a) get all your magic propulsion equipment out there in the first place and b) the astronomical distances involved meaning you're going to need to accelerate/decelerate for quite a while if you want to reach earth this millenium. 10 miles an hour just ain't going to cut it.
Maybe you are just desperate to believe in the dream. Hell we can't even move cars reliably with solar power, I think it's wishful thinking to think about moving asteroids with them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Your country, and your children's future, is being destroyed by mass immigration of non-whites."
No. I'm not from Tibet.
I think you missed the parts where they have several other lines of business beyond precious metals. Namely marketing the hardware they are developing (the telescopes for example) and volatiles harvested from asteroids (which are a lot easier to process then ore). Go back and look, they are not idiots, there is a plan for medium term ROI.
I'm pretty certain that 2 of those can be mined fairly easily down here on Earth, lol. By the way, I would find a self sustaining, non-connected to the surface, geothermal powered drilling robot that would retrieve basketball-sized diamonds from miles below the Earth's crust if they're doing this for a profit. That seems a lot safer and easier.
What you say is true. Sending minerals back to earth will never work out economically. But what if you could take your ore and work it right there on the asteroid? How much would the US or China or Russia pay for steel girders and plates delivered in LEO?
I understand your complaint. You and others, versed far more in orbital mechanics, assure the rest of us fools that, based on your admittedly superior knowledge and training, that what you propose is safe.
However, human history in the technological age has proven, time and time again, that reassurances of safety and no ill effects from domain experts is fraught with danger. Let's just run down through the list of things proclaimed to be safe, that we the luddites were wrong...
a) Coal / Heavy Metals - 1850s - .. everyone said coal was great.. built out a huge national infrastructure based on the use of coal and heavy metals, and woops, it turns out, that coal is not so cool, and heavy metals are good for you.
b) Ships / Tranes / Airplanes - Titanic - "practically unsinkable", sunk, Ford Trimotors all the way to the 747, all have crashed. A recent Airbus crash, with foolproof avionics, was partially caused by the pilot and copilot not having feedback to each other on their control yokes, like the way a Boeing plane does. Am waiting for the "superbly tested" wings of the 787 to fail in some unusual condition, am waiting for an A380 to go down in flames with a Titanic sized fatality list, has already watched two shuttles fail. It's gonna happen.
c) The Power of the Atom - I'm pro nuclear power, but pronouncements of public safety and "we've thought of everything"... are just the proof that, well, when self proclaimed smart people say they thought of everything, they missed something. There will be another accident.
d) Amphetimines - hey, doctors of the 1950s... let's dole these out.. perfectly safe. what could go wrong. Bonus points for Thalidomide.
e) DDT. perfectly safe, great against mosquitos and pests. Sorry about the birds, guess we didn't think of that.
f) Fossil Fuels. Global warming... no really, we didn't think of that.
g) Windmills. Perfectly safe. What could go wrong. Sorry about all the dead birds? God knows what other ill effects from land use.
h) FDA diet recommendations circa 1970s. Hey everybody, you should eat lots of bread and cheese. Four food groups! Oh wait, we were wrong. Sorry, cholesterol, who would have thought of that.
i) Cell phones, em radiation, birth control, psychiatric drugs, cholesterol drugs... all of which are too relatively new to know the effects of...except, cell phones cause as many car accidents as duis in some states, birth control might alter women's biochemistry to change their preferences in men and might have ripple environmental effects, cholesterol drugs might not be so great after all... and god knows what else will go wrong with other technologies.
The bottom line is, there's never been a roll out of some new thing in the last 150 years that has not been screwed up in some unforseen way. Mathematically, anyone with a degree of computer science, and this is a computer people kinda board, knows that complexity problems with loads of variables are essentially unsolvable, and yet there people who say "they have thought of everything"... when we already know just based on how information works, that no one can.
So yes, its not anti-technology at all, its anti-let's take a big frigging risk and abolish any common sense that says pushing a dinosaur killer closer to earth might be a bad fricking idea by deluding ourselves into pretending we know all the variables involved, when we can't. If we are going to do asteroid mining, why not mine and process the ore on site, and bring the concentrated stuff back to earth.
This is my sig.
Rough approximation, everything leaning towards higher visibility: Say L1 is halfway to the moon, and that the asteroid is all ice. A sphere weighing 1000 tons is 20 m in diameter, so would obscure half a football field's worth of the moon's surface. At 10 000 tons, 40-something m in diameter, it still obscures less than a whole football field. AT 1 M tons, 200m in diameter, it hides a dragstrip on the moon. (Which is probably just as well; low gravity - low friction - low acceleration, and the spectators can't hear the engines anyway...) So you would need a serious telescope.
And here it is. You're just a sad little fascist who wants to tell other people what to do. Thank goodness you don't have any power, you'd wind up hurting people.
The sad thing is that people like this are in political power at the moment, and elected a President who believes this kind of tripe (at least in the USA).
The twin evils of democracy are bread and circuses. Bread has been thrown around for quite some time (just look at the Food Stamp program and note how many people currently qualify for that kind of federal assistance) and the circus is simply the United States Congress. As long as these people are fat, dumb, and happy they don't realize there is a greater universe about us that could make not only their country but the rest of humanity much better off in the future. Instead they would love to be in the penthouse apartment of an outhouse, just because the shit doesn't roll down on them but instead on somebody else. A smart person would come up with an alternative to the outhouse and introduce the idea of plumbing so it wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
They announced at the press conference that they are already profit positive with existing contracts. In other words, if all they do is simply build these satellites, Planetary Resources is already going to be earning money for these guys. They are paying taxes, employing people, and returning money to the investors in the form of increased equity even as I write this.
How short of a period of time do you need than the fact they were making a profit yesterday?
The question right now is mainly what additional ventures do they want to get into and how quickly are they going to expand as a company? The investors are happy with the current progress of the company, and being in a position of a positive cash flow allows them to take some very interesting risks that sometimes start-up companies can't get into.
That some companies take a portion of their profit and send it into "good causes" and charities, having a company dedicated to expanding the reach of humanity throughout the Solar System sounds like a wonderful charity to me. It is also refreshing to see a company be serious about investing into serious R&D rather than merely buying out other companies to capture their technology.
What's more, as a business owner, you start to think automatically in terms of limiting liability. If you go by the general rule that Profit=Investment*Risk, opening yourself up to unlimited personal liability sets your investment to your personal net worth, so the risk would need to be significantly lower for the same amount of profit for the investment to be worthwhile.
(Pedants can poke holes in this, but the general idea is sound. Profit:risk ratios drive investment decisions.)
Agreed, we do need to clear LEO-space --- but I just can't see the economic incentive of recycling as a major component of that effort. Getting an asteroid in orbit and a foundry going first would help that along though.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Not to mention that one of their more immediate goals (asteroid mining is their endgame, but they have more achievable goals set for the nearer term) is to have a bunch of orbiting telescopes to find and track asteroids. Yes, the intent for this will be to find asteroids that could later be mined, but I don't see why this also couldn't be used as an Asteroid Collision Early Warning system. The more telescopes looking for asteroids, the more likely we are to spot one headed for Earth early, and the more likely we are to be able to stop/minimize the damage it does.
As someone else said above, this beats the billionaires deciding to spend their money by buying a sports team.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Re: Giving democracy a bad name... Having lived in Taiwan for 20 years, believe me, I have my problems with China. But I have to admit, they are going balls-out on the clean-tech front, putting my home country (USA) to shame. They subsidize their solar PV industry so much that they have raised the bar worldwide on price (this is the real reason Solyndra went under, their business model depended on PV cells costing $4/w, but China drove the price down to $1.25/w). They are actively working on molten-salt Thorium fuel nuclear power. They are moving aggressively on electric vehicle adoption. Etc., etc....
By comparison, the US gov't is deadlocked over transferring $4B/yr in subsidies from oil companies (who manifestly don't need them anymore) to R&D in clean energy. But unfortunately our "democracy" has devolved into a sham, with legislation sold to the highest bidder. As just one example, during the healthcare debate a couple of years ago, an overwhelming majority (70-plus percent) favored a "public option" (including 80% of Democrats and around 55% of Republicans), but it was never seriously considered.
Democracy is fantastic when it works, but not so much when it's broken.
Meanwhile, the Chinese gov't is run by technocrats. Our gov't is probably 3/4's lawyers and poli-sci grads; theirs is 3/4's engineers. Obviously they have their share of corruption too, but somehow they have crept ahead of us in some important areas.
Ironically, the USA is boosted by the fruits of its excess... allowing a handful of people to get filthy rich has produced some truly forward-thinking do-gooders like these Planetary Resources guys, Elon Musk, etc.. OTOH, we also have the likes of David Koch to deal with... you win some, you lose some...
Personally, I think the most important thing for the USA right now is to end corporate personhood.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This makes an atheist say "Amen."
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Almost every sci-fi novel I've read in the last 20 years is a story about the exploits of some form/aspect of "private enterprise" (unless it's an "escape the end of the world story - like they could save us). While sci-fi isn't real life, tax dollars aren't going to get us out there. Three important points: 1.) There are bound to be spin-offs in materials/engineering/computing/ during the development 2.) Going to space requires money and these people some they're willing to risk. 3.) NASA is ripe for a hostile takeover. Good Luck to 'em!
I used to support this sort of thing wholeheartedly, but then one niggling detail stuck its head up and now I'm not so sure.
What happens to the dust?
It's one thing to shatter a rock to bits out in the asteroid belt and leave a million microscopic orbiting bodies in the plane of the ecliptic. We could always just bank shot around the asteroid belt to avoid the worst. It's another to have a million microscopic orbiting bodies around earth. People are already biting their nails about the number of satellite fragments we already have.
Have they figured out how to avoid this, or will this be another industry that pollutes first and apologizes later (if at all)?
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.