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New Asteroid Mining Company Emerges
coondoggie writes "A new company intends by 2015 to send a fleet of tiny satellites to mine passing asteroids for high-value metals. Deep Space Industries Inc.'s asteroid mining proposal begins in 2015, when the company plans to send out a squadron of 55lb cubesats, called Fireflies, that will explore near-Earth space for two to six months looking for target asteroids. The company's CEO said, 'Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development. More than 900 new asteroids that pass near Earth are discovered every year. They can be like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century — a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.'"
if after they made their own mine tailings, they noticed that there were already mine tailings there.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I bet you a hundred dollarpounds they get bought out by the Jupiter Mining Corporation
Worst. Signature. Ever.
How much do you know about Asteroid Mining? Not much. And neither do these guys, because nobody has tried it before and there are still more unknowns than knowns. What I do know is that 2015, two years from now, is a totally and completely unrealistic goal. They would have to have surveys of potential candidates already done, launch windows nailed down, hardware completed and ready to go, support staff trained and ready, mineral recovery solution built, etc... You would be hard pressed to open a mine on Earth in just two years time, and Earth mining doesn't have astronomical launch costs. A 2015 timeline tells me that these guys are either insane or a scam.
I read the internet for the articles.
Fireflies (the exploratory satellites), but then I remembered if there were any danger of a collision, they could simply make the jump to hyperspace. Seems to work consistently well if I remember right...
And now this... coincidence?
The cubesats are to explore, not mine. First you need to find likely targets. If you bothered reading the article you'd see they will be using slightly larger vehicles to bring back small payloads.
In space, you don't have to be as strong as you do on Earth to lift heavy things.
Nothing. If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot), then you will discover that the first satelites are scouts. In 2016, they want to launch larger satellites to retrieve small samples. Ultimately, they want to build a 3-D printer in space, as well as create rocket fuel for space gas stations. As far as I could tell, the funding for this endeavor is a bit of a question mark.
This is what will they grow into
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Then in 2016, Deep Space said it will begin launching 70-lb DragonFlies for round-trip visits that bring back samples. The DragonFly expeditions will take two to four years, depending on the target, and will return 60 to 150 lbs of asteroid materiel.
This is a violation of International treaties and amounts to conspiracy to commit theft.
This is a federal crime under US law.
They're a corporation. You must not live in the U.S. or you'd know that laws don't apply to corporations unless they fail to pay their brib^H^H^H^H Freedom & Democracy Support Fees.
> the funding for this endeavor is a bit of a question mark
Unless and until they discover an asteroid, in a favorable orbit, that has large deposits of rhodium, or palladium, or platinum, or gold. (Or even copper.)
That will bring in the speculative investors.
Once they demonstrate that they can bring these minerals back to earth at a profit, then they will have screaming investors climbing over one another to put up money for it.
I was arguing years ago that we ought to be doing this. I'm TIRED of the whiny, "only one Earth and we're running out of resources" bullcrap. If they can make this work -- and I give them an even 50/50 chance -- it'll be as revolutionary as the invention of the wheel.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
NAMCO? :)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
It's going to work out fine until Deep Space Industries starts forming an Alliance.
Then Mal is going to flip the fuck out.
Aren't minerals concentrated by water moving through rocks? Doesn't that mean there won't be minerals concentrated in space debris?
I really dislike the fact that we can't undo an unintentional mod here =-(
they're following a similar roadmap to Planetary Resources, but skipping the harvest-volatiles phase?
Also cool was this blurb near the end of the article on zero-g 3D Printing
Deep Space's construction activities will be aided by a patent-pending 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, officials said. "The MicroGravity Foundry is the first 3D printer that creates high-density, high-strength metal components even in zero gravity," company co-founder and MicroGravity Foundry inventor Stephen Covey said in a statement. "Other metal 3D printers sinter powdered metal, which requires a gravity field and leaves a porous structure, or they use low-melting point metals with less strength."
I'm fairly certain that, in microgravity, with my feet strapped down, I could take a 5000 kilogram dumbell sitting at my feet with my hands and lift it up over my head. I couldn't do it very quickly, due to inertia, and I would have to start working against my initial movements at about the halfway mark to stop it from yanking itself out of my hands (or yanking off my hands) at full extension.
I want to work for this company as their Material Defender. You know, just in case those robotic satellites malfunction and turn hostile.
Try to think about this solution with a blank slate view for a moment. Don't assign qualitative values as to whether an approach is "good" or not.
Mining for resources ultimately comes down to (resources gained)/(labor + energy + fixed costs + materials).
There are very huge amounts of resources available deeper in the earth's crusts, in the oceans, in the wilds of undeveloped countries, etc. All of them require somewhat more of one of the variables in that equation than mines that are open today.
Consider the case of space mining. Labor requirements : enormous, because each piece of space-rated hardware must be assembled by hand because space stuff tends to use one-off designs and of the best possible quality. Energy : enormous. You have to provide incredible amounts of energy to get asteroids to a recovery location near the Earth. Fixed costs : enormous : you have to develop a bunch of new technology for this to even be possible. And materials : enormously expensive because the rocket equation demands that you throw away most of your spacecraft to even reach low earth orbit.
Versus opening a new mine somewhere on earth, or mining a little bit deeper.
Now, there is one advantage to space mining : no one has legal claims that can be enforced on any of those celestial bodies. In the future, when we have radically more advanced technology, it might be cheaper to send self-replicating robots out somewhere than to try to unleash those same robots onto land on earth that someone is willing to fight over. We don't have that kind of technology, yet, and are many decades from developing it.
One other nasty fact : high performance rocket engines need several nuclear weapons worth of highly enriched uranium as fuel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
If you actually wanted to push a mountain of metals to near the earth in a reasonable amount of time, you'll want a very high performance engine. However, such an engine not only has weapons proliferation risks, once you get the asteroid under power you've got a weapon in itself.
Great now I want to dig out and play Homeworld again. Send out the miners to the local asteroid field and commence harvesting, cue the ethereal music. Forget building capital ships, building anything from material harvested from an asteroid would be pretty cool (except kinetic weapons).
I think it's more geared as a proof of concept. Amount of investment required to make this concept profitable is unjustified. It makes much better business-sense to keep torching the earth than spending billions to play Where's Waldo in space.
A asteroid mining kit you get a hard hat,pick axe,shovel and plus are exclusive hint book, all for 19.99 plus free shipping
How to evaluate a space related venture...
Step 1: Evaluate how much of the projected funding requirements they have actually secured and have banked
Step 2: For those from step 1 who have all the funding already in hand, evaluate where they will get the additional funding they didn't project that they'd need, that they'll actually end up needing. Disregard the rest.
Step 3: For those from step 2 who have a very plausible source of additional funds, then begin to consider their business plan, the TRL of the tech they plan to use, and the audacity/coolness factor of their vision. Don't let those things distract you prior to steps 1 & 2
If you don't clearly see that the money angle is nailed down, no matter how great the idea sounds, they aren't worth treating as more than SciFi. The reason companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Stratolauncher, Sierra Nevada, Planetary Resources, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and a small number of others who seem to be incrementally bootstrapping their way up via less exciting but business saavy tactics deserve watching and being taken seriously, is that they all have a pretty clear source of money fueling what they are doing.
A venture like the one in this article might be worth watching, but we'll only know that when they release some info that indicates the funding picture is overwhelmingly plausible. I think I am not alone when I say I was disappointed with the recent Golden Spike announcement because they didn't announce the most critical part...that they had much of the funding in place.
Tragedy has a much better grasp of "strength" than you seem to have. You must overcome inertia in space, but not gravity or friction. Hence, much less strength is required to move an object. Picking up a quarter ton on the moon is about as easy as lifting a hundred pounds on earth. With even smaller microgravities, you might pick up two or three tons. But, inertia might get you killed, unless you're experienced in those microgravities. Pick up a ton, without planning how you're going to stop that mass moving, and it may very well crash through your sunroof, inducing explosive decompression in all the occupants of your habitat.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
50/50 chance? You're talking about the original investors and original staff, I take it.
Given that they are almost as likely to fail as they are to succeed, what happens when they go under? Someone buys up their assets, right? They will have left some valuable tools up there, and someone will want to claim them, maybe for pennies on the dollar. That someone will have a somewhat different plant, and succeed where the first team failed. Or, something like that.
Bottom line, for me, is that they are accumulating experience and knowledge in the attempt. We, mankind, will build on that, and eventually succeed.
Everything needed for exploration and colonization is already out there. All we need do is figure out how to use them. Success depends only on our initiative.
Two thumbs up for initiative!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
How this could possibly be cost effective? I mean even in foreseeable future, the cost would be so much more than what ever they could gather.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Also, why is it a violation of international treaties to mine asteroids (if it is at all)? What morons would make a treaty that says 'nobody can mine asteroids'?
I mean if it's not actively mining an asteroid, is it still an asteroid mining satellite?
Is a car door really a car door if it has no involvement in the drive train? Mining is more than extraction.
An asteroid may have precious substances, but we could spend more resources by far trying to tap them. Does that seem right to you?
Yep. Because like most technological developments, it's an initial investment. Getting the first kilo of iron ore from a satellite will cost billions of dollars. Getting the next 5 million tonnes down will cost a fraction.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
For starters, they do not own those asteroids. Who are they to take what isn't theirs?
Mining asteroids also risks changing their trajectory, which may endanger the Earth or other stellar bodies.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
> the funding for this endeavor is a bit of a question mark
Unless and until they discover an asteroid, in a favorable orbit, that has large deposits of rhodium, or palladium, or platinum, or gold. (Or even copper.)
That will bring in the speculative investors.
Once they demonstrate that they can bring these minerals back to earth at a profit, then they will have screaming investors climbing over one another to put up money for it.
I was arguing years ago that we ought to be doing this. I'm TIRED of the whiny, "only one Earth and we're running out of resources" bullcrap. If they can make this work -- and I give them an even 50/50 chance -- it'll be as revolutionary as the invention of the wheel.
If it was gold the 'speculators' would be paying you a fuckton of cash just to forget you ever saw it and destroy all record of it. Or, failing that, pay very expensive hit men to get rid of the asteroid prospectors.
There could be enough gold come from asteroid mining to completely destroy its value. That would be hilarious and I'd love to see it happen, but the wealth of the gold cartels is, well, astronomical and they'd like to keep it that way.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I am being serious here: what rights do they have to those minerals if by some miracle this actually 'gets off the ground'? Is international law really Finders Keepers? Hard to believe.
Regardless, I could see the very real scenario of them being underwritten by someone with very deep pockets (ahem-China-ahem) in exchange for exclusive use of the minerals.
> 50/50 chance
I personally think (hope) the odds are better than that. It depends on how smart they are. (And by "they," I include Planetary Resources in that.) What's really interesting about their proposal is the use of small, inexpensive satellites and telescopes to do the initial searches.
Some skeptics point out that NASA will spend about a billion dollars just to bring a couple of ounces back to Earth. They conclude that this isn't even worth the try. My answer would be, first, well, NASA. The government. $400 hammers and toilet seats. You know. Second, for all of it's flaws, private enterprise, being profit-driven, has every incentive to find ways to do it cost-effectively. The government doesn't and never has.
> Bottom line, for me, is that they are accumulating experience and knowledge in the attempt
Bingo! You've got it. Even if these attempts fail, someone else will jump in and try a different angle.
Like I said: my intense irritation is with those who whine that we just need to make do with less, and return to a more pastoral lifestyle. Don't even bother to try. At least these people are trying. I give them two snaps for that.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
> There could be enough gold come from asteroid mining to completely destroy its value.
Of *ALL* key minerals, not just gold.
Recommended reading: "The Man Who Sold The Moon" by Robert Heinlein. Harriman(sp?) wasn't even interested in profits. He just wanted to go to the moon.
Your point about cartels is well-noted. For that matter, I've read that there are already enough diamonds on this planet to give everyone at least 1 carat each. I have no idea how accurate that figure is, but hey; diamonds are simply crystalline CARBON. One of the most common elements in the universe. The price is kept artificially high by a ... cartel. (The Debeers group.)
But I think it's inevitable. We can decide that our generation will colonize the asteroids, or leave it to the distant future when our great-grandkids have no choice but to do so, and under much greater economic difficulty. We're running out of copper and other important metals. Gold isn't just for jewelry anymore, it has very important industrial uses.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Nobody owns fish on the high seas (outside the 200 mile EEZ), but it's still legal to catch them - the taking of fish (or minerals) doesn't require a claim of sovereignty.
How hard would it be to nudge an asteroid toward Earth, then control its descent to the surface, in a non-wiping-out-a-major-city sort of fashion? It would probably be a lot cheaper to bring an asteroid to Earth first and then mine it, rather than send robots up to do it.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Just what we need, Rogue Drones.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I guess this has the potential to go over cloud storage.
I don't understand how asteroid mining could be profitable with current technology. What is the delta-V budget for sending engines+fuel+mining equipment to a near-earth asteroid and returning it to earth? I'd imagine the per-kg cost exceeds the value of whatever you could possibly return, even if you found an asteroid made of solid gold and all you had to do was de-orbit it.
Gold = $50k/kg
Delta-IV Heavy = 9000 kg to Earth escape velocity @ $250 million = $28k/kg
If the delta-V requirement to bring a NEO back to earth from earth escape is ~4 km/s, and your rocket was say a RL10 with 100 kN @ 450 Isp, than the final rocket mass m1=mo*e^(-deltav/Isp*g0) would only be ~3600 kg. Assuming the engine + tankage weighs around 1000 kg, we're talking maybe 2600 kg payload return. Again at $250 million launch cost that is $96k/kg, almost double that of pure gold. And it's not like there are actual pure gold asteroids just floating around either. We're looking at a factor of 5-10 or even worse cost difference here.
SCV ready to go sir!
Nope. You could *move* the dumbell sure, but the motion would not be lifting because lifting implies "moving upwards", i.e. working against gravity (or pseudo-gravity). As such it's an irrelevant term in a free-fall environment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It would be upwards relative to my personal notion of up. Anyway, I said "microgravity" not zero gravity. For the sake of argument, my feet are strapped to a small asteroid, with 1/1000th the surface gravity of Earth. Or, I'm on a space station, but I'm at one of the far ends, with 90% of the mass of the space station in the direction of my feet. Or there's a slight spin to the space station. Or who cares. The point is that the statement "In space (you probably meant "in orbit") you have to be exactly as strong as on Earth to lift things" isn't correct. Even if your objection holds, it still doesn't make it correct, because that poster said "lift" as well.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I haven't run in to many people who whine about a shortage of the sort of resources we could mine - we have plenty of most resources if they're recycled when no longer used, and for a lot of it recycling is actually more cost-effective than mining. The things we have to seriously consider shortages of :
Clean water - sure we can make this if there's dirty water available, but it's expensive to do so.
Arable cropland - maybe GM crops can drastically increase yields in a safe manner (I remain unconvinced, at least by current approaches), but there's still the emerging problem that overworked land appears to produces lower-nutrient food as the trace minerals are stripped from the soil.
Environmental impact - our species stands upon a vast foundation of planetary ecology, which is beginning to crumble beneath the weight of our reckless impact. If it collapses, we go with it, and it appears that giving it a chance to heal will likely require leaving large areas essentially untouched to provide safe-havens in which a healthy ecosystem can thrive and spread to the surrounding areas.
Energy - we won the lottery when we unlocked the energy potential of fossil fuels, but we're coming to realize they carry a potentially extreme long-term cost. There are lots of other options, but they all still have major technological hurdles standing in the way of widespread adoption.
Notably *none* of these things can be mined or brought in from off-planet in meaningful quantities (okay, actually solar power could be), and all of them put fairly hard limits on sustainable population size, with arable land and environmental conservation probably being long-term limits. If for example we unlock low radiation fusion in the next couple decades we'll have plenty of cheap energy, and with unlimited energy clean water is cheap to produce.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I am sure millions of people will happily throw money into this without any hope of return or success.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Do not try this at home, if your home is an orbiting space station. Given the very slow scale of this, by applying "upwards" force on the dumbell you'll be shifting its orbit realative to yours, and it will drift "sideways" as much as "up", which could get awkard with your feet strapped down and all. (If you move stuff very fast relative to your orbital period, you don't much notice this effect, but moving a 5-ton weight won't be fast.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It costs more to safely de-orbit platinum than it's worth. Mining anything in orbit for use on Earth just isn't in the cards. The sane business plan is to create an orbiting refueling point, since fuel is so very expensive to lift into orbit, and CHON asteroids are common.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Thanks for sticking up for me, by the way. I didn't, in fact, mean "in orbit" as the AC suggested I meant (thereby making me look like a bit of an idiot), I was talking about the same thing that you were trying to explain.
I'm not thrilled with the idea of someone bringing 5 million tonnes of iron ore down from orbit onto my head. What could go wrong?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
...the fact that her father was a stellar cartographer, and in 2340, he conducted a full spectrum mineralogical analysis of the Vlugta asteroids. He never had the means to follow up on what he found. Alsia's plan was to carry out her father's dream.
Wow has /. gone down hill, this article is a day old and I don't see one comment about ST:DS9 Rivals episode.
Link, to a website I googled to get the summary, couldn't find this mining reference on the Wikipedia page for the episode, was really a sub-plot, I can't vouch for this site, but seems to have the full details of the show.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Rivals_(episode)
Those who can, do.
I guess you're currently hiding under your desk, desperately worried that a jumbo jet's about to land on your forehead.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You were right about the mass a 55 lb sat could bring back, of course. There's no food reason a smaller device couldn't bring back many times its own mass. Realistically these cubesats won't, of course and the devices that follow them almost certainly won't be able to bring back much for a while. But there's nothing in principle that stops them from being able to move around very large masses in low gravity. Even here on Earth, the principle is easily observed with relatively small tugs moving around very large boats.
Why yes, I am. How did you know? Oh shit I have a TrendNet Webcam, don't I?!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Finally someone found a practical use for those old Cobalt servers.
They will get more from mining uranus than what they will get from these other endeavors.
It wouldn't need to be that slow. 5000 kilograms is a lot more than I would be able to lift on Earth, but it's not some unimaginable amount. I can easily deadlift 50 kilograms in Earth gravity to a height of 1 meter without that much strain and let's call full extension of my arms 2 meters (can't actually be bothered to measure it right now). So, I can provide at least 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration to 50 kilograms, which means that I can provide at least .098 m/s^2 to 5000 kilograms and reach 1 meter in about 5 seconds, then reverse my pull and reach full extension after about 10. I would probably be a lot more careful about it in an actual orbital facility and go more slowly, but I don't think the sideways force would be as bad as you're worried about. There shouldn't be any reason that I shouldn't be able to counteract it. It would obviously be transmitted through my strapped down feet though.
So they don't own those asteroids? Who does, a bunch of ethically-bankrupt politicians claiming to "represent" the people of Earth? Great job they're not doing so far. I say if somebody has the guts to get out there and bring back the wealth of the void instead of open-cut mining our biosphere like the rest of the leeches, go for it.
The ability to mine asteroids also means the ability to avert that same risk. Be a shame if there's already an an asteroid out there on a collision trajectory with Earth and we go extinct because a bunch of whingers made sure we didn't have any spacecraft out there with the ability to do something about it.
You seem to have forgotten this is slashdot where people masturbate over the comments rather than reading the articles...... (I'm not immune to that - unf unf unf.....)
It might not be as slow as you think. I've pushed a 35 ton boat around by hand rather easily on the water and I imagine in microgravity the behavior of moving massive objects like that would be similar. HOWEVER the strapping down would be rather unsafe as that kind of weight would do your body a world of hurt if you got hung up on it with your feet strapped down - or at least you'd end up a LOT taller :) Another thing to keep in mind is any massive object coming back at you - don't let yourself get pinned. Not only could that 35 ton boat have pretty much torn me apart pulling it would have crushed me to death if it pushed me against a solid object.