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Asteroid Resources Could Make Science Fiction Dreams and Nightmares a Reality
MarkWhittington writes "With two private companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, proposing to set up asteroid mining, the prospect of accessing limitless wealth beyond the Earth has caused a bit of media speculation about what that could mean. The question arises, could asteroid resources be used to create the greatest dreams — and perhaps the worst nightmares — of science fiction?"
Something might happen... or not.
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere in this horribly written "article".
Now, I still think the idea of mining an asteroid is - well a long time off.
But, the reason for doing so would be that the incentive to mine an asteroid is insanely high - for instance, supplies on earth run low and the price is through the roof, many factors of what it is today.
Then you have the economic incentive to build a space ship and dig for that substance on another planet.
Much like deep sea drilling for oil. If oil is $5 a barrel, there isn't much incentive to build massive platforms to drill. At $100 a barrel, the incentive is there. Investment seeks the highest rates of returns.
If you found an asteroid that could provide every human 1000 pounds of platinum and could easily mine it - platinum isn't going to stick to $1000+ an oz, it would be insanely cheap.
Wealth based on what? Real estate, or other things that are both durable and widely used? Nope. Precious metals. But, what good is gold or platinum if everyone has a brick or two of it lying around? Some things will become more affordable (meaning the wealth of everyone will go up) because once-precious metals will find their way into products in ways that actually improve them, but overall not much will change even if we manage to start bringing home tons and tons of some metal that is only valued because it's rare.
The solar system is nothing like Earth.
For one thing, it's not a planet.
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere
I wonder if that's because the target audience might confuse it with a brand of vacuum cleaner.
... but I've duly made a mental note to never accept a mission to fix the communication gear on one of their mining ships after it suddenly stops all transmissions with Earth... I've already got enough "training" on that subject to know that things never turn out well.
I seriously doubt even a solid gold asteroid would justify the costs to go into space, mine it, and return said gold to earth
Nobody is talking about returning products to Earth - the whole problem is that it's too expensive to get stuff off of Earth. DSI is currently pursuing the model of 1) recovering water from asteroids and using that to refuel satellites that are already in orbit (revenue stream) and 2) mining nickel from asteroids to use in an 3D printer in space to build space infrastructure.
And since we don't even have the technology to move an asteroid yet (just some "Well it's possible" bullshit speculation)
We understand Newtonian physics, and we have ion engines deployed in space on deep space probes and on satellites for station keeping. There's 15 years of on-mission experience with these things.
If we need to move an asteroid quite a distance over a long period of time, that will be done with a gravitational mass that is held in the desired orbit with ion engines and gravity between the two bodies drags the asteroid towards that mass. The expense will be in doing the first one, as we'd probably have to lift something very heavy off the Earth to bootstrap that process. But once the first asteroid is in Earth orbit for mining operations (you'd want to attach new ion engines from Earth in the near term) then the process can be done much more cheaply.
For small objects near to us we could just attach ion engines directly. NASA has already landed a craft on an asteroid, so the rest is just a matter of working out the system to fire the right engine at the right time. This doesn't scale very well, but for first efforts it might be worthwhile. Heck, if it were very very close and in a very similar orbit, we could even use chemical rockets.
We do have the technology - certainly not much experience or engineering best practices yet - but that's why it's a nascent industry, not an established one. Just because it hasn't been done yet, it doesn't follow that we can't do it yet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We tend to have a naive feeling that we understand the solar system, that it is really just like Earth, but with craters or whatever. It isn't, and we don't.
Given that the vast majority of those naive people will never ever have any impact on space activities, I really don't see the point of the observation. Instead, you should be asking what people who actually plan to do anything in space have as their understanding of space.
Their basis is the laws of physics, which so far have shown to work just the same on Earth as in space. And they've done a lot of remarkable stuff in space that requires more than a ignorant human's understanding of space in order to perform.
NASA's Near Earth Object Program's website, quoting the 1990s-era book "Mining the Sky," suggests that there is in the asteroid belt alone enough wealth to provide everyone on Earth $100 billion.
Except that, you know, if gold were as abundent as steel it would also be $0.06/pound scrap value so that's not actually true. So you go bring back a bunch of iridium, it's not worth thousands of dollars per pound anymore either. One asteroid alone could hold enough of a rare material to up the worlwide supply by 10x or 100x or who knows. That would single handedly crash the market before the company could even get a chance to sell it. So then they'd have to be a big, evil monopoly and artificially slow down the flow of supply like oil or Nintnedo Wiis so the price stays high and everyone hates that.
> And since we don't even have the technology to move an asteroid yet
Yet it's essential that we develop that technology. The Earth has been hit before - and odds are that it is going to be hit again, it's just a matter of time. It's a simple matter of long-term self-preservation that we need to be able to adjust asteroid orbits. Asteroid mining is an excellent idea, because it lets us learn those techniques - and it may defray some of the costs.
It doesn't stop at precious metals, either. Even if SpaceX hits its target launch costs of $150/lb, that means that a ton of anything we bring back to Earth orbit has a starting value of $300,000. (Today the numbers are closer to 10X that.) Even if it's "worthless rock", others could call it "radiation shielding" or "thermal mass" and it becomes valuable. Given an adequate supply of focused solar energy, I suspect just about anything can be refined, in orbit.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Don't bother to RTFA. I did it for you. Complete waste of time. Some no-name blogger, who just rambles on for a few paragraphs about making trillions of dollars from asteroid mining, to get hits on his ads. He's had other equally useless articles linked here.
One of the major concerns that isn't mentioned is what happens to earth-bound mining companies and their markets when these trillions of dollars of minerals arrive?
Yep; Heinlein's Future History already covered this; DeBeers and their lobbying efforts made it illegal to import moon diamonds. The same will happen to gold and platinum from asteroids. Banned for public health reasons because of all the solar radiation that's contaminating them.
"We"?
Why must morons project their own ignorance to everyone? It's like an opposite Dunning-Kruger effect - they find something hard to comprehend, so they assume it is equally hard for everyone, and attribute any expression of knowledge or enthusiasm as naivete.