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Earth-buzzing Asteroid Would Be Worth $195B If We Could Catch It
coondoggie writes "The asteroid NASA says is about the half the size of a football field that will blow past Earth on Feb 15 could be worth up to $195 billion in metals and propellant. That's what the scientists at Deep Space Industries, a company that wants to mine these flashing hunks of space materials, thinks the asteroid known as 2012 DA14 is worth — if they could catch it."
Re-position the Planet. We could catch it full in the face. How much would it be worth then?
I'm sure that's the same thought my neighbors dog has while it is chasing the cars passing by.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The US? The world? An individual?
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But... if $195B worth of metals would be added to the market, wouldn't the value of metals drop because of supply & demand, resulting in a much less profitable asteroid?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It seems to me that the biggest bottleneck in making a ROI for something like this isn't even so much the logistics of getting up there, mining it, and bringing it back down gracefully. It's the fuel consumption. Short of nuke power, we haven't got anything approaching the energy requirements to make this efficient.
I haven't looked into Deep Space Industries all that much or what their business plan is, but what I understand seems kind of pie in the sky and unrealistic. Mining operations are huge capital investments. So would be the infrastructure necessary to bring the materials down here once they're harvested, and getting the equipment up there.
Granted, you'd not have to worry about the ecological impact mining on the planet causes or the associated government regulation, but short of establishing a fairly large extraplanet base where most operations, including smelting, occur, with massive space mining ships like what you'd see in science fiction movies, I can't imagine this being profitable anytime soon... Don't get me wrong, but how are these guys NOT some sort of "dotcom company" selling vaporware?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"The impact of a 50-meter asteroid is not cataclysmic--unless you happen to be underneath it, NASA said."
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this statement.
Wouldn't material influx on that level affect the market and depress the cost?
For example, an asteroid made of gold would be worth a lot of money, but the price of gold may fall worldwide if we do catch one.
The article is big on using "if", "might be", "could range". So that $195B will represent the most wishful of optimistic estimates. We need to get the technology for better assessment of the composition of asteroids when they're still a distance away before trying to figure out how to harvest them when they're nearby.
Just mint a $195B coin!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The Greenland ice sheet would be worth nearly as much if we could snare it, tow it, and deliver it to the Middle East in pristine condition, held with minimal expense for the long term, and without leaving an ocean sized dent among when it's finally depleted by the immodest swimming pools of Saudi Arabia.
Half the shit rotting in your basement could become liquid gold if you had a time machine and a forwarding address to eBay future. Only problem is that they will return payment in a priceless commodity you haven't got the first clue how to use. If you're clever, you might be able to wangle out of them all the remaining Bitcoin blocks.
"Primordial human, what do you want that for? Are you an archaeologist, or what? Well, you'll just have to time your deliveries more precisely. The grand curator's office hours are October–November, Monday and Tuesday, 13:00 to 14:00, no exceptions."
The real reason a supermodel isn't going to sleep with you is not because you're boring and ugly and proud of your Costco luxury goods—it's because you're living the wrong life, with the wrong crowd, on the wrong spiral arm of the social graph.
It's there, you're here, and never the twain shall meet.
The moon is probably valuated many zillion dollars, give the tidal effects and romance industry that it fuels. Who's up to catching it?
I suspect that if this asteroid were to land gently in a valley somewhere, and we were to exploit all of it's resources conventionally, we'd find considerably less mineral wealth. The $195B figure is probably about saving the cost of launching comparable amounts of metals and water, minus the cost of developing infrastructure to mine in space. Mining in space is going to be about building in space, folks. The only thing we'll be sending back home is beams of space-generated power and research data. We'll spend the next million years filling the solar system with miles-long solar heat-sintered concrete cylinders to live in. There will be far more humans in space than on Earth, and we'll rarely mingle in person. Maybe someday we'll have the skill and energy to visit other stars (we quasi-already have the technology), but it won't be to bring back dilithium crystals and chests of gold-pressed latinum.
I thought they meant that's how much we could save if we dropped it on North Korea
Won't be the last time it passes close, and anyway maybe could be easier to capture another asteroid. Not sure about cost, is not like is feasible to put in orbit that amount of minerals taking them from here.
In the other hand, if this or another captured asteroid is "catched" by the right city in the right place, then it could worth more than $195B... in damages.
The idea just struck me. If aliens didn't possess cloaking technology.. An asteroid such as this would make great cover to closely observe a species advanced enough to detect planets around other stars. You could even deploy small probes the size of a softball to fall to earth or into orbit.
The asteroid would be worth more than $1,000 per kilogram. That seems a bit optimistic to me considering that most of its matter will likely be dust and ice.
FTFA:
Still, according to DSI experts, if 2012 DA14 contains 5% recoverable water, that alone -- in space as rocket fuel -- might be worth as much as $65 billion. If 10% of its mass It could mass which could range from as little as 16,000 tons or as much as one million tons -- is easily recovered iron, nickel and other metals, that could be worth -- in space as building material -- an additional $130 billion.
Which ignores that there is no market for raw metal "in space as a building material". And sadly, after 50 fucking years in space, there's still not even a market for propellant in space. The only current market might be to supply the ISS with water, (two tonnes per astronaut per year perhaps) but it's unlikely that they would trust asteroid-water unless they control the purification process.
So there's science value as the first sample return of its kind. There's maybe a few million per year for water for ISS. And you might be able to sell some of it as crude bulk shielding to a future project.
But one day... <sigh>
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
70% of US debt is owned by American investors and the SS trust fund. So you'd be "delivering" it to your own cities.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
"HULK.... sad."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
You're right, and not at all stupid to bring this up.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man :)
You go to all the trouble of catching the asteroid, mining it and it turns out to be Veldspar... Either that or some Goons turn up and steal it from your hauler when you try and take it home.
Harvesting that ought to be about the same level of difficulty as extracting the mineral wealth, I'd say
... we simply jump ship and live ON the asteroid instead of bringing it to Earth? Would we have enough resources?
And a project to capture and safely retrieving the asteroid could be as cheap as $200B.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat."
I won't be done my training for my Retriever until the day after it passes!
There are lots of smartass comments on this article already so I'd like to (for once) start an interesting discussion.
How WOULD you "catch" an asteroid? We'd basically have to find a way to drop it into some Earth orbit, right? Then as we're mining it, we'd have to adjust its speed according to the mass we're removing from it in order to keep it in orbit. Wouldn't mining in and of itself be a different issue? I don't know much about mining, but it seems like we depend on our environment quite a bit when mining -- we need water and air for cooling, we need to replace bits/heads quite often due to wear, in many cases we use weights to help drive the drill (and in zero G, there's no weight). THEN we get to try to pull these things off the asteroid without destroying either object's orbit.
This sounds like a really interesting problem. I also wonder regarding the investment that would be required in order to solve these problems... how many asteroids like this would we have to mine before getting a return? How many asteroids like this come close enough to earth that we could mine them?
Trigger-happy mods don't get the reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone
Another fun trivia:
" In 1674, according to Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, someone smeared the Black Stone with excrement so that "every one who kissed it retired with a sullied beard". The Shi'ite Persians were suspected of being responsible ... "
I didn't know asteroids were self-propelled so that if you catch them, you can steal all their propellant, lol. Anyway, AT CURRENT MARKET VALUE, it's worth that much. Guess what happened to the price of gold when some guy found several kilograms of gold coins out in a field in the UK? The price dropped. Guess what happens when you throw 100 pounds of platinum (or whatever) on the market from an asteroid? The price goes down in a hurry.
I'm told it's returning at some point?
I imagine something useful come come of it... and for that matter, why aren't we soft landing an instrument package on the face of haileys comet?
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If this is such a good idea, then why doesn't Deep Space Industries raise the capital and do it? It is always interesting how people (usually business leaders) cry out for smaller government, but want the government to fund their business endeavors. It's quite simple really. The estimate from Deep Space Industries is that there is about $195B worth of resources to be mined from the asteroid. Depending on what they want for a ROI, say 40%, if they can do mine it for less than $139B then they should do it. If not, then it doesn't make business sense to do it and they should move on.
When there is a for-profit venture, the government shouldn't be footing the bill. That is the role of the private sector. The government should get involved when research is necessary for the benefit of citizens but the ROI isn't there to encourage the private sector to act (ie. develop inexpensive vaccines) or to provide infrastructure (ie. if you want hydrogen powered cars, somebody has to build hydrogen delivery systems across the country).
If Deep Space Industries thinks this is a good idea, then they should be able to convince any number of venture capitalists to fund it instead of taxpayers. Of course, venture capitalists have to be repaid, where taxpayers usually are not.
That this is a really really bad idea. Attempting to catch an asteroid that is near earth. What happens if you make a mistake and the thing comes crashing to Earth? I could see the news, "Well folks, in the attempt at catching the Asteroid it is now aimed to strike New York. If you think the economy was bad before....."
An honest question here:
If Earth gains mass because of this industry, wouldn't that affect earth's attraction to the sun? It seems to me that this would definitely make the Earth's and the Sun's attraction towards each other stronger. And if this is true, earth's speed around the Sun would need to increase to maintain a stable orbit, or else the Earth would need to move further away from the sun... Wouldn't it?
Just because the asteroid has metals that may be useful to us, what about materials mixed within that may pose as threats to the life on Earth? Even if we could mine the asteroid by somehow catching it, I sure hope the folks doing the planning have also considered the possible detriments to life that may also be an outcome of successfully catching this asteroid.
You could capture it with a minimum of propellant fairly easily. Reorienting its orbit relative to Earth doesn't take much of a push if you do it far enough away (which is why when you do course corrections on a spacecraft, you make the big ones early on, and make small, fine-tuning ones when you get closer to your target).
Then you can get most of your delta-v by aerobraking it in Earth's upper atmosphere, aiming it just deep enough to slow it down to just barely below Earth's escape velocity. You'd save a vast amount of propellant and make an amazing light show for anyone watching. =)
Then you give it one more nudge at apogee (probably the most expensive part of the endeavor) to circularize its orbit enough that it doesn't hit the atmosphere again (which is important). After that last high-thrust burn you could then further circularize the orbit with low-thrust, high-efficiency electric thrusters.
Given enough time and a nuclear reactor, this could all be done using reaction mass acquired on-site, so you wouldn't have to actually haul the propellant to the asteroid, and only take just enough to get your reactor and fuel-manufacturing plant to it.
Your zero is a very strange zero.... because its a zero that contains the infrastructure to capture asteroids being built, meaning the next one should be quite a bit of profit. Its only a big fat zero if the whole purpose was short term profit.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
They screw up and it crashes on Earth
Are you sure that caching it would cost $95B? Even an asteroid that big would probably only need 16 GB of RAM.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45676693@N03/6959137824/
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I presume they're busy flashing. (Since when do asteroids flash?)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
With all of the debris we collect from space,eve, when it burns up in our atmosphere, our planetary mass is constantly growing. Every time that happens, our planet's mass distribution changes. It's negligible. I also don't find it entertaining to consider the potential repercussions of something that sounds really freaking sweet to spitball about. Can we get more pictures and diagrams please? Or at least start debating the different zero-g ways to re-create our heavy industries? http://s9.postimage.org/4hgptrfnj/SPACE_STATION.png
I believe in karma, which is why, when I do something bad to people, I assume they deserve it.
But before we get to that, let us point out the obvious - we have no means, at all, to overcome the challenges that physics alone presents to anyone hoping to "harvest" this asteroid. No, we don't. Not even close. Oh, sure, I've seen lots of pie-in-the-sky conjecture on "what might work", but that's just conjecture. And conjecture doesn't come close enough make even a half-assed cost-benefit analysis. Nevertheless, the snake-oil salesmen are lining up the suckers, erm... investors. That $195 billion number is, of course, rubbish, because it does not factor in the cost of actually delivering the materials to someone who will buy them for that much. That cost is unknown, and given the physics challenges likely to be prohibitive absent some miraculous breakthrough in propulsion technology. That breakthrough might come, it's true, but it probably won't. Even if it does, such a dramatic breakthrough will change all kinds of things, possibly affecting the value proposition of asteroid mining in major ways. In other words, it's a sucker bet and the money that will be made off of "asteroid mining" will be by those who've convinced wealthy chumps to part with their money in the hopes of "getting in on the ground floor".
My car would be worth $165 Billion... If someone would pay me that much for it... see how ridiculous these hypothetical articles really sound?
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
I am not sure if there is an actual water price on the stock exchange like oil has...
would be curious if this would bring some water logged countries like Canada more value or not.
Maybe if they tried aerobraking a dozen asteroids this size we would be seeing weather or climate issues as they tore up the ionosphere, but that's about it. The difference in mass between Earth and even the largest asteroids is so enormous that even slamming Ceres head-on into our planet wouldn't alter our orbit noticeably. It would be like hitting a dragonfly with a Cadillac.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Gravity doesn't work that way. The objects that impact Earth are already in solar orbit. There's only a small change in momentum due to their slightly different orbits.
But even then, their masses are so tiny that measuring their effects in practice would be impossible. To bring down enough mass to alter Earth's annual orbit by a few minutes would release enough impact energy to re-surface the whole planet. Ie, a mere extinction level impact event, such as the one that killed the dinos, would not be enough to do the job. Variations in tidal effects probably does more. Planets are massive. Imagine a 12 foot high ball of solid nickel-iron rolling down a steep hill at around 100mph. Your job is to divert it by throwing one-inch glass marbles at it, one at a time, as it passes you. (At this scale, a one inch marble is a 50 mile wide monster asteroid. The dino killer was about 5mi wide, so about a tenth of 1% of the mass of a 50mile asteroid.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Thanks for your explanation, it was really good. Also, your example really helped me put the differences between the earth's mass and an asteroid's mass into perspective!