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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.
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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?
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"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.
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."
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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
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.
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 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.
And a project to capture and safely retrieving the asteroid could be as cheap as $200B.
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'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.
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.
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