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."

Comments

Re-position the Planet

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-position the Planet. We could catch it full in the face. How much would it be worth then?

Re:Re-position the Planet

[dreamchaser]

Using average values for velocity, density, impact angle, etc. you get about six megatons. Hardly a 'zit'.

Re:Re-position the Planet

[amoeba1911]

You don't get it: material in space is worth a whole lot more than material on earth. If you brought it back down to earth it would be worth only a tiny fraction of that price and defeat the entire purpose of catching it. We already have lots of water on earth, and this whole planet is made of all kinds of metals, there is no water shortage here. Asteroid is worth a lot in space because bringing material out of the gravity well and atmosphere is expensive, to the tune of several thousand dollar per pound. If we slowed down this asteroid to make it go into a stable orbit around the earth (or the moon) then it really would be worth billions, if not trillions. The problem is slowing down an object out of a hyperbolic orbit - it requires tremendous amount of force. We could change its trajectory slightly so it enters the atmosphere for aerobreaking, but that requires very precise control of the trajectory to make sure it doesn't end up sub-orbital. :)

Doggy Dollars....

[rts008]

I'm sure that's the same thought my neighbors dog has while it is chasing the cars passing by.

Who owns the asteroid?

[gTsiros]

The US? The world? An individual?

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[corbettw]

Whoever can land on it. Possession being 9/10s of the law and all that.

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[Zouden]

The outer space treaty says that nations can't "claim ownership" of space bodies and they can't use them for weapons testing. But AFAIK that doesn't prohibit commercial exploitation of an asteroid. Whoever can catch it and start mining it has a pretty good claim to it. Who's going to stop them? And for what purpose?

A legal battle would arise if another company tried mining the same asteroid. They'd need to set up a way of staking a claim. But we're not nearly at that stage yet.

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[Zouden]

Yes it's ratified, and how is the number of spaceships relevant to the question of mining rights?

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[Zouden]

Of course, but that superpower would also need the desire to enforce ownership. There's just no incentive when they can just encourage Chinese or US mining companies to do the dirty work.

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[LingNoi]

The whole point of these materials being valuable is due to the fact that launching said material into space is expensive, so the materials wouldn't be taken back to earth, they'd be used in space.

Re:Who owns the asteroid?

[rocket rancher]

Whoever can land on it. Possession being 9/10s of the law and all that.

Heh -- you are almost right. It's the person who can defend a claim that owns it, not the first person to make the claim. I sincerely hope Deep Space Industries does live up to their potential by profiting from asteroid mining. But their success is contingent upon them being able to defend their claims of ownership, and they really haven't addressed how they are going to do that, yet. Be interesting see what their defense is. Claim-jumping is just as real a threat now as it was in California in 1849. Who will Deep Space Industries appeal to when a rival lands on their rock and reprograms all their mining bots -- Starfleet, perhaps? (I kid, I kid, but I think you see my point.)

Supply & demand

[dingen]

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?

Re:Supply & demand

[taiwanjohn]

Different market. They're talking about the value of these materials in orbit, not here on earth.

Re:Supply & demand

[jonadab]

It is, however, possible to flood the market for particular commodities. A few centuries ago, for example, Spain mishandled their newfound wealth from Central America and flooded the European gold market. OPEC has repeatedly been held together because the country with the largest production has consistently and deliberately reduced their production to compensate whenever other member nations produce too much in a given year. If they had not done so, the market would have been saturated and the commodity price of crude oil would have dropped significantly.

An asteroid made of mostly iron, to have any impact on the commodity market for iron or steel, would have to be worth a good deal more than $139 billion. An asteroid containing significant amounts of some less common material (e.g., rare earth metals) could potentially have an impact on the commodity prices of those -- if it were economic to capture and mine the thing, which of course it's not, at our current level of technology.

In fact, however, this asteroid probably doesn't contain anywhere near $139 billion worth of metals at commodity prices. (It's only about the size of a football field, and they don't yet know precisely what it's made of.) The article talks about how much its materials would be worth in orbit, which is mostly a function of how expensive it is to get things up there from the surface. For example, they're imagining it might contain water, which could be used as reaction mass for spacecraft. On the surface, water is one of the cheapest materials there is. (Air is even cheaper.) But it costs money to lift it out of Earth's gravity well.

They're dreaming, though. Without sci-fi technology (e.g., a tractor beam), capturing (let alone mining) a passing asteroid would be a ridiculously expensive (and also dangerous) operation, and all the equipment and personnel needed to do it would have to be lifted to orbit from the surface.

Re:Supply & demand

[jkflying]

If we could stick into the Earth-Moon L4/L5 points it could sit there for a few million years without any sci-fi hardware. The difficulty is getting it there in the first place.

I think the reason there isn't any demand for orbital construction is because there isn't enough materials. If we could get that sorted, the construction opportunities will follow.

Space mining ROI - fuel

[CAIMLAS]

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?

Re:Space mining ROI - fuel

[sFurbo]

It seems their plan is not to bring the materials to Earth, but to use them to build things in space, where things are much more valuable (is it something like 10.000$ per kg to launch a satellite?). IIRC, the first part of their scheme is simply to extract water and other volatiles, which can be used for propellants. The required investment would be much smaller than for producing objects, and the cost in orbit is still at least what it costs to launch it on a rocket.

Re:Space mining ROI - fuel

[ae1294]

It's space so there is no vapor...

Re:Space mining ROI - fuel

[Electricity Likes Me]

Actually I think you're applying a lot of conventional earth-bound thinking to an enterprise which is not.

Earth mining has a lot of constraints which space doesn't. For one thing, solar power is perpetual and constant. There's no gravity - so structures don't need to support their own mass, only the forces they experience due to their own accelerations/rotations. You could use kilometers wide mylar sheeting to build solar furnaces, and provided you didn't spin it or over-tension it it would be just fine.

Building volume is practically limitless, there's no environmental issues or clean up to worry about (though not scattering debris in the orbital regions would be important). There's also no convection - anything you heat up is only going to lose heat by inefficient radiative cooling. Keeping hot things hot would be ridiculously easy.

The single biggest problem with space mining is refining - and it's not a problem, we've just never thought about how to do it in that environment. The goal of the mining/refining process is to use as few depleteable items as possible - i.e. you'd want to do as much as you could with free-floating masses of material and focussed sunlight as you could.

Factories, refineries, mining picks/drills/whatever - all these ideas are irrelevant in such an environment. And all this can be done in an area less then a light-second away from Earth - so no need for any humans to be in space whatsoever.

NASA said..

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

value = thing + time and place

[epine]

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.

I misunderstood

[Grayhand]

I thought they meant that's how much we could save if we dropped it on North Korea