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?

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.

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.

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.

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.