Mining the Heavens: In Conversation With Planetary Resources' Chief Engineer

cylonlover writes "It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now, with increasing interest in the commercial exploitation of space, companies are springing up to turn asteroids from things that Bruce Willis blows up into raw materials for future travellers and colonists. One such firm is Planetary Resources, which is currently winding up a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining by offering the public access to a space telescope. Gizmag visits the company's Bellevue, Washington headquarters and talks to the President and Chief Engineer, Chris Lewicki." Long, but worth the time.

Comments

so still scifi then?

[Trepidity]

"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."

A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...

Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:

Space habitats, space stations are going to need hundreds of thousands or millions of liters of water, but there are some asteroids 75 meters across that are water rich. Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle that’s ever been launched. It’s useful for fuel, its useful for supporting life and it’s full-blown radiation shielding for all those people talking about going to Mars. So, that is a resource that is of near-term interest.

Re:so still scifi then?

[Trepidity]

And yes, it moved from the sci-fi pages to the realm of business plans and strategies.

So it got downgraded from hard sci-fi to soft sci-fi? ;-)

Re:so still scifi then?

[SuricouRaven]

You'd never get the orbits to work out for any craft with a halfway-decent journey time though.

Re:so still scifi then?

[taiwanjohn]

Buzz Aldrin spent some time discussing this issue in his recent ISDC talk. The trick is to have an entire fleet of "cycler" ships and only use the ones that are in the "just right" phase of their orbit. There are many possible configurations, but most have Earth/Mars transit times in range of 3 to 6 months.

If you timed it right, you could have cyclers departing on a weekly basis with transit times of a few months. Then just leave the ship uninhabited during the long voyage back to the front of the queue.

Creepy libertarianism

[EdgePenguin]

There seems to be an attitude amongst certain people that space resources should belong to those rich enough to grab them. There hasn't yet been a serious discussion of paying for this exploitation of nature, and I suspect that is because many of the people involved have a libertarian agenda, and see space as an opportunity to escape any form of public restraint on their activities, and construct their Randian utopia off world.

Given the immense resources of the solar system compared to those found on Earth, this is a recipe for immense, cruel and unfair inequality. Those of us Earthbound, who have motivations other than money and so are not billionaires, will be plunged into poverty by extraterrestrial energy magnates whose obscene resource wealth will make the Saudi royal family look positively frugal.

Quite timely then that someone appears to be making a movie on this theme :)

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Anonymous Coward]

Mineable asteroids are nowhere near as scarce as natural resources here on earth. If we are going to discuss who should be able to mine asteroids we should also start to question how a single person can have the right to a patch of land.
Just because your grandparent was a little bit older and got a head start to grab some land doesn't mean that my grandparent didn't have the right to an equivalent amount of land.
While we are at it. The right to heritage makes it so that not everyone is born with the same opportunities. We need to get rid of that too.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Intrepid imaginaut]

You've got it backwards. The unfathomable amount of raw materials and energy available in space will act as a great leveller, ushering in an age of post scarcity undreamed of. I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow, but it is inevitable, and while the first movers may make a lot of money in the process, ultimately when we've got deep orbit factories being fed an endless stream of ores by automated refinerminers that will hardly matter.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[EdgePenguin]

What will us poor Earthlings trade for all this bounty? We won't have anything we could possibly offer to an off-world society, with comparable industrial capabilities but with incredibly larger energy reserves. Please not, that "trickle down" economics has failed every single time it has been tried on Earth.

This idea that if we let the greediest amongst us (not the most talented; being talented per se doesn't make you rich, you have to be specifically talented at making money and motivated to do it) do as they will, it will somehow benefit the rest of us is a discredited idea. I can't believe people are still proposing it, post-2008.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Please not, that "trickle down" economics has failed every single time it has been tried on Earth.

Good thing I'm not proposing it then. You can't just fly up there and start building cities in space, you have to finance each step as you go progressively, and you do so by first returning raw ores, then refined ores, then basic manufactured goods, then larger manufactured goods and ultimately agricultural/medical products.This stuff is wildly expensive, beyond belief, even if you disregard the fact that the technology doesn't exist to enable your randian outposts. Do you imagine some cabal of rich guys taking over the solar system and then chortling over the rims of their bubbly glasses at the rest of us below?

You really, really don't understand the scale of what we're talking about here.

The asteroid Eros has more metals including precious and semi precious than ever have been or ever could be extracted from the earth's crust, tons of gold for every man, woman and child on earth, and we have a giant nuclear reactor sitting there just waiting to help us take it apart. That's just one single asteroid out of millions, and not a very big one either. An embarrasment of riches doesn't begin to cover it. Once space manufacturing takes off do you know what happens to a global economy flooded with everything? I don't, but I'm looking forward to finding out. This is what's known as a 'post scarcity society'. I suspect it will start to look like Western Europe on steroids, with a very good basic standard of living guaranteed while still allowing options for those who want to excel.

Hell, they'll need to place restrictions on how many cars you can buy in a year just to stop the place being flooded with trash. Growth industry of the longest term future? Waste disposal.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[bertok]

You really, really don't understand the scale of what we're talking about here.

In reply, I posit that you really, really don't understand how much that doesn't matter.

Spot iron ore prices are about $120 per metric ton. Asteroids are unrefined, remember? They're full of ore, or a complex and impure mix of metals at best. For comparison, a typical four-door sedan, the biggest lump of metal most people ever buy, is about 1.2 metric tons. This would need about $300 of iron ore.

Do you seriously think that the primary limit on manufacturing, and hence overall wealth, are raw resources? My 10 year old car, if I were to sell it used is worth 20x the cost of the iron ore that originally went into making it!

If space mining somehow magically made iron ore 10x cheaper than it is now, I'd save a total of $270 on my next $50,000 car purchase. I'd save more by skipping the optional coffee cup warmer, or whatever. That's not even factoring in that something like 90% of all iron and steel is recycled, so the difference would be more like $3.

Space mining is a fantasy for rabid Star Trek fans who can't count, nothing more.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Do you seriously think that the primary limit on manufacturing, and hence overall wealth, are raw resources?

Is there any compelling reason why you can't manufacture things in space? It would offer lots of advantages in fact - abundant free energy, pollute all you like, raw materials literally raining on you, and you can drop consignments next door to wherever they are meant to be going.

Space mining is a fantasy for rabid Star Trek fans who can't count, nothing more.

You just haven't thought this through.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[EdgePenguin]

You won't achieve a post scarcity society (if such a thing is even possible...) with rich guys holding all the resource wealth. Such people have demonstrated a willingness and an ability to ensure that the rest of us see very little of the profits they make - despite the fact said profits often exploit public resources. You haven't addressed the fundamental issue - you hand over the solar system to those selected primarily by their capacity for greed and then you think they will just hand over these resources? No, they will demand trade. If space manufacturing achieves what you think it can, what can Earth possible have to offer? We would become the Somalia of the solar system. Trickle down hasn't failed because of lack of resources, it fails because the rich are simply too good at hoarding the wealth - and when they and their puppets in government try to prop up dwindling consumer spending power with credit, they cause a crisis.

I do understand the scales involved. I'm an astronomer. Understanding things on a really big scale is kind of my job.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[EdgePenguin]

No your problem here is that you're seeing 'rich guys' and having a fit of the commies. There are exactly three entities that could make a serious attempt to exploit the resources of the solar system at this point: The European Union, The United States of America, and the Peoples' Republic of China. And they would damn near bankrupt themselves in the attempt. No rich guy, no cabal of rich guys, no army of rich guys is going to make this happen. Even Planetary Resources themselves acknowledge this.

The entire solar system? No - but doing so will be within the reach of the first people to develop off-world resources and manufacturing, so wealth will continue to leverage more wealth and the overwhelming majority of humanity will not get a look in.

In order to reach a position where you could be independent of Earth, you'd have to spend a very long time selling stuff to Earth. And by then why stop? In fact by then the barriers to entry would be reduced so much that system resource exploitation would be on the level of opening a factory. It is not possible to sidestep the middle of the process and somehow lay claim to everything above the atmosphere.

You don't need to be independent of Earth's resources to economically dominate it. If you have such resource/manufacturing capacity as is supposed, someone from Earth can send you whatever you need. This won't enrich Earth, because the trading relation will be so absurdly asymmetrical.

Try applying some of that understanding to economics next time, eh.

I'm trying to keep my responses civil, but its hard whilst you keep trying to imply I'm stupid just because I'm questioning your conclusions. I do understand the issues at hand, you could do with paying more attention to what I understand.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Ost99]

The raw materials are never meant to be returned to earth.
While a ton of iron ore is worth less than nothing here, transporting it to LEO costs $10M (multiply that by 5 if you want it on the moon).
Our space capabilities are limited by the cost of getting stuff out of earths gravity well.

Asteroid mining would sell raw materials and water to other space ventures, private or public.

Re:Creepy libertarianism

[Princeofcups]

You've got it backwards. The unfathomable amount of raw materials and energy available in space will act as a great leveller, ushering in an age of post scarcity undreamed of. I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow, but it is inevitable, and while the first movers may make a lot of money in the process, ultimately when we've got deep orbit factories being fed an endless stream of ores by automated refinerminers that will hardly matter.

You forgot the land grab. All those resources will be owned by mega-corporations backed by government militaries, so don't think about trespassing on their asteroid belt or else you'll get a nuke up your mining ship.

Re:My usual question, not answered thus far...

[ledow]

I know you're joking but...

Earth: 6 x 10^24 kg.
Weight of the Pyramid of Giza: 6 x 10^9 kg.

Thus, if you brought in enough stuff to weigh the same as a huge stone pyramid, you might alter the Earth's mass by:

0.00000000000001%

Oh, give me a break

[TWiTfan]

It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction.

Yeah, not that long ago, as in yesterday...and today...and tomorrow.

starving amid plenty

[Thud457]

You stupid monkeys have a perfectly useful 3.839Ã--10^26 W fusion reactor only 93 million miles away. Get off your asses and figure out how to use it.