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First Survey of Commercially Viable Asteroids Estimates Only 10 Are Worth Mining
KentuckyFC writes "In 2012, Richard Branson, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt announced the launch of Planetary Resources, an ambitious start up with the goal of mining nearby asteroids for natural resources. Now an academic survey of ore-bearing asteroids estimates that only about 10 are likely to have resources worth mining. The new approach is to create a Drake-like equation that starts with the total number of asteroids and determines the percentage that are close enough to Earth, the percentage of these that contain valuable resources, the percentage of these large enough to pay for a space mining mission and so on. Each of these factors is filled with uncertainty but the bottom line is that when it comes to platinum group metals such as platinum, palladium, and iridium there are likely to be very few worth exploiting. That has significant implications for the future of space exploration. With so few commercially-viable space rocks out there, knowing which ones to pursue will be hugely valuable information, concludes the study. And that means the prospecting of asteroids is likely to become a highly secretive commercial endeavor in the not-too-distant future."
...someday we'll have the technology to shotgun baseball sized probes at the hunks of rock and figure it out. [Citation needed.]
That said, the real question is what is the intersection of the availability of asteroid mining technology with the obsolescence of the need to mine these asteroids.
This kind of estimating may have an order of magnitude error. So it could easily be only 1 asteroid worth mining. Let the asteroid war begin!
And much like the Drake equation if even one of the inputs is a WAG the final result is meaningless.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Why just look near Earth? Won't we want to build stuff far away from Earth too? Seems like having building supplies near Jupiter might be useful and a lot cheaper than bring them with.
California did not get rich off it's gold reserves, neither did the Youkon. By the very nature of precious metals mining, they draw you in. California is great because it has great resources, at first mostly useful to living there, and oh, by the way there was some gold to draw in the crowds. The real economic payoff to come from space is most likely going to be in the form of energy production. Like California, if it takes the modern equiv of gold to draw in the crowds and investment, great. But how many gold rushes were there in the US? 3 or 4, California, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia, and Montana?
As anyone in mining can tell you, 'ore' is defined as mineral resources that can be mined at a profit. Binghman Canyon mine, for example, ran out of ore a few years ago, but then regained ore after they build a conveyer belt that let them move material more efficiently.
The number of asteroids that are 'ore' depends on the cost of mining and the price of metal, both of which are subject to change. The cost of mining, especially, is basically unknown at this point, given that we've never done it.
What we need for this to work is essentially the Star Wars economy. Wonder how they built the Death Star and all those massive ships? Droids. If we can launch something up there that can harvest enough materials and build what it needs up there to keep going, then it just takes one launch. It sends robots to the right asteroid. They extract metals, build more robots, build space ships, go to other asteroids, and keep repeating the process. Occasionally they send shipments back home.
We're a long ways away from that level of technology, but I don't think there's anything preventing us from getting there.
For energy, the robots could either build nuclear or solar power systems.
For manufacturing, 3-D printing is likely an enabling technology. It needs to advance way beyond where it is now, such as making full computers.
Refining the raw materials found on the asteroids is another obstacle.
I would guess it's 50 to 100 years out.
These numbers are highly speculative and reflect bad assumptions.
The main bad assumption: That one would mine an asteroid for any one resource. Platinum/water etc.
Much more likely is mining whatever is there and refining it into things useful in space, at least at first. Particularly obvious is making fuel from water, but any asteroid with ice will likely also have useful metal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is an investment scam. Plenty of idiots will not see through it though.
They got the idea from an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 called "Rivals", where some alien lady was conning investors with an asteroid mining scheme. It was apparently an old investment scam in Star Trek lore.
...the idiot mines asteroids. The Chinese are not going to lose this one..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
... most rocks have little commercial value.
Just because they have yet to get trapped by the earth's gravity well doesn't mean that most asteroids (especially the ones with the right orbits to mine) are fundamentally different in composition from what we find in the earth's crust.
You bring up a good point mentioning the "obsolescence of the need to mine these asteroids," but I disagree that we'll hit that point for two reasons.
1) Materials science keeps coming up with fascinating new things that we can do, but often requiring exotic (i.e., rare) elements. Sure, there's tons of things we can do with carbon, but there will always be things where other materials are needed. Unless you're going to argue that it will be cheaper to make elements on demand through nuclear reactions, new sources of rare materials is always a good thing. (And then there's the environmental advantage of mining asteroids over terrestrial mining.)
2) For space exploration, sources of materials off-planet are an advantage.
All those involved should go watch the movie Armageddon.
Anyone else watch those TV Documentaries where the ads for it say "We answer mankind's biggest question. DO. ALIENS. EXIST. Tonight at 5, only on the Discovery Channel." and when you watch it, it concludes with "..so, are there aliens out there? The answer is a definite.. maybe." *roll credits*
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
The most precious mineral you can get from an asteroid is dihydrogen monoxide. Although common on Earth, in space this is a precious substance with myriad uses.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Clearly mining of astroids in space is going to be a much different business than mining on earth. I would suggest that the technology for mining astroids in space does not exist and therefore any cost/benefit analysis is probably not very acurate.
What will initally drive humans to mine in space is not profit but rather the human drive to do something that has not been done before (challenge/curiosity). As with any technology an initial loss would be expected, but with great challenge comes great opportunity and great reward.
One should also keep in mind that precious metals are not the most valuble space resource. Initially other resourcces such as water (hydrogen/oxygen), helium, etc. will be they are required for human space flight and especially any lengthy stay is space.
The value of information is going to be, at most, the value of the materials contained on the asteroid minus the cost of mining them. That means if there's a 5% ROI mining asteroids and you can get $100 million return out of the asteroid, then the value of information is going to be at most $100 million to mine a $2 billion asteroid.
Then subtract the risk. Let's say that, accounting for mission failures, failure to properly assess the asteroid's value (both finding more than expected and finding much less), and cost overruns for probable events, an extra $80 million goes into each mission. The value of the information is then going to be at most $20 million, otherwise it costs more than the risk and you're just gambling. The difference between gambling and investing is gambling has a probability of loss if carried out perfectly; investing has an outcome controllable with net-positive or break-even gain and an extremely low (unpredictable because it happens almost never) loss. The stock market is called "investing" because skilled traders can read the market well enough to consistently make a profit, enough to offset occasional black swans (the market is essentially skilled traders preying on unskilled idiots who don't know how to keep their shirts).
Then you have adjustments over time: scarcity of materials increasing commodity value, causing a great rise in price; this couples with risk, both in increased scarcity (makes you a profit, makes society poorer) and in someone finding themselves a bitchload asteroid and bringing back gigatonnes of platinum (makes your current mining efforts suddenly worth a lot less, causing a loss; makes society more wealthy). Improvements in technology--particularly in energy production and storage--make mining cheaper, so profit margins increase and risk decreases. These adjustments increase the value of prospecting contracts.
Then you have emerging markets. For example, a titan supply line would be highly valuable as a way to replenish CO2 in the earth's atmosphere. To facilitate space travel, an orbital collector could store microwave energy in power cells or flywheels, then sync transmit and tight-beam power down to a ground station. The ground station would then absorb CO2 from the air--carbon and oxygen--and H2O--hydrogen and oxygen--and produce gasoline or diesel fuel in a rather lossy process. With enough access to a huge store (i.e. the sun, which will burn out in 5-10 billion years) of high-flow (i.e. enough radiation from the sun to provide for space travel) energy, you could use this fuel--gasoline, hydrogen/oxygen, diesel--as propellant.
Accounting for this, your in-atmosphere propellant would be clean: it would release hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon originally collected from atmosphere, and not contain mercury or sulfur. Your out-of-atmosphere propellant would remove these things from the atmosphere--water, carbon, oxygen. Thus, eventually, new sources of hydrocarbon fuel would be required to replace the depleted oxygen and carbon in the earth's atmosphere. All high-altitude fuel would come from the methane hydrocarbon reserves of Titan, either as methane-propelled gas fuel rockets or processed into a more effective fuel source. Most of that hydrocarbon combustion products--and any allowable impurities (sulfur, mercury, etc.)--would spew into space instead of into earth's atmosphere. Clean fuel would be preferred in-atmosphere, but mined fuel would be brought in and burned--possibly in launches--when the atmospheric levels of CO2 and H2O and O2 were considered low.
Huge economic considerations.
I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!
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If you think of asteroids as widely scattered mountains scattered through the solar system, they are going to vary as mountains do on Earth. Most are heaps of ordinary rock and ice. Some have more minerals, some less. A very few might have a lot of resources. But even the richest asteroid is very hard to get to compared to any mountain on Earth.
In the future, perhaps a long time from now, there will be orders of monks living beyond earth and they will predictably dwell on monasteroids.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
In many ways, these equations are almost worse than useless. For years, the Drake Eq. gave everyone the impression there were 1 or 2 other planets in the whole universe that could support life, and reinforced the whole contingent for which space exploration is never a "cost effective" endeavor. Then we found out "oh, wait, all our guesses were wildly pessemistic." They get filled with extrapolated numbers about a place we've only begun to tip-toe into and then make dire predictions.
Some are also just wrong. For example, he uses 4.5 km/s delta-V but that doesn't even cover the maxima for Liquid Fuel Rockets (7 to 9 km/s). If you start to approach tech like Electrostatic or Hall Effect (Ion) Thrusters you get up into numbers more like 50-100 km/s, which would probably multiply his 10 number by a bit (most of the Oort Cloud becomes available over time).
There's just so much fuzziness here its hard to find the use in it.
The kind of investment needed to mine a single asteroid put a limit of what is viable and what is not, at least in the most straightforward way (launch a rocket to that asteroid, mine it, send the materials to earth, game over). But can that limit be lowered changing the goal? What instead of searching for a platinum rich asteroid the goal is iron or needed materials (fuel?) ones to build/resuply ships already in the asteroid belt, would that initial investment raise the bar in what is profitable and what not? One of the biggest costs should be the initial launch of the ships from Earth, where every pound matters.
...since his drilling team is the best.
playing Mass Effect 2?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
>> And that means the prospecting of asteroids is likely to become a highly secretive commercial endeavor in the not-too-distant future.
Given the large numbers of even hobby astronomers, the chances of sneaking a payload into space are pretty small. (See also: X37).
This is just random low grade physics fantasy pondering:
Once you can get a hold of an asteroid, you have a place from which you can exert a force. So 2 things can happen:
You can use force to chuck little pieces of asteroid back towards Earth to be collected "somehow"
You can jump from asteroid to asteroid.
All this would take precise calculations, but it doesn't suffer from "weak thrust ion drives", "weak solar sails", or "limited conventional thrusters." If you do your math calculations correct to jump from asteroid to asteroid, you could be using "electricity gained from nuclear or solar." to propel you through space.
So if the goal is to take select pieces of asteroid and shoot them back to Earth, you just need some really intelligent algorithms to leap from asteroid to asteroid. The fudge factor would be using some "limited conventional thrusters.", but the better your algorithms, the less you'd need to use them.
Now I don't know if this is viable at all, but it really opens your mind up to a robot leaping from asteroid to asteroid, gripping it, chucking pieces back to Earth(albeit possibly slowly) and going from asteroid to asteroid. OH SNAP! Dude you could totally use an asteroid as a surf board. Just throw pieces away from you in order to get you exactly to the other Asteroid you want to dock with. Man this is just fun to think about. The total costs of doing this would be really low because you wouldn't have to refuel often.
God spoke to me
When companies and research teams look at things like asteroid mining, or space exploitation in general, they tend to look at thing purely from an monetary perspective. So, the "economics" if you will.
This, by and large is the outlook most folks have. Indeed, it is our nature to take the low hanging fruit without any thought to future ramifications.
The conversation should not be one of strictly money though. Instead, they should look at the long term effects of striping our planet of natural resources.
In the long run, is better to spend more effort now to mine "rare earth" metals in space, or to continue with strip mining and chemical leach mining because it costs less money now.
There is a butt load of stuff in space we could use, but it would be terribly expensive at first. Heck, Titan has more hydrocarbons than Earth could use in a billion years. Plus, who cares how bad we fuck up Titian when we spill a bunch? I would much rather destroy the moon or Titan than fuck where the one place we've got.
Also, the ort cloud is ridiculously huge. It seems a safe bet that there are more materials in there we could ever dream of using.
I ask you, is it right to only think about what we would need to spend today, whilst giving no thought at all to what it will "cost" us in the future?
We could just make commercial towing ships - have them refine the good stuff as they haul the payloads back. Name the class "Nostromo."
I'm going with Ceres and Vesta. You guys can have the other ones.
The water in more common asteroids and nickel-iron are more valuable. There are lots of studies from the last AIAA SPACE 2013 conference (I was there), and simple analysis by arm-chair geeks. Water = fuel (esp for nuclear thermal and other thermal rockets) + life support. Plain metals for construction. It isn't the gold miner that makes money in a gold rush, it is the bartender, cortesan, and store owner (see the history of SF, Yukon, etc.). In this case the water is already 'on site' being above the Earth gravity well, and nearby, same with plain metals. Orbital factories for very high end things (that are either dangerous to make on Earth, or better made in zero-g) are a potential money maker, as are colonists who just plain want to increase the human species footprint. Other valuables may emerge as we begin to grab resources off planet (at a min...no more environment destroying mining).
You only need to launch out of atmosphere a few times...to set up a station. After that you move in space in lieu of starting from the ground, provisioning on site.
A space elevator would change the economic equation quite a bit and make a lot more of them viable.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Its garbage equation that has ZERO scientific value.
End of discussion.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Platinum is currently $1400/oz. But you can't assume that price for selling lots of it. Supply and demand! If the supply doubles, the price may halve, but if the suppressed demand for platinum is only slightly greater than the current supply, then doubling the supply will reduce the price by very much more than half. It's true that a plentiful supply will generate new uses, but that's likely to take a while, and in the interim, the up-front costs of asteroid mining would probably bankrupt even Branson et al.
So the authors looked at the number of asteroids that it would be ***commercially profitable to mine with today's technology***, and they estimate ten? That's fantastic news! Let the asteroid mining begin! I am sure once those ten are mined out, the infrastructure will be in place to bring a thousand more within reach.
Why? Do some of them contain bitcoins?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
...I was told by ALL the environmentalists that we were running out of natural resources on Earth, and that the planet was a limiting factor - when those resources were used up there were NO MORE.
If they were wrong, then the whole 'Club of Rome' thing about limited resources might be wrong too...?
The early bird gets the worm.
The first corporation that gets out there and starts commercial mining is going to be the big winner if this is so limited.
Should be an interesting few decades once they get started.
Let the government mine the least desirable asteroids for the public good. Leave the most profitable ones for the corporations to mine. I am sure the corporations would be happy to chip in to help pay for it with taxes...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The problem with this study is that it presumes that the materials collected will be used on earth. The idea behind Planetary Resources is that they would be used in space.
A bottle of water costs what? $1 maybe $2. The cost to put that bottle of water into space can range from $1,000 to $10,000. If Planetary Resources can find some asteroids with ice, extracting the water is not that difficult a task. The problem is getting the machine for mining into place because putting things into orbit is so crazy expensive.
Even if it costs them $5000 per litre to mine water they can still make a profit. Not because water itself it expensive, but because putting it into space is.
Make that 9. One is up a dinosaur's petrified ass.
Table-ized A.I.
We will always have a use for orbital mining as long as the amount of solar energy passing inside the Moon's orbit equals the world's known fossil fuel reserves *every minute*. It's not the metals or water that are important, it is access to that enormous energy flow, which lets us do most anything we want.
The assumption made by Elvis in his paper is wrong, though. 4.5 km/s from Low Earth Orbit only accesses 4% of the asteroids, but you don't want to mine from Low Orbit. You want to mine from the vicinity of the Moon, where you can get a free 1-2 km/s gravity slingshot from the Moon in both directions. Using the Moon plus 4.5 km/s propulsive velocity gives you 8.75 km/s relative to Low Orbit, and that accesses 60% of Near Earth asteroids. So right there you have a factor of 15 larger sample.
4.5 km/s is derived from the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation, and implies your propellant burn is 172% of your payload mass. However that equation assumes you start with all the propellant at the start of the mission. If you are mining for propellant, you can do that at several locations in Near Earth space, not just near the Moon. Refueling changes the propellant needs from exponential to linear with delta-V. Let's say you can refuel twice during the trip, for a total of three propulsive intervals. if you are allowed 172%/3 = 57.33% propellant each time, you can travel 2.04 km/s x 3 = 6.12 km/s velocity change for the same amount of propellant. Doing the same calculation relative to LEO, we get 10.4 km/s above LEO as our reach, which lets us access over 70% of Near Earth Asteroids.
Finally, let us assume electric propulsion, which has an exhaust velocity of 50 km/s, and that we can extract 20% of the mass of our vehicle as propellant. That gives us a range of 9 km/s per fueling stop. With 3 stops we can reach 27 km/s, which lets us not only access 100% of Near Earth Asteroids, but is beyond Solar System escape velocity. That means we can mine anywhere in the Solar System - Main belt asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, Kuiper Belt. The ability to refuel plus use of electric thrusters is a complete game changer.
> Right now we have absolutely no business case we can make that says, we can go get something from an asteroid more cheaply than we can get the material from earth.
Right now there are about 1000 functioning satellites in Earth orbit, with a procurement cost of around $150 million each, thus $150 billion in value. When they break or run out of fuel, they need to be replaced. If you had an orbital service station that could refuel and repair them, you are talking billions of dollars per year of value there. Comparing it to a terrestrial service station, you need a gas pump, service bay for repairs, and a "tow truck" to haul the satellite in for repairs and put it back afterwards.
The gas pump would have it's tanks filled by the asteroid mining if you can do that cheaper than sending fuel from Earth. Since many of the satellites are in Geosynchronous Orbit, they are very close in energy terms to the orbit you end up with after a "slingshot" gravity assist past the Moon on the return trip.
Whether the service station has people aboard, or is remote controlled from the ground I will leave to the mission designers. My guess is a few humans for the hard jobs, and a lot remote controlled (like fetching the satellite). Shipping new hardware to GEO costs about it's weight in gold to buy and launch, so if you can avoid doing that, it is extremely valuable.
If you think like a geologist or mining engineer, you look at the ore value of the various things you can get out of the asteroid rock. This is % extracted by weight x value/kg.
Platinum might be 1 ppm vs the total mass of the asteroid, and has a value of $46/gram. Since a gram is 1 ppm of a ton, the ore value is $46/ton of raw asteroid.
Launching *anything* on a Falcon 9 rocket costs $4.3 million/ton. Lets assume you can extract 20% of your raw asteroid in propellants, water, and metals. Their ore value is then $860,000 per ton, way more than the platinum. Precious metals are a nifty bonus if you can extract them, but the big money is basic commodities you can get in large volume.
I wonder if that one will crash before or after the student load bubble.
more money than sense?
The most valuable part of any asteroid mining is not going to have anything to do with its composition. It is going to be all about its location. Well, actually more about its delta vee relative to whatever platform we intend to build.
Regolith: asteroid dust. That will be the prime component in making stoneware. We will either use some form of water based chemistry to make concrete, or we will use solar furnaces to fashion ceramics. But either way, the biggest of our space ships will have outer shells and load bearing walls made of some form of stone. Expensive materials like metals and plastics will see minimal use.
Any exotic materials we might acquire in the process will be gravy. But the meat and potatoes will be characterized by sheer mass, that happens to already be headed in more or less the direction we want to go.
Will
even if you could pinpoint a solid platinum or diamond asteroid
its just too damn expensive to commercially return it to earth
when you start adding things up without magical fairytale math
there is no positive financial return
yes it could be done as some kind of pet project or
the winning move in a dick-waving contest
but after once or twice the person/people who are footing the bill are gonna pull out
... is probably the biggest factor that makes their concept of asteroid mining so unprofitable. If your buyer for the materials isn't sitting in Earths gravity well, or better yet, you can already perform some sort of manufacturing while still close to the asteroid, the equation for profitability should change quite a bit.
The Rare Earth hypothesis is much more scientific. I'm not sure why the Drake "rule of thumb" gets any mention on /.
I come here for the love
Star Wars is a historical account.
It isn't a work of fiction about a socialistic society run by a giant space navy.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It was built on the backs of Wookie slaves... Arrrrhggggghhh!
It seems somehow there was a bit of a discontinuity with easily available droids in the past vs the future (1,2,3 vs 4,5,6).
The argument is very sensitive to cost of getting to asteroids, and probably not just ones that cross Earth's orbit. Iron meteorites are rare, but not vanishingly so, and they are the ones that have heavy metals, not just Iron Group, VIIIb, but Cu, Ag, and Au metals. Since Iron Meteorites come from planetessimals that were hot enough to differentiate and have metal cores, ones the size of Ceres or Vesta, finding them might be a matter of getting beyond the vicinity of Earth to main best asteroids and mining those. The economics arguments here must assume that the current cost of getting out of low earth orbit and only a few million miles from Earth constrains the cost of getting to targets. Once you pay that cost, the cost of getting to main belt asteroids isn't much more. The cost of mining could be reduced by developing robots to do the work in microgravity.
It might take only one modest sized asteroid consisting mostly of metal to justify the cost, imagine that the amount of precious metals, Pd, Ir, Pt, Au, minded in total from the Earth's crust, and very like delivered to a solid crust by late bombatdment asteroid impacts, could be doubled or tripled by finding one such body and mining it. Ironically, the price of gold would be negatively affected, since finding an appreciable percentage of the total ever mined from Earth would depress the price. The upside is that finding these elements in abundance would open up new uses, note that Pt has major applications as an industrial catalyst, and maybe the other VIIIb metals, such as Rh and Re, as well as Ir, Pd could find new applications if their prices drop. Ag and Au, if found, have other applications than coinage.
Fe, Co, Ni and maybe even Cu and Zn are likely to be the most abundant metals, and maybe Mn, Cr, Ti, V, as well, even though their value is less, maybe the desired metals would be smelted in space and the robots would refine the ones worth returning to Earth and leave the others in space.
I don't know the detailed chemistry of iron meteorites, but if significant amounts of Rare Earths also exist in them, that would certainly sweeten the pot.