Billionaires and Polymaths Expected To Unveil a Plan To Mine Asteroids

dumuzi writes "A team including Larry Page, Ram Shriram and Eric Schmidt of Google, director James Cameron, Charles Simonyi (Microsoft executive and astronaut), Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot), Chris Lewicki (NASA Mars mission manager), and Peter Diamandis (X-Prize) have formed a new company called Planetary Resources, and are expected to announce plans on April 24th to mine asteroids. A study by NASA released April 2nd claims a robotic mission could capture a 500 ton asteroid and bring it to orbit the moon for $2.6 billion. The additional cost to mine the asteroid and return the ores to Earth would make profit unlikely even if the asteriod was 20% gold."

Re:A bad idea that "sounds good".

[Sarten-X]

The weight of the space shuttle is approximately four times as much as the 500-ton asteroid, and unfortunately we've recently seen what happens when it enters Earth's atmosphere (at the right angle to let it hit the ground). Pieces are scattered, and there's little damage to things on the ground.

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, consider Mir, which weighed about 150 tons. Its orbit was intended to break it up (though burning it entirely wasn't the goal), and it did so, with only a few fragments surviving to hit the ocean.

Causing actual damage with an asteroid seems to require far more mass (or at least significantly better aerodynamics than a space station). Even orbiting the moon, the Earth is very far away, and cities are very small. A failsafe rocket to deliver a slight nudge is enough to steer the rock into a much nicer entry orbit.

Disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist.

Re:A bad idea that "sounds good".

[0123456]

The space shuttle has a mass of around 100 tons and is very fragile. A 500 ton asteroid would have a much better chance of surviving re-entry, but then you'd just have a 500 ton rock. We've got plenty of those already.

Compared to the moon

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

To use lunar resources you have to land and take off in a gravity well. Distance matters much less than delta-V for space operations.

Asteroids are differentiated. Some are mostly pure nickel-iron. Never heard of that being available on the moon.

Re:"Even if the Asteroid was 20% gold."

[Larson2042]

They're not going to have the 20% gold problem, anyways. If you had bothered to read the study, you would have known that the asteroids targeted would be C-type, which are full of useful volatiles and organics that can be turned into handy things like water, and hydrogen, and oxygen (which also happen to be pretty good rocket fuels). Any asteroid mining isn't going to be returning stuff to earth. It's going to be using it for other purposes IN ORBIT. That's where the profit comes in: you don't have to launch 500 tons into lunar orbit at today's launch prices.

Plus, that 2.6 billion cost estimate was for a "Prime contractor design, test & build based on NASA-provided specs" with NASA insight/oversight. I'd be willing to bet that a wholly private effort could do a similar mission at a cost quite a bit less than that. (I would also point you to the NASA study that stated the cost difference between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and a NASA developed Falcon 9 was more than half [scientificamerican.com].)

Re:Compared to the moon

[poly_pusher]

The moon has been shown to be composed of materials that are very similar to the earths crust and the moon has not experienced nearly the same level of volcanic activity of the earth. The earths crust does not contain very many resources. What resources is does contain comes from that volcanic activity. In other words the moon is not a good candidate for the resources we desire.

Re:It's even dumber than that.

[artfulshrapnel]

Don't forget about real-estate. A 500 ton asteroid would have nearly as much interior space as the ISS, so all you have to do is hollow the thing out (selling the resulting materials of course) then seal it, brace it, and bolt on some air tanks and maneuvering thrusters. You've constructed the world's roomiest space station!

Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.

What do you want to bet this asteroid retrieval system will be configured to use a hydrogen/oxygen engine of some kind? They could refill and relaunch it off the first asteroid for a fraction of the original launch costs!

Not that easy unfortunately

[sjbe]

Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.

The economics are nowhere near that simple. Let's say you have a big store of rocket fuel up there and ignore (for a moment) the cost of obtaining it. Then what? You still need payload which mostly has to come from Earth and the key processing equipment which also has to come from Earth. You haven't escaped the cost of the launch, you've simply added to the complexity and thus the cost.

Then there is the problem of actually developing the technology to mine and process these resources. We don't have industrial scale factories that are space worthy. Even if we did, they still have to be launched into space. We don't even have anyone working on them because there is no reasonable prospect of a return on investment. To get financing you have to have a product you can sell back here on earth and there is very little prospect of an economic return in the reasonably near future. Most of the economic benefits to the private sector are indirect ones (spinoff technologies, etc) for the foreseeable future.

Re:It's even dumber than that.

[dbIII]

let's say that gold from an asteroid has a slightly different chemical composition than gold from planet Earth

It looks like US science education has jumped the shark. Notice he didn't write isotope so there's no excuse there, and there's nothing wrong with his written English which indicates at least a high school graduate if not more. Maybe we need to get bands to wear those periodic table t-shirts on MTV or something.

Re:It's even dumber than that.

[bryan1945]

Or we could, you know, do both. Radical idea, I know.

Re:It's even dumber than that.

[TheRaven64]

Plutonium is rare because it is the heaviest vaguely stable element (meaning that only trace amounts were created in the star exploded to create the elements that form our solar system and because its most stable form has a half life of 80 million years. The latter means that around 57 plutonium half lives have elapsed since the sun formed. That means that about 7x10^-16% of what was formed initially still exists. To put that in perspective, if an amount of plutonium equal to the total biomass on the Earth had been formed, there would be 1g left.

Or, to put it another way, if there had originally been a quantity of plutonium equal to the mass of jupiter formed, then there would now be somewhere around double the mass of the great pyramid in Giza left, scattered all over the solar system. That amount is a pretty optimistic estimate, especially if you exclude any that ended up in the Sun as irrelevant.

In fact, if you assume that all of the matter in the solar system except the Sun was originally plutonium, then that still only gives you three times the mass of the great pyramid in Giza (about 1.8x10^7 metric tons) of plutonium left, scattered all over the solar system. Imagine if you took the great pyramid, ground it up, and scattered it just over the Earth's surface - even if it had the energy density of antimatter it probably wouldn't be worthwhile to find and collect it. If it's scattered all over the solar system (meaning most of it will be inside large masses, and most of it inside Jupiter), it's not going to be even remotely energy positive to find it.

Or, for the TLDR version, even assuming that there is vastly more plutonium around than there is actually likely to be, it's still not even remotely worth harvesting.

In future, please try not to assume that just because people have an understanding of the workings of science and the limitations of (current) technology, and don't treat it as a magical solution to all possible problems, that they're anti-technology.