Billionaires and Polymaths Expected To Unveil a Plan To Mine Asteroids 531
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."
"Even if the asteroid was 20% gold" (Score:5, Interesting)
However, long term, it could very well end up being economical to return materials to earth. If any initial effort at mining of materials that are useful in orbit succeeds, then there will be an existing industrial base for mining asteroids, and the incremental cost of the next one will be less. As mining methods are refined and become more efficient and the industrial capacity in orbit expands, it becomes possible to create more and more of what you need in orbit instead of launching it from earth (which is where much of the expense comes from). Then, when all you have to do is turn the less valuable parts of an asteroid into shipping containers, load it with the more valuable stuff, add an electric propulsion system, then it might be worth returning stuff to earth.
But the bottom line is that mining asteroids is going to be most useful for getting lots of useful material in orbit (be it lunar or Lagrange points or whatnot) without having to go through the process of getting out of earth's gravity well.
Re:"Even if the Asteroid was 20% gold." (Score:4, Interesting)
Horribly inflated? By what measure?
It seems to me that gold is sitting at the intersection of the supply and demand curves.
The primary driver of the high gold demand is artificial (Man made/imaginary role as a parking space for power/wealth). In this case the LACK of supply is what drives demand, and for that reason any large influx of gold would have a much larger influence on price than a simple supply/demand market. Gold is not "used up" in that we have far too much gold on Earth for the current prices if only aesthetic and industrial applications are taken into account. It is rare and it sits there, take away either of those properties and it is not useful anymore.
Re:Ownership Rights (Score:4, Interesting)
Even under the most strict (and asinine) interpretation of international property claim laws, this would fall under salvage rights. The rocks are unowned and set adrift, and nobody can make a decent claim to ownership. Therefore any person who reaches them first is entitled to collect whatever salvageable goods they wish.
The real question will be whether they're allowed to make a claim to the asteroid to keep someone ELSE from mining it once they do the gruntwork of getting it in orbit. That could become a real barrier to growth in this area, given that current international laws prohibit any nation from laying claim to an astral body.
I suspect without a change in laws we'll start seeing wild-west style ownership take place in space, in the form of jammers and guns. "It's ours, because if you send a spacecraft here to take it we will shoot you down or disable your probe."
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:4, Interesting)
Never heard of that being available on the moon.
We barely know anything about what's available on the moon. However, as the moon has millions of years of asteroid strikes and as it doesn't have an atmosphere to burn things up, more of their material is likely concentrated where they landed, I suspect that the riches are just waiting to be stumbled upon.
It might take years of exploration to find a great asteroid as we know even less about them and how to get to them than the moon. Gravity on the moon is very, very weak and launching is fairly easy in terms of fuel and as 'step 2' of their plan is move the target to orbit the moon, it might even be 'cheaper'. The fact that it has gravity is a bonus as everything that we know about mining and processing minerals is rooted by a gravity well, and a moon colony could produce fuel and cargo containers.
That being said, the effort to find and move asteroids is certainly a worthwhile skill, but it'd be far more likely profitable to mine the moon.
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Interesting)
However, a concentrated Nickel-Iron asteroid as one other poster mentioned could be very lucrative.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, what if they can pull in materials that are a bitch to find here? It is possible that it might be easier to dump something from orbit rather than try to hunt it down and dig it up on Earth.
My first thought was plutonium.
With the current (Not completely unfounded) fears of launching it from Earth, we have effectively removed one of the two best and only power sources available, not to mention the only power source that works in the outer solar system where the Sun isn't as bright.
Plus Plutonium is pretty rare on earth. Current thought is most of it has sunk deep into the Earths mantle and core billions of years ago. Places humanity won't have the capacity to even reach let alone mine anywhere in the next couple hundred years if that.
Having such a power source available already in orbit ready for refinement would mean an explosion in propulsion technology, space probes, and other powered crafts.
There are other rare and heavy isotopes and atoms that had a similar effect happen on Earth, and would be quite valuable. There are so many reasons why this is a good idea!
The real lesson here is to ignore the naysayers.
<rant>
It doesn't surprise me the anti-technology crowd that has taken over the slashdot forums would be against it so ruthlessly.
As long as the technology is being developed, these people bitch and moan how unnecessary the tech would be. Yet they are the first to bitch loudest and hardest when they personally can not avail themselves of that same tech once mass manufactured.
"Rawr space technology is such a waste of money! Take that 1% of the federal budget wasted on NASA to give to me!! Oh noz, my doctor just detected I have cancer! Plzplz doctor use that space technology to cure it!"
I just wish these people would totally ignore the science they hate so much and die in their 40s like nature intended, and stop holding the rest of humanity back with them.
Sorry for the </rant>
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a lot of Earth's resource rich areas are... ancient large asteroid impact craters.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right about the water. But a 500 ton asteroid is about 7 meters in diameter. The linked pdf is really neat - it's got a lot of interesting details. Once you build it into a space station, yeah, then it'll be as big as the ISS.
You are correct about the hydrox fuel also, sort of. The first one has to be Xenon, but they did figure they'd need about 40 tons of LH2/LO2 to bring back 1000 tons of asteroid that is about 40% water. So successive trips can be done with LH2/LO2 once you've got a boat and some fuel, and of course if you can use part of the asteroid itself for fuel.... With LH2/LO2 you can also bring back much larger asteroids. Or you can go down to the moon and get unlimited water from the moon's poles at that point. It becomes an energy problem only, rather than both a materials and energy problem.
I've been thinking about Ceres. That one is entirely covered in ice (more water than all the Earth's oceans). If you're refining water into rocket fuel all you have to do is get your gear out there and Ceres has the fuel for the return trip. The upside is that we don't have to find it. We know where that one is. The DAWN mission is about to go out that way. (am not talking about bringing back the whole minor planet, just some water). Surface gravity is just .03g, so landing and blasting off is no big deal. The downside is that it's not a near-earth asteroid so travel time is a drag. But there's no limit to how much water you can bring back.
Once you have an unlimited fuel depot in orbit around the moon though you can do some really neat things. Manned craft only have to get to LEO, and can be met with the rest of the fuel they need to go anywhere in the Solar system. Things like habitat modules could be lifted to LEO, where they're met by robot rockets that can move them into whatever place we want them. Not having to launch with all the fuel, water and air for the whole trip opens up everything. Maybe some robotic gardens or something could be arranged as well. That would be really cool.
I'm getting very excited about this project. I am told that the project is for real, though the other stuff above is speculation.
Re:Steel mills are rather heavy (Score:4, Interesting)
sjbe sneered:
No, instead you have to lift all the (non-existent) processing equipment instead. Are you under the impression that a steel mill is somehow not very heavy? Of course none of this technology is being developed because even if you did get it into orbit, you need a product to return to earth to make the financing possible.
Man, do you think small.
First off, judging from the composition of meteors found here on Earth, iron asteroids should mostly be composed of nickel-iron alloys. The percentage of nickel in the two most common components, kamacite and taenite, is MUCH higher than that found in most steel manufactured on Earth. Meteoric iron is highly corrosion-resistant and extremely durable, and it needs NO smelting to turn it into construction materials - it's pure enough to build stuff with straight from the sky.
It WILL need to be MELTED, so that it can be formed into girders, sheets, pipes, and so on, but that's actually trivial. The Earth/Moon orbit receives more than enough sunlight to use as a heat source. Simple parabolic mirrors made out of aluminized Mylar will do the trick. Yes, presses, rolling mills, stampers, and crucibles designed to work in microgravity environments will be necessary, but the hardest part of the task is the Bessemer process - and that's a skippable step.
As for needing to deliver a product to Earth to make a profit - nonsense! Why send it to Earth, which already has lots and lots of iron, when you can use it in space to construct stuff like an orbital shipyard and drydock facility, true SPACE ships (i.e. - ships designed to operate only in space, and never to touch down on a planetary surface at all), orbital habitats, factories, and labs, and so on? How much do you think Planetary Resources can charge for building a spacecraft capable of reaching Mars?
Finally, everyone in this discussion seems to have fastened onto NASA's 500-ton asteroid thought experiment as the size of the rock PR will attempt to lasso. I think you're all thinking too small, again. If they can capture a 500-ton asteroid, why can't they grab a 5,000-ton asteroid? It'd take a little longer to coax it into a useful orbit, but the same technology that would allow capture of a 500-tonner should be scalable to one 10X that size - and that would provide a helluva lot more raw material for in-space construction purposes.
PR is a MAJOR braintrust with some extremely big bucks behind it. I suspect they've thought this through a lot better than you or I have.
Regardless, we'll find out exactly what they're proposing to do on Tuesday.
Re:it's the constraints of the world (Score:5, Interesting)
Long way off, seriously where were we in 1912, where were we in 1812. The leaps humanity has made in two hundreds years have been enormous. Just look at computing in the last 25 years, in fact if it wasn't for computers you could say the last thirty years were wasted in bloated stagnation of adulation of psuedo celebrities and the rich and greedy or own little utterly pathetic and pointless dark ages. A mini dark age that the internet is lifting us out of by spreading the truth and exposing the lies.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Interesting)