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."
A bad idea that "sounds good". (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
And when the mission makes a mistake and an asteroid goes plummiting into a major city it will cause trillions of dollars in damage and massive loss of life and potentially create a cloud of dust that will cause an ice age.
I'm sorry, but no, this isn't a good idea. If you don't even have the technology to completely destroy an asteroid yet, then you can't fully control it and shouldn't be trying to "bring it to orbit". Maybe the first team will succeed because they have the smarts, but then when its shown to be profitable, the morons will get involved with fresh VC, etc.
It's even dumber than that. (Score:2, Insightful)
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
And a shorter distance.
And with an atmosphere.
And so on and so forth.
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And a humungous gravity well.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
the point of the plan is that it is possible.
not that it is profitable right now, but that it is a possible backup plan to get resources(ore) should we need them in the future.
why does that matter? to shut the fuck up people complaining that we will run out of mineral X in 20 years and all civilization will be doomed because of that.
overly right wing? I think my opinion on this is left wing, actually.
another thing is that we wouldn't necessarily want the resources to be dumped back to earth just to shoot them up to space again, but use them in space.
Compared to the moon (Score:5, Informative)
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: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:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of people are used to space being a government endeavour. When it's NASA/ESA/JAXA/etc it's perfectly natural for the public to have an opinion, since it's their money being spent. It'll be interesting to see what happens as more private ventures move into space, and don't have to answer to a majority.
Not that it will stop the comments, of course. We certainly hear enough opinions about what Apple and Google should do.
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What these guys are doing probably WILL lead to mining the moon. Because the asteroids have water, and that water can be made into LH2/LO2 fuel that makes mining the moon not only possible but profitable - especially mining the moon for more water to make into even more fuel to sustain other space efforts. They should be able to SELL that fuel, water and oxygen at huge rates to other people who want to do things in space. But they have to get the asteroids first.
It's all about the water. If you can get
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Funny)
Unless we crack the sucker open like an egg and suck out all the goodness from the center.
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a lot of Earth's resource rich areas are... ancient large asteroid impact craters.
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Why wouldn't there be a vein of iron ore on the Moon? There are veins of it on the Earth.
You have to find them first. If you're sitting on a giant nickel iron rock then no hunting is necessary.
Re:Compared to the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
Why wouldn't there be a vein of iron ore on the Moon? There are veins of it on the Earth.
The moon doesn't have veins of iron ore because it doesn't have an atmosphere that contains oxygen and never experienced the Great Oxygen Catastrophe [wikipedia.org], and thus does not have the banded iron formations [wikipedia.org] which is the source of almost all the minable iron on the earth's surface.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
The problem with the Earth and moon is that yes, they're big and there are lots of resources in them, but all the ones we're really interested in are heavy and thus concentrated at their cores. It's tough to get down there.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are small and their cores are readily accessible, not that you need to do that because they're not differentiated like planets and big moons are. Although if you do mine one from the inside out, when you're done you have an awesome space castle.
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What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
I heard they're looking for something called 'Unobtanium'.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
I dunno, maybe........resources that are not on this rock? i.e. in its gravity well?
Why does the bulk of humanity always have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future?
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your "future" seems to be somewhere around 1970. Today's challenge is not how to find and use ever more resources, it is how to use and re-use the existing ones without making the planet unliveable. Given the current context of impending climatic and ecosystem breakdown, mining asteroids is nothing but an outrageous red herring.
I continue to be astounded by the number of "technologists" in this forum who appear stuck in an almost Soviet mindset of science, where the future is all mining and flying cars and space exploration. It's as if you haven't noticed the last 30 years of scientific advance and all the new constraints that humanity must now work within.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an impoverished view which will lead to nothing but stagnation, decline, and ultimately extinction.
it's the constraints of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
that lead to stagnation, decline and extinction if humans don't get sufficiently wise and active about mitigating them.
_Wish upon A Star_ works in Disney movies. Mother Nature is unimpressed.
Re:it's the constraints of the world (Score:4, Insightful)
If we don't get off this rock, we will follow the path of the dinosaurs or even worse. Whether by interplanetary impact or a hugely destructive solar storm or a disastrous disease mutation etc.
On this world we live in borrowed time and probability will catch up to use sooner or later, suck it up, extinction is inevitable when you are bound to a planet, it is just the way of things.
So reality, why worry about the abstract notion of an asteroid they capture crashing into the planet. They have got so much else to do before they even get there, leaving basically decades to discuss the issues. Getting into orbit cheaply being the first issue. Low cost space stations next (obviously capable of far more than just asteroid mining). Accurately mapping and scanning surrounding asteroids, your doing far more than scanning suitable for mining ones, that level of scanning could map every single high risk of impact asteroid. Then there is the non-nuclear shifting of the orbit of the asteroid, that some propulsion method would get as cheaply around the solar system.
You know what really pisses me off, narcissistic fuckwits wasting the planets resources on supercars, mansions, mega yachts, jewellry etc. etc. etc. all those wasted resources, all that pollution for what. Seriously what the fuck are those morons proving, how big a pollution pushog they can be or being the winner in the race to be the most wastefully useless arsehole on the planet.
Those resources being spent on expanding the future of humanity seems a whole lot wiser than using to try to feed the insatiable ego of psychopathic arse holes.
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.
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I dispute that getting off Earth will solve our problems. Our problems go a whole lot deeper than that. In fact we seem far more likely to destroy ourselves than a meteor crashing anytime soon.
While getting off the Earth won't solve the problems, it will provide parallel opportunities for alternate solutions to be found. What a Luddite view of humanity might offer is simply one possible "solution" to the issues facing mankind, where the tendency on the Earth is more toward a single "global" solution to the issues facing mankind.
What has helped mankind to be able to solve problems it has faced in the past is the ability to have many different but parallel attempts to solve those problems being do
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Then fly off to a planet with no ecosystem, and generate one from scratch with our great knowledge of ecosystems, great enough apparently to create a sustaining biosphere from nothing, but NOT great enough to have allowed us to successfully manage a perfectly-working one we already had without fucking it up.
Yes, we call that "learn by doing". It works pretty well so I don't see what your concern is here. We don't know how to mine asteroids either. And I would suggest figuring it out by trying to mine an asteroid for the same reason as above.
And if we were "fucking up" the Earth biosphere, then it wouldn't be "perfectly working", would it?
Cart before the horse (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I see that I'm outvoted by incurable, irrational techno-utopians.
I too am optimistic, as it happens. But only cautiously so – not recklessly, like you people are. Given humanity's past, there is no reason to believe that we can't rise to the current environmental challenge. But we're taking our time seeing the problem, as evidenced by this frivolous chat about mining asteroids. Right now the world a half-century hence is looking a scary place, and even in the best-case scenario a lot of permanent damage is going to be done to the biosphere. If and when we solve this problem – mitigating the effects of consumption rather than finding resources for more of it – then we can perhaps start thinking about mining asteroids. Until that point, you are putting the cart before the horse.
I have a strange feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about, that we're not even on the same page here. That's sad, because I'm talking hard science, and the solutions will come largely from hard science too. They include energy tech, biotech and all kinds of innovation in farming, town-planning and architecture. They don't include mining asteroids.
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First, you need the technology to get into space for a reasonable amount of money. Space X and a few others are working on this. Money spent on that kind of R&D is spent here, on earth, and creates jobs and spinoff technology. Next is working in space. Improvements in solar cell technology could power things here as well as in space, and that's not even mentioning the whole solar power satellite aspect.
People talk about spending money on "space" like we just stuff cash into a rocket and blast it into or
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Not really. I think any attempt at mining asteroids now is silly and doomed to economic (if not technical) failure. That does not mean I believe that "Today's challenge [...] is how to use and re-use the existing [resources] without making the planet unliveable." That's the essential part to the stagnation and decline. No matter how much you re-use, you're going to get less out at every step. As time goes on under such a system, eve
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I want my flying car. Now! It was promised ages ago.
Given the amount of money that our civilisation wastes in all sorts of ways there is no real reason why we can't do both. It is all politics.
I doubt very much if we would even know about our impending climatic and ecosystem breakdown if it wasn't for them there sat-e-lites that go a whizzing around the planet.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Informative)
Or we could, you know, do both. Radical idea, I know.
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Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
We fear change. It's a survival characteristic.
It's also a survival instinct to move on to new territory when your tribe has grown too large and you cannot distinguish yourself from the other males as a suitable mating partner.
Stupidity rears its head (Score:3)
Are you done?
The reason it's valuable to have a billion pounds of iron ore in orbit is because...well....if you want to build something, it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper (in the long run, when we invest the initial money required to develop the technology) to work with an asteroid than to ship the refined material piecewise into orbit!
Just why the hell is this so difficult for someone to understand? Oh, I know--because you actually have to be thinking progressively about moving forward into the futur
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm thinking they don't want to bring 'Mineral X' down to Earth unless it's in ton lots. What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space. Yes, it could take $2.6 billion to bring a random 500 ton asteroid to lunar orbit. It would cost over 10 billion to launch that 500 tons into orbit at the current guestimated going rate of $10,000 per pound. What can you do with 500 tons of materials in orbit? Lots of things. 500 tons of very high grade iron ore, the purity of which we haven't seen on Earth in almost a millenium, would make the basis for the frame of a decent sized space station. For comparison, the ISS at full buildout is about 37 billion plus overruns and weighs in approximately 450 tons plus about 13 billion so far in supplies etc to date. Grabbing a carbonaceous asteroid could offset some of that 13 billion on the 'next-gen' space stations, when we learn to 'convert' that carbon into foodstuffs in space.
Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid, but add a machine shop as well, adn we can duplicate the factory complex and build out from there, at ZERO boost from Earth costs. Again, why would we want to send asteroidal material to Earth when we need it so badly in space?
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
First, on the marketing side... let's say that gold from an asteroid has a slightly different chemical composition than gold from planet Earth. IANA geologist, but you can tell (chemically) where a diamond came from, so wouldn't you be able to tell whether gold came from an Asteroid or from Terra Firma? Either way (chemical signature or not), they can bring down a few hundred tons of "Space Gold" and Debeers can tell husbands that only the men who really love their women will buy space gold at a 500% markup.
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.
Lastly, this is necessary prep for the future. As the parent post said, it's kind of necessary for eventually working in space. It'd be way easier to mine and refine metals out in space for a moon base or space station than it would to bring everything up from Earth.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
This is one of the things I really don't like about Slashdot, to be honest. I have a passing interest in chemistry - the last time I undertook any serious study of the subject was almost a decade ago in high school.
I guess knowing the intricacies of covalent bonds and isotopes is really critical to my everyday life!
I like coming to Slashdot because we have a wide variety of geeks here. Someone can go off on a tangent about, I don't know, toaster ovens and there will be people in here talking about whether H
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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. (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.
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It only takes a little bit of alloying metals to make most different kinds of high-grade steel. Some of those are available from asteroids or the moon quite easily. Shipping a little of some of the rarer alloying elements like chromium up is still a lot less mass than boosting everything. Nickel is the other major element of nickel-iron asteroids and it is great both on its own and in alloys. High performance steels and nickel superalloys are truly high-tech stuff - often the best materials at any price, n
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It only takes a little bit of alloying metals to make most different kinds of high-grade steel. Some of those are available from asteroids or the moon quite easily. Shipping a little of some of the rarer alloying elements like chromium up is still a lot less mass than boosting everything. Nickel is the other major element of nickel-iron asteroids and it is great both on its own and in alloys. High performance steels and nickel superalloys are truly high-tech stuff - often the best materials at any price, not just on the basis of cost.
The problem is process control - you need to add the elements in just the right proportion and then have a proper temperature cycle, etc, which greatly increases complexity. With titanium it could probably be as simple as an electron beam gun heating up raw rutile with oxygen escaping and leaving pure titanium. One thing you have in space is plenty of low-quality vacuum !
There are also large quantities of platinum-group metals in some asteroids that have many, many technological uses but are just in too short supply on earth to use as much as engineers and chemists would like.
I agree.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Raw materials that aren't at the bottom of a gravity well.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, most the metal in this planet is below the crust. The metals we do have in the crust is from the lower levels of the earth squirting little bits out every now and then. An asteroid does not have that problem.
No no, they got it all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Hardcore math time. (Score:3)
Let's look at the real numbers.
The asteroid belt is over a THOUSAND times further from the Earth than the Moon is. It's over 200 million miles away.
The asteroids in the asteroid belt are about SIXTEEN times further BETWEEN THEM than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
What that means is that going from asteroid A to asteroid B is about the same distance as going from Earth orbit to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and back to the Moon
and back to Earth orbit
and ba
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Yes, it's a long way. Farther than to the chemist's, even. But it doesn't really matter so long as we have some patience. What matters is energy production mass and reaction mass, and both of these can be reduced to quite low levels if we are willing to take enough time to do the transfer. With current or near future solar technology and ion drives, it is feasible.
See this on applied chaotic orbits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hardcore math time. (Score:4, Insightful)
then you do not have a grasp of how far away the asteroids are.
If you: a) Think that all asteroids are in the belt between Mars & Jupiter. And b) think of space in terms of distance, not fuel/velocity/energy. Then you don't understand enough to comment.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'We Only Need Earth' religion DEMANDS we do everything from Earth, that there are no exploitable resources offworld. They would have had each and every settler from Europe to San Francisco to pack every single gram they needed in supplies and tools plus the entire vehicle used to get across the ocean, all the way from Europe to San Francisco. At those kind of costs, nobody would have ever left, which suits the 'We Only Need Earth' crowd just fine, thank you.
I've been told a famous man once said 'The meek shall inherit the Earth'. That man was spot on. The rest of us are going to figure out a way to go to space and make it pay.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Crazy... that can be quite a desirable characteristic.
Re:It's even dumber than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Large, impractical, grandiose, ridiculously expensive symbolic gestures?
It's a better idea than invading other countries for resources. Probably less expensive too.
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And that's really the issue. As populations rise and the need for water and arable land increases, not to mention that it's awfully hard to hide catastrophic policies that kill tens of thousands (or in the case of the Great Leap Forward millions), the cost of extraction is going to rise. We are also likely going to have grabbed the cheaper sources of metals at some point, and as those prices keep rising, the economics of mining asteroids will become more viable.
The whole point behind developing concepts is
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.
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Did you miss the part where it's going to be put into orbit around the moon?
Honestly, I think Slashdot has even stupider, more closed-minded people than the Westboro Baptist Church and the people who attend the Creationist Museum. For a place that's supposed to be a hang-out for tech-heads, the people here are pathetic.
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Don't you understand? One non-technical paragraph is enough for me to make a completely informed decision about what a group of scientists does.
I don't even have to have studied any of that because I can use a mixture of quick, logic, common sense and, If I feel really smart, maybe even google something.
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And when the mission makes a mistake and an asteroid goes plummiting into a major city it will cause trillions of dollars in damage and massive loss of life and potentially create a cloud of dust that will cause an ice age.
The former would probably require the mission planners suddenly forgetting Newton's and Kepler's laws en masse and all the trajectory-calculating computers to burn out simultaneously. For the latter, a 500 t asteroid is too lightweight.
Actual distance between earth and moon is huge (Score:2, Insightful)
The diameter of earth is less than 13'000 km. The distance between earth and moon varies (elliptical path) but even when the moon is at its closest, the distance is more than 363'000 km. That's nearly 30 times the diameter of earth. This picture [trickofmind.com] illustrates it pretty well. I think that a lot of people fail to grasp that scale due to having seen very deceiving images of the solar system (all planets and the sun presented relatively close to each other) at the classroom walls when they were young.
Even factori
Re:A bad idea that "sounds good". (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Sorry... the 2,000-ton figure was launch mass, which I guess means fuel, boosters, and so forth. Wikipedia failed me.
I'll revise my statement: Though the 500-ton rock may be large enough to survive Earth's atmosphere, it requires a combination of incredibly bad luck, incredibly bad planning, and incredibly missing failsafes for the rock to actually reach Earth.
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"Even if the Asteroid was 20% gold." (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Even if the Asteroid was 20% gold." (Score:5, Informative)
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:"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.
Asteroid Defense? Orbital Construction? (Score:3, Insightful)
Third: threaten to bring the whole thing to earth (Score:2)
Control of a sufficiently sized asteroid could potentially make the men and women who control it rulers of the entire planet.
Re:Third: threaten to bring the whole thing to ear (Score:4, Funny)
Great, now we're going to have an asteroid arms race. The U.S. and India will be threatening to crush Germany with a huge rock if it doesn't capitulate to their demands and cease "construction" of its own "weapon of mass destruction" aka their own huge orbiting rock.
Welcome to the brave new world of tomorrow....
the beginning of (Score:2)
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I'd be happy with a Kickstarter to reboot K240 (Score:2)
But I'll take this, too.
The moon? (Score:2)
Why the moon? Why not bring it into low orbit around earth? What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously though, gold is a bubble metal. It has very limited practical value and is desirable only because it's desirable. Bring back billions of tons of the stuff and it ceases to be desirable, or at least will be no more special than iron or uranium. Mining an asteroid actually uses up real resources so is not a paper shuffling exercise that creates financial paper products. It had better result in something ac
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The summary added the gold bit. It's very unlikely they're planning on mining gold (exclusively). They're probably going to mine an asteroid for everything they can get out of it - every metal and mineral you can think of. I seriously doubt they're going to do a 500 ton asteroid either (unless it's as a demonstration). If you can move a 500 ton asteroid, you can move a 5000 ton one, and their press release specifically talked about adding "trillions" of dollars to the global GDP.
Not to mention a cheap s
Ohhhhhh! (Score:5, Funny)
Ross Perot Jr. (son of Ross Perot)
Thanks for explaining that; we would have never figured it out on our own!
Re:Ohhhhhh! (Score:4, Funny)
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No, but having a Jr on the end does typically mean it's the son of someone by the same name.
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Unobtanium (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure that right now it's 100% Unobtanium.
Side benefit (Score:2)
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Sadly, people aren't very good at taking a long-term view, in general.
Apparently some are. And they have enough money to see this through. This project is going to actually happen. It's going to be privately funded, so it's not subject to NASA budget cuts.
The people involved stand to make a lot of money doing it, too. Huge money.
Scientists are naive (Score:5, Insightful)
You only make a small part of the money involved in capturing an asteroid on commercially-viable minerals/metals like gold.
What people will pay for a space rock is way more important than what people will pay for gold. A 500 ton asteroid could be 500 tons of rock. But that would make millions of lumps of Space Rock that could be sold by The Franklin Mint in a special collectors set.
"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.
Meanwhile (Score:3, Funny)
A committee has asked Michael Bay to make a film depicting the worst case scenario of this project.
Re:Meanwhile (Score:5, Funny)
The big surprise will be... (Score:3)
when we discover it's already been done.
SpaceX's costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, here we are.
Bringing the asteroid down is a mistake (Score:3)
We have plenty of resources on earth as it is... where we lack them is in high earth orbit. Move the asteroid to high earth orbit and keep it there. Mine it there to build things in orbit for orbital use. That way they don't need to be launched.
We need a source of resources off planet that are closer then the moon. A stepping stone. If we start moving asteroids into high earth orbit, cracking them for their resources, and turning them into the fuel for our space industry we can eliminate a lot of problems we're having with our gravity well. For one thing, we can use the waste material that we have no particular use for to insulate a better space station... one that doesn't allow so much radiation into the habitat.
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Insightful point. To process all that metal, we would need some way of heating and melting it into containers, then some way of fabricating rocket and space station parts from that metal. If there is water, that could be split into hydrogen and oxygen.
Sounds like the perfect way to build a ring world. Send out one mining ship to the asteroid belt. Mining ship fabricates and builds more mining ships. This continues until there are mining ships all along the asteroid belt. The mining ships then proceed to st
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We've launched objects more massive than 500 tons into space before (2,030-ton space shuttle). Some of those objects have crash-landed. Humanity wasn't wiped out.
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."
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There have been many instances where satellites in orbit have changed ownership with money transferred here on earth. Bringing things back to earth is not needed.
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How would the UN enforce that treaty? Does anyone think they could get the Security Council to vote for enforcement? Anyway, the treaties do not say what some people think. Space resources can be developed and owned, just not as real estate or unmined minerals.
The "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies" allows in Article 1: "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for
Re:Typical 1% Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid.
Ask the 1% what they would do with $2.6 billion and they'd say "invest in some hedge funds, HFT companies, etc." These guys want to do something that a) generates more actual wealth and b) advances our capabilities as a species.