
Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived' - ptrptr
http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4
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foxyv
"It used to cost $35 million (£28 million) to send one person up on a Soyuz
rocket. Today, Virgin Galactic hopes to get space tourists into space for
something like $250,000 (£200,000), Goldman says."

This made me wince. Suborbital is not anywhere near the cost of orbital
vehicles. Although the cost HAS gone down. A SpaceX Dragon 2 costs about $70M
with a crew of up to 7 reducing the cost to $10M a head. (When they start
manned flights.) But this isn't 3 orders of magnitude =/

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boznz
I would hope SpaceX and Blue Origin would have think-tanks planning out these
things, after all once you have a shit tonne of re-usable rockets waiting for
customers you may as well put them to work.

Problem I see is robotics, nobody wants to go to the effort to put up a space
miner with all the human problems so all the work is focusing on robotics that
could do this, however this is something that could ramp up quickly into a
race once someone starts making a concerted effort or books some flights as
the payoffs are enormous for the winner and Humanity.

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netzone
Yup. All it takes is that someone starts the ball rolling making a serious
effort, then everyone will follow suit and we might see a new "space age".

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payne92
The article highlights the problem: one asteroid would tank the entire
platinum market.

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Arizhel
Yes, but the other factor is, with much cheaper platinum available, new
applications are likely to be found which were previously ignored due to cost.
Today, for instance, (this is an unrealistically simplistic example) if you
could make something out of either copper or platinum, with copper not working
quite as well but still fairly close, you're obviously going to choose copper
because platinum is so expensive. If platinum is now cheaper than copper,
you're going to choose that instead.

However, this does make me wonder: are there any applications where platinum
would actually make more sense than what we're already using? It doesn't
conduct electricity better than copper, for instance. So aside from catalytic
converters and jewelry (which we already use platinum for, so it'll just drop
the cost rather than expand the market), what is it good for?

Secondly, what about other metals? Surely these asteroids have other valuable
metals besides platinum, such as iron and nickel. Considering how much we use
copper, we could really use a copper-rich asteroid.

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nickjarboe
Fuel cells are expensive due mostly to the cost of platinum.

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placeybordeaux
It'll be very interesting to see the cost-benefit calculation of chucking the
raw materials down the gravity well vs parking them in orbit and waiting to
sell it at a premium as they could easily beat the price of anyone that wants
to fly something up.

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bglazer
How does one go about getting a 500 meter wide asteroid back to Earth's
surface? It seems like there is a non-zero chance of accidentally creating
Chicxulub v2.

Or do you just leave it in low earth orbit and build a space factory?

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Arizhel
Much of the asteroid is likely not that valuable; it's not like there's pure
ingots of metals floating around out there. So you'd want to have some kind of
refinery in space which can capture the asteroid and extract the valuable
ores.

Here's something helpful: [http://www.space.com/15391-asteroid-mining-space-
planetary-r...](http://www.space.com/15391-asteroid-mining-space-planetary-
resources-infographic.html)

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Clownshoesms
So will it be "first in, first served" on all the roids/matter in the
universe?

A world where Goldman has first dibs on these resources, or any say in the
matter at all actually, is a grim one to me.

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csense
The money has to come from somewhere. Why shouldn't private spaceflight use
our financial system's existing infrastructure for raising capital? In my
mind, spending tax dollars on space is fine for exploration and science. But
when it comes to industrial development, letting the free market sort it out
is a good thing -- if asteroid mining's profitable, this part of our space
presence can become self-funding.

As far as who owns what, I imagine the first successful exploitation of
extraterrestrial resources will quickly be followed by the governments of
countries with this capability hammering out some kind of international
agreement on who can mine where.

