
Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources - jseliger
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/08/asteroid_mining_by_planetary_resources_google_billionaires_are_backing_an_outlandish_venture_.single.html
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squonk
The technology to discover and retrieve minerals from asteroids is likely to
be simpler than resolving politics and economics of it:

In order to sell the minerals, there must be a way to attain ownership.

How does one come to own an asteroid, or the minerals it contains?

A land grab under a single government is manageable. When there are 200
sovereign states, who decides which asteroids are owned by whom? First to
discover? First to land? First to return minerals? Passed though a parsec I
have rights to? Or perhaps you don't own the minerals until you cross low-
earth orbit with them in your possession. Sign me up as an asteroid pirate.

If a company does attain ownership of an asteroid, can they sell the asteroid
before ever landing on it? Will asteroid futures be traded on the CME?

If an asteroid is found to contain 100 tons of palladium, what happens to the
palladium market? (Cha-ching! I hold put options on Pd!)

Ya, far more interesting....

Wired started a dialog with:
[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/opinion-
asteroid-m...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/opinion-asteroid-
mining/)

Discussed ownership, but there is no answer.

The Economist touched on it: "The most important members of the team, then,
may not be the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who put up the drive and
the money, nor the engineers who build the hardware that makes it all
possible, but the economists who try to work out the effect on the price of
platinum when a mountain of the stuff arrives from outer space."

<http://www.economist.com/node/21553419>

~~~
cwilson
You've clearly not played EVE Online. This sounds like a joke, but it's
probably the closest thing out there to an example of what the future will be
like if mining of asteroids becomes insanely lucrative (and technology
advances fast enough for us to even witness it).

Someone who's played EVE for a significant amount of time (it's been years
since I've touched any game) could probably answer everything above.

This is all to say that we'll of course fight over it.

~~~
squonk
Haven't played it, to my regret.

Seems like, loosely speaking, chasing down sunken treasure, or possibly
wildcatting for oil can offer precedent in some form. The notion of
'international waters' perhaps can apply to space. However, someone, sometime
owned the treasure that was lost and may lay claim to it.

My real question is, apparently, nations can not claim ownership of asteroids.
But they will have to mutually define the legal ways any citizen or
corporation on Earth can acquire ownership. What is the most likely method,
once they all agree on it?

Planetary Resources is at the same time forcing the issue by proceeding with
their endeavor, and, making a pretty big bet that when the laws are in place,
they will have legally acquired their booty.

~~~
Devilboy
I don't see the problem. If you mine it, it's yours.

------
bfe
Two Barclays commodities analysts produced a gleefully scathing research note
on this project, and the Financial Times concluded that "The space mining talk
amounts, however, to no more than hot air and gobbledegook", all based on
laughably inadequate points of comparison. For example:

"Their calculations were based on Nasa’s forthcoming OSIRIS-REx mission, which
aims to launch a probe in 2016 to pluck samples from an asteroid called 1999
RQ36 and bring them to Earth.

Nasa hopes it will be home by 2023, with a couple of ounces of dirt. By then,
the cost will have reached $1bn – made up of $800m for the vehicle, plus
another $200m for the rocket launch.

Since that outlay will return just a couple of ounces of material, Barclays
says it could use it as a baseline to estimate break-even prices for asteroid
mining. Using the metrics proposed by Barclays, the Financial Times
commodities team estimates that copper prices would need to rocket from
today’s $3.81 an ounce to $476m for a similarly funded space mining project to
cover its costs.

Clearly, it does not look like base metals from space are likely to provide a
good return on capital.

So what about precious metals? Gold trades at $1,665 a troy ounce, setting a
price of $518m a troy ounce for space-gold to break even."

"Asteroid mining is for space cadets", The FT, April 30, 2012 -
[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144feab49a.html)

Astonishing that anyone can take this seriously as a baseline. You don't
become a commodities analyst for being able to include flexibility and
imagination in your analytical capability.

~~~
seagreen
You'd have to be pretty dumb to bring copper back the surface. It would be far
more valuable in orbit around Earth.

Also NASA isn't, ah, the best example of a cost conscious and frugal
organization. They probably don't make a good baseline for the expense of
these trips.

Planetary Resources still may never come close to turning a profit, but it's
possible you're dismissing them a little too quickly.

~~~
billswift
Actually with his sloppy writing, I couldn't decide if he was dismissing
Planetary Resources or Barclay's and the FT.

~~~
seagreen
Ah, sorry bfe, I misunderstood your post. I agree with you in disagreeing with
Barclays, if that makes sense.

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typpo
As a side project, I've been working on a site, <http://asterank.com>, that
attempts to rank asteroids by their economic potential. These calculations
take into account things like the energetic cost of reaching and extracting
material from an asteroid. Open to any feedback or pointers.

~~~
djb_hackernews
That is an awesome project. Keep it up!

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yen223
"Our telescopes, which we call the Arkyd 100 spacecraft, are cubes half-a-
meter on a side and will cost around $1 million each, though the first one, of
course, will cost much more."

I seriously find this mind-blowing. $1 million for a telescope _launched into
space_ sounds ridiculously cheap to me.

~~~
sehugg
At $10k/kg to orbit I'd guess these will have to weigh less than 100 kg. Some
articles report they will be 20 kg each:
[http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/20/12326161-aster...](http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/20/12326161-asteroid-
hunting-venture-wants-you-to-suggest-crowdfunding-projects?lite)

~~~
danielweber
SpaceX can launch it's Falcon 9 for half that cost right now. They can
probably get down to $1000 per kilogram with more work and/or the Falcon 9
Heavy.

------
jonmrodriguez
Uh oh...

"PM: You've suggested an asteroid could be brought closer to the Earth to make
it easier to mine. Is that really feasible? EA: It is. One of the ways that we
could do that is simply to turn the water on an asteroid into rocket fuel and
burn it in a thruster that nudges its trajectory. Split water into hydrogen
and oxygen, and you get the same fuels that launch space shuttles. Some
asteroids are 20 percent water, and that amount would let you move the thing
anywhere in the solar system."

Wtf? EA just suggested a perpetual motion machine. He suggests using energy to
hydrolyze water, but then de-hydrolyzing the water to get energy. He's making
it sound like more energy will come out than went in (allowing propulsion),
when really it would be == at best, and really < because of inefficiency. The
only way his concept of storing the energy is even slightly useful is if you
were to spend years and years collecting solar energy and storing it as H2 +
O2 to burn later in one quick burst. But that's _you_ storing the energy over
a long long time, and getting back less than you put in.

~~~
kolinko
I think he's not de-hydrolyzing water to get energy per se, but to generate
thrust.

Say, you've got a nuclear reactor (or whatever else is more practical) on an
asteroid. You cannot use the energy from the reactor to propel the rock, you
need to generate thrust. So you take water, you split hydrogen & oxygen, you
burn it, you get thrust.

~~~
pjscott
If you're already bringing a nuclear reactor into space, you could use it to
heat up the hydrogen and use it as propellant directly, for more efficient
travel. (In situations where you need bursts of high thrust and are willing to
sacrifice efficiency, you can also go with a hybrid system that uses both
nuclear heat and combustion.)

Oh, and fun safety fact: a nuclear reactor isn't actually particularly
radioactive until it's turned on. If you launch it out of Earth's orbit before
turning it on, you're sitting pretty.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Also, assuming a lot of electricity, some form of ion engines would likely be
(much) more efficient than heating.

Also, nuclear reactors aren't the ideal way to make electricity in space.
Proper nuclear reactors work as heaters for a heat engine, and heat sinks are
proportionally much more expensive in space than on earth.

However, solar power is much more efficient. You get 100% efficiency all the
time, and it's 30% better in space (near Earth) than it is down here at best.
Also, since no structure has to carry any significant weight, you can build
things like a flexible paper-thin sheet of solar cells printed on plastic that
is spun about it's axis to keep it deployed and spread out.

