

An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion. - substack
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/featured-article/space-the-final-frontier-of-profit

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tjic
As much as I'm a fan of space exploration, it's a bit silly to say that an
asteroid is worth $20 trillion.

The ore in an asteroid, REFINED, is worth that much.

It's a fair bit of work to move that ore from pt A to pt B, crush it, smelt
it, refine it, anneal it, etc.

A cubic kilometer of sea water is worth a similarly preposterous amount ...
and yet, noone has become a trillionaire by refining sea water. It costs more
to do it than the minerals are worth.

Will it happen some day? Sure. Is it relevant today? No.

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idlewords
(minus shipping and handling)

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sanj
I suspect that flooding the market with those metals would depress the price
of those commodities significantly.

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noonespecial
Its not really about that. The point is that the wealth of a single small
planet is insignificant compared to the wealth of even the extra bits floating
around our solar system.

What could we build if titanium was _free_ (or very close)? What would our
houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?

A vital step to us getting off this planet in a meaningful way is sending
robots out to gather resources, both to build the ships we'll need outside of
our gravity well and to return some of that abundance to the surface so we can
alleviate our scarcities here.

~~~
tjic
> What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of
> aluminum?

There _IS_ a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over
the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes
energy.

...just like processing an asteroid.

Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.

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Confusion
_It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy._

Which is exactly why we need fusion power and not the hydro, wind and solar
power the shortsighted environmentalists keep pushing. Those will never
produce the vast additional amounts of energy needed to make the next step in
our general wellbeing. With cheap limitless energy, you can produce all the
water you want, bind all the CO2 you want, produce all the O3 you want,
recycle everything you want and even use fission to produce whatever materials
you want.

~~~
lutorm
And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap?
People said the same thing about fission, but it's turned out to be quite
expensive, and the technology is likely to be very complex. If you calculate
how large area of photovoltaics you can build for the price of developing and
building a fusion reactor (not that anyone has any idea what this cost will
be), I suspect you'd get a lot of it.

~~~
Confusion
_And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap?_

Because fusion scales well. With time, everything limited by technology
becomes cheap as technology advances. There are no fundamental problems or
limits in fusion, just practical problems. Fusion has never received the
amount of funding it should have received. How long did it take ITER to get
the measly 10 billion dollars required?

As for fission: the all important difference is that the fuel for fusion is
much easier to get, is unlimited and the garbage that gets left behind isn't
nearly as much of a problem. Moreover, there is no risk of blowing up half the
nearby city and irradiating the area for the next 100K years. Fusion and
fission are incomparable as for their ability to provide energy.

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27182818284
If you haven't read _Entering Space_ I highly recommend that you do. Published
in 1999, it was my first introduction to the basic economics and technology
required for asteroid mining. It not only that, but also many other topics
from possible Lagrange point space stations to Helium 3 fusion. As a bonus, it
is old enough that your local library probably has it for you to check out
with no reservations.

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MikeCapone
> As a bonus, it is old enough that your local library probably has it for you
> to check out with no reservations.

Unless other HN readers are in the same city :)

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ggrot
"Moore's Law has given us exponential growth in computing technology, which
has led to exponential growth in nearly every other technological industry."

This is very untrue.

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noarchy
Did any Eve Online players here see "20 trillion ISK" when they read the
headline? ;)

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hammmatt
An interesting article, but full of speculation. Many assumptions where made
to produce the conclusions and the data (like an asteroid being worth 20
trillion).

Yes, I agree with many of the predictions of the article. Like how private
industry will take over the space exploration. But the opinion of the author
and I is about as valuable as a crystal ball.

If we are going to play the speculation game, here is what interests me about
the subject.

1) Who would get the mining rights in space? Or would it be a 'gold rush?' If
so, would it be like international waters with no laws? Could I achieve my
childhood dream of being a space pirate? ;)

2) Most of the asteroids of our solar system take months to reach reach with
our fastest ships. If you want a human presence we are talking YEARS. Humans
on prolonged space flights are very, very tricky to take care of. That makes a
strong case for only sending robots, and that would require some very wicked
AI, since the transmission times for controls would be too great.

Think about all the hazards and procedures the robot(s) would have to perform.
Guidance, acquisition, positioning, detection of surroundings, plotting return
course, AVOIDANCE, ext. And the hardware implications, the fuel, the power,
capturing, ext.

It would make a Mars rover look like an RC car. And the two mars rovers cost
us approx. 820 million dollars.

The cost of development may be justified by a 20 trillion dollar prize, but
the cost to buy in is very high. If a corporation did want to fund it with
billions of dollars without knowing if they were going to see a return, and
willing to wait years for it. Then you have a winner, I don't see anyone
jumping at the bit to take that risk though.

3) While asteroid mining seems like a great idea. Why are aren't we being more
creative about the other things we can do in space? Where is the startup
mentality?

How about technicians that repair satellites in orbit? Great place to hone the
programing for the asteroid gatherers.

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NathanKP
I doubt that earth has the resources to serve as a processing facility for
space asteroids. Even if we get metals from asteroids we would still have to
smelt and refine them on Earth, which is a polluting and resource demanding
process.

~~~
qw
Would it not be possible to create a nuclear powered robotic installation on
that asteroid as well? I guess the initial costs are high, but it would pay
off in the long term (just move the factory once you are done, the low gravity
requires little fuel)

~~~
lutorm
If you're only going to the asteroid belt, you can probably get away with
photovoltaics instead of nuclear power, too. And yeah, it seems it would be
better to do it in place. But if it's really quite pure metal, there's not
much refining that would need to be done.

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jimmyjim
>First, private capital is seeing space as a good investment, willing to fund
individuals who are passionate about exploring space, for adventure as well as
profit. What was once affordable only by nations can now be lucrative, public-
private partnerships.

For the moment being, that sounds specious at best. _We_ (the US) are not able
to get back to the moon because of a lack of funds (NASA accounted for some 5%
of the entire federal budget in 1966, now it's down to .5%); any amount of
funding by private entities for such tasks is minuscule in comparison, and
therefore obviously insufficient.

But I suppose that'll change in interesting ways with time.

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tcskeptic
It is unfortunate that he uses the Alaska purchase as the benchmark for shrewd
public investment as there is some thought that maybe it wasn't, see:
<http://bit.ly/d3WsHn > _The purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million,
ridiculed in 1867 as “Seward’s Folly,” is now viewed as a shrewd business
deal. A purely financial analysis of the transaction, however, shows that the
price was greater than the net present value of cash flow from Alaska to the
federal government from 1867 to 2007._

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lrm242
If this is interesting to folks, I highly recommend "Mining the Sky":
[http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-
Planets/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-
Planets/dp/0201328194).

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amohr
And where does one apply for the position of Space Adventurer? I want in.

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holdenc
This article seems a little overly optimistic on the logistics problems of
exploiting asteroids. It even compares them to Alaska.

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ryanhuff
Perhaps Nasa can become a profit center. :-P

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rmorrison
Does the gov't even have any profit centers outside the IRS?

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camccann
The Postal Service and the Patent and Trademark office have had net positive
cash flow some years. Not for the last few years though, I think.

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xenophanes
The post office couldn't make a profit if it didn't have laws supporting it.
They have terrible customer service, take sundays off, various other problems,
UPS and Fed Ex would destroy them.

Of course the Patent and Trademark office is law supported too.

~~~
tierack
Perhaps FexEx and UPS could "destroy" the USPS if they didn't have to worry
about guaranteeing relatively quick delivery for envelopes from Kirby, WY to
Boone, TN for the same inexpensive price as deliveries within a few blocks.
The USPS may have laws supporting it, but don't we have expectations of it
that far exceed whatever private business could hope to accomplish for profit?

(And, naively, aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a
profit without laws supporting them?)

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randallsquared
_aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws
supporting them?_

In a sense, no, by definition.

~~~
tierack
I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue
of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly
regulations for some (legal) reason.

Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not
actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your
reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might
sound snarky.)

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camccann
I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like
"any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to
some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government".

Of course, by that standard, I'm not sure how many "truly private" companies
exist, since it seems to rule out (among others) any company that relies on
intellectual property law, including trademark enforcement to prevent bootlegs
and cheap imitations.

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Devilboy
I think what might finally send us to the asteroid belt will be the military.
If we are able to pick an appropriate sized asteroid and deflect it off it's
course, the asteroid can easily be accelerated using Mars or Venus or the Sun.
We can take it anywhere we feel like. We can destroy any target on earth - as
small as a city or as large as you want. The energy needed to deflect the
asteroid is minuscule compared to the kinetic energy you can exert on your
target. The ultimate WMD.

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cousin_it
Nukes are much cheaper.

~~~
lutorm
Agreed. They also already exist in sufficient quantity to do whatever you'd
imagine doing with an asteroid and still inhabit the Earth. Unless, of course,
you don't have nukes. Maybe Iran should consider this? ;-)

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ksraines
Unfortunately this article overlooks the "startup" costs for developing and
deploying the requisite technologies for harvesting the profits (which are
significant enough to preclude privatization, IMO).

And there is another more grievous oversight in the article which pertains to
the sinister slight-of-hand on the administration's policy: they intend to
slough off the cost of developing and deploying what portends to be mankind's
greatest engineering feat, while planning to reap the profits: do you really
think for one second that good old Uncle Sam will not find away to skim away a
hefty share of these (potential) profits? do you think that such asteroids
will be corporate or "social" property (read government)?

Tying together one last point, does anyone really believe that this
administration has a new found faith in the free markets - or is all of this
pandering and innuendo just a red hearing to keep us from sobering up to the
cold fact that the promising Constellation project was just killed?

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brennannovak
WOW, I guess no one on HN remotely thinks humans and the earth are facing any
sort of environmental problems at the moment. All everyone here is talking
about is the profit margins and logistics of pulling this preposterous, albeit
very cool, idea off. I'm all for adventure, technology, progress, blah blah
blah. I am thrilled about the possibilities of space. But realistically I
think we as a species need to better undertand ourselves and create better;
more sustainable systems on our native plannet before we embalance our natural
habit and ecosystem on an intergalactic scale.

~~~
anigbrowl
interplanetary

~~~
ryanpetrich
♫ intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic ♫

