

One billionaire's mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025 - nsns
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/asteroid-takeout---a-one-billionaire-mission-to-bring-a-500-ton-asteroid-to-high-earth-orbit-by-2025.ars

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SlipperySlope
On one hand a 500-ton asteroid is way too small to make a difference if the
smelted iron and nickel could be safely landed on Earth. Nickel ore is quoted
at about 30 USD per ton in Indonesia, so the asteroid's material might only be
worth 15,000 USD on the Earth's surface.

But on the other hand, the smelted ore is much more valuable if used for
earth-orbit construction, especially high orbit construction. SpaceX charges
about 2,000,000 USD per ton to launch a payload into low earth orbit. The cost
to put 500 tons of ore into space from earth would thus be 1 billion USD. By
comparision, the mass of the International Space Station is about 500 tons.

This rough analysis shows that the most cost-effective mission would be the
construction of large space facilities using material smelted from a well-
chosen asteroid.

Maybe the investors have in mind something like the Stanford Torus:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus>

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run4yourlives
Excuse my ignorance here, but wouldn't the easiest solution of all just be
both mining minerals and performing construction on the moon? Once you are
established there, you pretty much have the space construction port you're
looking for, do you not?

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aqme28
It is much much much cheaper to get to low-earth orbit than it is to get to
(and from) the moon.

See:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalaltitudes.jpg)

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read_wharf
I know nothing, but I would think gravity smelting and related operations
would be much more technically difficult and risky than gravity based
operations on the moon.

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read_wharf
_no_ gravity smelting would be difficult

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cheddarmint
Without reading the article, what I imagined was a mad billionaire trying to
eradicate life on earth by 2025.

Yes, I realize 500 tons is far too small to do that.

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SlipperySlope
Moving asteroids amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction.

I expect some sort of space treaty to regulate the safe operation of such a
venture, and in return provide some liability limits on the required
insurance. Otherwise the investors have a tiny chance of being wiped out
financially if some city gets hit.

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andrewflnr
Honestly, should they _not_ get financially wiped out if they hit a city? Or
do we just let them keep their money to fund criminal defense lawyers. I want
the reaction to killing people to be more than "oops, that will be expensive".

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SlipperySlope
Sorry for my poor word order.

I agree with you. I expect that should a city get hit, then international
outcry would lead to the confiscation of all of the investor's assets, despite
being shielded by a limited liability corporation.

For that reason the investors need insurance - and a very large amount of it
considering the damage that a direct hit on a major city might cause. The
investors would seek some sort of limit on the liability - say 100 billion
dollars, and in return they should eagerly submit to regulatory oversight of
their plans, procedures and operations.

In order to insure such an asteroid moving scheme and establish a premium,
insurance companies must determine a risk probability distribution, and they
must know what the maximum liability would possibly be. Over many decades,
there may be observations of close calls or actual damage causing situations
that can inform the actuarial calculation, but at the initial point its simply
educated estimates.

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terramars
dude a 7m asteroid would be literally impossible to hit a city with. it's far
too small - would burn up in the atmosphere at around 30km. there would be
some small meteorites that would survive in all likelihood, especially as the
speed would be a little slower than usual, but those are very trivial in
danger. asteroids this size enter the atmosphere every couple of years
naturally - occasionally over populated areas - and have never caused
meaningful amounts of damage.

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SlipperySlope
I got it.

So the investors chose that asteroid diameter so as to minimize potential
damage due to an impact on Earth.

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korussian
They probably choose that asteroid diameter to say exactly the above: i.e.
"relax, it can't hurt you."

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jboggan
Is it possible to bootstrap this process by capturing low mass asteroids
crossing near LEO? A small tug device paired with a separate crude ore
processing unit with 3-D printing capabilities seems like a minimum viable
unit. A few of these units in orbit, a few at LaGrange points, and we'll start
leveraging the amount of re-usable construction material under human control
in near space. It might also be a way to clean up 50+ years of exploration
debris. Instead of de-orbiting a satellite when its productive life has ended
we could just melt down, salvage, and repurpose much of the material. Literal
pie-in-the-sky, but that's what it would take.

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hkmurakami
I wonder if sometime in the future, we will have exhausted Earth's fuel and
metal resources so badly that we are no longer capable of building the tools
necessary to make our way into space, including projects like this one.

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Tuna-Fish
Metal resources don't get exhausted -- nearly all of the copper mined at the
time of the pharaohs is still in use. When the cost of mined material rises,
we simply reuse some of the metal that is in use in lower-value places.
Example: all the copper piping that is presently being ripped up and replaced
with plastic everywhere in the world.

Nuclear fuel resources are essentially inexhaustible -- there is enough
Thorium to feed constant growth for at least tens of thousands of years. Which
should be enough for development of fusion.

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_exec
>>nearly all of the copper mined at the time of the pharaohs is still in use.

Source?

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jacques_chester
Any physics textbook. Look up "conservation of mass".

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cpeterso
I think _exec was asking for a source to back up the claim about the pharaohs'
copper mines.

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_exec
Yes. I couldn't find anything online about that :)

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waterlesscloud
Has anyone seen official confirmation that this is what will be announced next
week? I've seen nothing but speculation. I guess the fact that the speculation
hasn't been quashed is weak confirmation, but I wondered if there was more...

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signa11
i think folks should start seeing on how to secure those lagrangian points...

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SlipperySlope
Looks like the Chinese are there too ...

"Perhaps more significantly, low-energy pathways lead away from L1 and L2,
which can be exploited to send spacecraft to Jupiter, Mars, asteroids, for
less fuel. They make an excellent staging point," Belbruno said. "Placing
spacecraft at these points gives one a high ground, so to speak." Not only
would they be interesting places to position a space station, but from there
China could perform planetary exploration, both in piloted and automated mode.

from: [http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-
missi...](http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-mission.html)
And also see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point>

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Cushman
Not getting at you, but there's something profoundly disgusting about talking
about "China" doing planetary exploration. Surely the word should be "Earth".

(Kinda curious what y'all find objectionable about this idea.)

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chc
I think your post comes across differently than you meant it. I _think_ this
is how it's going:

 _What you meant_ : "It's deeply unfortunate that we're at the point of
venturing to other planets but we still haven't managed to get past all our
petty divisions on this one."

 _How it reads_ : "I prefer to think of humanity as a unified whole and view
national boundaries as pernicious fictions, and it bothers me when other
people talk about these fictional boundaries in the context of something as
important as space exploration. Please phrase it differently from now on."

The latter reading comes across as kind of pedantic and bossy, not to mention
unrealistic.

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fennecfoxen
It's a disaster movie. </cameron>

