
Asteroid Database and Mining Rankings - wglb
http://www.asterank.com/
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d357r0y3r
When you start measuring "profit" in the trillions, doesn't the measurement
become somewhat meaningless? Like, imagine Planetary Resources or SpaceX gets
into this and brings back a haul of metals worth approximately 100 trillion.
How devastating would that be to the economy? What would it do to the price of
the metals involved?

I'm not saying that bringing this quantity of metal into the economy is a
_bad_ thing necessarily, but it would have enough of an impact on the market
to make these values completely inaccurate.

~~~
maaku
Such an operation would take decades, and centuries probably to exhaust and
return to Earth the entire asteroid. In the process and in response the size
of the Earth economy will grow due to the introduction of a vast new supply of
industrial materials.

Introduction of extraterrestrial resources will cause these commodity prices
to fall. But falling prices will cause industrial use (and world GDP) to rise.
How much will prices fall, and how much will demand rise, and therefore how
much maximum revenue can be extracted? This is not an easy calculation.

~~~
cgriswald
Looks like a simple differential equation to me. And we already have the
models. The only real variable would be the rate at which materials are
retrieved. And even that wouldn't be very variable, because SpaceX or whoever
would use the rate that optimized their profits.

~~~
sirclueless
There's no good model out there I know of for the rate of innovation. Massive
availability of a resource should spur innovation around its use. It's very
difficult to predict the future demand for a resource beyond a timescale of
decades.

A good historical parallel for this kind of situation might be aluminum, which
was a precious metal for many years. When it suddenly became available in
large quantities due to new chemical processes for extracting it, supply
skyrocketed and led to whole new industries. I don't think anyone in 1890
could have guessed what the ultimate demand for aluminum would settle at, even
though it was clear the price was dropping precipitously.

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Rumford
Exactly. If economic growth was just like microbe growth in a petri dish,
sure, a simple equation would suffice. But people choose and act based on
their own thoughts, opinions, and goals, and they are always readjusting to
new input and information. Economics can tell us reliably that if you add
supply, you press the price downward. What economics can't tell you is what
crazy and amazing things the humans will do in response to that.

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walterbell
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/space_20/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/space_20/2014/10/asteroid_mining_and_space_law_who_gets_to_profit_from_outer_space_platinum.html)

 _" On Sept. 10, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a
hearing on the Asteroid Act, a refreshingly short and readable five-page bill
that would recognize the ownership by companies of resources they have
extracted from asteroids and would also prohibit companies from interfering
with the operations of competitors. Planetary Resources sent a letter to the
committee in support of the bill._"

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humanfromearth
For those who are interesting finding out more I would recommend: Mining the
Sky by John S. Lewis. It's an excellent book that discusses in length the
composition of NEO, possible retrieval methods and economics of such an
endeavour.

[http://www.amazon.fr/Mining-The-Sky-Asteroids-
Planets/dp/020...](http://www.amazon.fr/Mining-The-Sky-Asteroids-
Planets/dp/0201328194)

~~~
walterbell
Thanks, that book seems to be the layman's version of this 1993 collection of
papers from Lewis,
[http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthS...](http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthSpace/contents.php)

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darkmighty
Now I'm interested in knowing the value of Earth crust (up to a depth of, say,
1km) according to those measures.

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jessriedel
I dunno about compositions, but:

> The combined mass of all of the asteroids is about 25 times less than the
> Moon's mass (with Ceres making up over a third of the total)

[http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s2.htm](http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s2.htm)

    
    
      Moon mass: 7x10^22 kg
      Total asteroid mass: 3x10^21 kg
      Earth mass: 6x10^24 kg
      Density Earth's crust: 2.7 g/cm^3
      Earth area: 5.1x10^8 km^2
      Mass Earth's crust to 1km depth: 1.4x10^21
    

So all asteroids combined and the Earth's crust down to 2km are very close to
the same mass.

But like I said, I have no idea about the composition.

~~~
maaku
Composition would be strikingly different. Elements which are rare in the
Earth's crust (and therefore, expensive) are rare because during the formation
of the Earth they sank under gravity and now reside near the core of the
planet.

Chondritic asteroids, on the other hand, are left over from the primordial
solar system and have the original relative abundances of rare earth
materials. Hence the interest as a source of industrial resources.

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FiatLuxDave
I really like this site. How much do I like this site? Well, before clicking
on it, I said to myself, "I wonder where Davida ranks?" (query the list of
most valuable). So, yeah, I've thought about this subject a lot, and I really
appreciate this beautiful website which presents all this data in an easily
readable way.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I would suggest the following changes
which might make the site more useful for people like me who run calculations
on asteroid mining for fun:

1) Make the formulas for value and cost explicit somewhere easily found on the
site. Maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it.

2) Make it possible to alter the variables to allow exploring different
scenarios. For example, the cost in $/(km/s) of delta-v depends upon the
technology used. Maybe have different selections (chemical rockets, nuclear
rockets, solar sail, cool unknown technology, magic fairy asteroid whales)
which have different costs associated with them. This would change the
rankings of which asteroids would be more profitable, since high metal
asteroids with a high delta V cost are more profitable if more accessible. The
opposite effect occurs if there is a technology which lowers mining and
processing costs (such as directed solar heating and in-situ smelting). It
would be nice to tweak that cost too. Being able to change technology
scenarios makes this site much more fun.

3) Show some estimate of ore concentration. Yeah, I know the data isn't
exactly definitive. Spectra don't give you good information on internals. But
an estimate is being used in there somewhere, it would be interesting to show
it, especially if it could be compared with earthling ores.

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troaway1234
The interesting thing about adding hundreds of trillions of dollars in raw
mineral resources to earth's standing economy is that earthly real estate will
become more valuable until we find some place else to use all this stuff.

Seems like there might be an interesting intermediary phase, maybe something
like a gilded age, until we figure out how to exploit these resources under a
framework of instantiating extra-terrestrial colonies.

~~~
d357r0y3r
Maybe what actually happens is most of the material never comes back to the
earth, it immediately gets put back into building infrastructure in space.

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bfe
This site was built as a side project by one guy who got it acquired by
Planetary Resources.

He's got some other fun projects:
[http://www.ianww.com/](http://www.ianww.com/)

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markbnj
You can't estimate the market value of the materials at the time when
harvesting them becomes feasible, and you can't estimate the costs with any
accuracy either. Other than that, very informative graphic.

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jliptzin
This is a really cool site. We should load up the probes with toxic nuclear
waste to dispose in space on the way up, then come back down with valuable
materials mined from the asteroids.

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cpa
If you manage to safely (that's the keyword here) send toxic waste in space,
just shoot it straight into the sun, that's way more eco-friendly!

~~~
Lorento
If you miss, it'll end up in an orbit that intersects Earth's orbit. That
might be the opposite of eco-friendly!

~~~
siscia
Well we are able to send robot on Mars, miss the sun seems quite an huge error
for me...

You make me laugh tough :)

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CyrusL
Another exciting destination for [http://asteroids.com](http://asteroids.com)
!

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justonepost
I don't agree with profit. How do you ship asteroids to the surface without
burning up in the atmosphere?

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fit2rule
You turn that asteroid into solid nickel/gold/titanium airplanes with a heat-
shield, and fly them back.

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manicdee
Or forget the wings and heat shield, just make a space-train of cannon-ball
sized objects and hard land them in an uninhabited area. The hard part will be
de-orbiting them accurately, but have a large enough landing area and that
problem goes away.

Suggestions in science fiction include foaming the metal in space and landing
it into the ocean, then hualing the "metalberg" back to a drydock where it can
be cut apart and hauled off for refining.

Foaming the return mass means it will have a slightly lower terminal velocity,
and it will float!

Now to work on a deorbiting system that provides accuracy with low cost …
perhaps a solar electric linear accelerator?

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anonfunction
I think the full 3d view has gone down, getting a 504 from nginx. Everything
is great!

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maaku
If only there were a way to assert mining claim rights over space resources :(

~~~
elevensies
Other than possession? The technology required to harvest them is far more
advanced than the tech required for an ICBM, so anyone who can I get there, I
don't think will be paying tribute.

~~~
maaku
This is actually a field I've thought a lot about, in no small part because
whoever solves this problem stands to profit _a lot_.

The problem is time horizons. Extraterrestrial mining projects from conception
to first delivery is probably a 20-30 year timeframe. That is way, way outside
of what could be reasonably financed on the open market.

On the other hand, if you could reasonably get a return on investment in the
5-7 year time frame, then there'd be no trouble getting financing for each
step of the project. However that requires having liquidity events before
you're able to actually get resources to market, and the only way I see that
to be possible is to sell some sort of contract valued by future revenue
potential. You see the same problem in remote areas of the Earth where mining
efforts take considerable planning, e.g. northern Canada. And we have
solutions there: mining claims and a sense of legal ownership of resources
that are still in the ground.

Break that mining project into 5 to 7 year chunks with a mechanism for
contracts exchanging hands inbetween, and the free market will solve the
problem of bootstrapping space settlement.

