Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources

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

by jseliger • 14 years ago

47 30 14 years ago

slate.com

yen223• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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...

danielweber3• 14 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

The Iridium satellites demonstrated that it's possible to build satellites in an assembly line, at enormous cost savings. For a very simple satellite I think $1mil/unit is achievable.

squonk2• 14 years ago

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...

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• 14 years ago

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.

squonk2• 14 years ago

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.

danielweber3• 14 years ago

If there are dozens of parties going for space, then they might fight for it. As is, I think we'll be lucky to just have one.

jonmrodriguez2• 14 years ago

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.

typpo2• 14 years ago

It doesn't seem unreasonable to split water using a solar or nuclear energy source, and then use the hydrogen and oxygen as rocket fuel to actually move the asteroid. Anderson's goal is not a net energy gain, it's to move the asteroid.

kolinko• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Yeah, or just heat the water into steam and shoot it that way, saves a lot of work. There was an interesting paper done on turning a comet off course by basically throwing a supercritical mass of uranium at it. If you can set it up with a 'cool' side (perhaps leading non-metal penetrator cover) and a 'hot' side (the fissioning core) then the thing tries to dig into the comet by vaporizing ice at the back and shoving it out the hole that it made when it went in. Poof, instant rocket engine changing the orbit of the comet (hopefully in a good way)

jonmrodriguez2• 14 years ago

Makes sense. Thanks.

ricree• 14 years ago

I didn't see anything about using the H2 O2 as an energy source. Presumably, he meant that they would use some other energy source (presumably solar) to hydrolyze the water, then use that to generate thrust.

I have no idea if that's the best way to convert solar energy to thrust, or if it's even feasible, but bringing perpetual motion into it seems a little harsh.

zem• 14 years ago

do the man the basic favour of assuming he isn't an idiot. the problem here isn't energy, it's momentum; storing energy over a long time and then releasing it in precisely timed bursts to eject reaction mass when you need a course correction is perfectly feasible way to do things. you could probably even supplement the energy collection with some sort of moon-based laser if you threw enough up-front resources at the problem.

ovi256• 14 years ago

I think you're pretty much putting words in his mouth. He didn't say a single word about energy balance. He just said "burning water", which is badly formulated and unclear, but does not exclude using an external energy source for the hydrolysis.

That energy could come from solar panels as you mentioned, with the drawbacks you mentioned. But it looks to be a good enough method.

mikeash• 14 years ago

You'll probably collect energy with solar panels or similar. You'll expend energy with rocket thrust, and all else being equal, rocket thrust is most efficiently used for orbital maneuvering when done over a short time.

So you have energy collected over a long period of time, then released in a short period of time. That means you need to store that energy. It's not feasible to ship batteries up from the surface with current battery technology, since the energy/mass ratio is awful, so you'll need some other way to store the energy. Chemical storage would be one way. Use local materials and transform them into new materials with more chemical potential energy. Chemical storage tanks can be reasonably light. When the time comes, you can reverse the process and transform your stored chemicals back into electricity.

But wait, we don't actually want electricity, we want thrust. A traditional rocket engine is a great way of transforming chemical potential energy into thrust. So let's skip the electrical middleman, and burn our chemical energy storage reagents in a rocket engine.

All that's left to do is choose the chemicals. If there's water, then it's easy to make oxygen and hydrogen from it using electricity, and hydrogen is a great rocket fuel.

danielweber3• 14 years ago

Hydrogen is a pretty good rocket fuel in terms of Isp, but it has a tendency to boil off in space.

I still think it's very practical to consider moving asteroids around from a technical perspective. The political ramifications are huge. If the people in charge are malicious they could completely devastate the planet.

I think this is generally solvable by using lots of small thrusters that are independently controlled to make sure that no one can smash the thing into the planet, but getting sign-off from everyone who might have veto power is huge.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

Most asteroids in our Solar System are bathed in about 1 KiloWatt/m^2 of readily available power 24/7 in the form of ordinary sunshine.

bfe• 14 years ago

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...

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.

seagreen2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

I've said it before but it bears repeating.

In no way is asteroid mining cost effective at the moment. However, that's not actually very relevant.

Several companies are working toward bringing down launch costs, SpaceX being the farthest along. If such efforts are successful they could result in lowering launch costs by around a factor of 10 to 100. That fundamentally changes what it is possible to do in space. Which obviously has a very direct impact on the feasibility of asteroid mining. More so, it will probably spur development in Earth orbit as well, including things like inhabited orbital stations, hotels, and eventually cities. That will create a hungry market for materials in orbit, and there the advantage of mining from an asteroid vs. launching from Earth (even given the reductions in cost mentioned above) makes asteroid mining all the more competitive.

Additionally, advances in robotics and automation could potentially make asteroid mining very cost effective. Consider that when mining an asteroid there is no environmental concern and the most effective mining methods can be made use of with brutal efficiency. And, of course, the development of advanced robotics to facilitate asteroid mining would of course be valuable for other uses and thus be a profitable spin-off invention.

There are other points of interest but they are relatively less important. The core point is that if these developments happen then asteroid mining could quite easily become profitable. Of course, there is no guarantee that any of this will happen. So why not wait until the opportunity is ripe and then start? You certainly could, but you'd find that you're just enough steps behind Planetary Resources to be at a significant disadvantage. They'll already have experience with operating spacecraft. They'll already have developed the core technologies necessary for mining asteroids. They'll already have identified the most valuable asteroid targets. They'll already have run pilot operations and overcome several key roadblocks. And on the day that it becomes profitable to sell asteroid mined resources they'll be there with the goods. And if it turns out not to be feasible then overall they'll still have made a better use of their funding than, say, buying instagram, and they likely will not have spent nearly as much money either.

freehunter• 14 years ago

Using a mission designed to bring back a small amount as a baseline for bringing back a large amount is ridiculous, I agree. If I drive from Chicago to New York to pick up a piece of mail, you might say that one piece of mail is $3000/oz. But I don't have to spend much more to pick up a couple thousand piece of mail; I've already spent the money on the car. Adding maybe a trailer and the marginal increase in gas, you end up with... UPS. They don't deliver one package at a time.

Assuming the launch costs are the same or slightly more, how much extra will it cost to attach a rocket to an asteroid and slowly push it back to Earth orbit? I would wager that the engineering costs would be exceedingly more than the marginal cost of hardware/fuel. Couple that with keeping the resources in orbit and building new ships off-planet, economics of scale will easily take care of the cost issue.

One asteroid mentioned in Planetary's plan had more platinum than existed in the entirety of Earth. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't make money from that.

typpo2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

That is an awesome project. Keep it up!

Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources

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