The Dawn of the Space Mining Age | Hacker News Reader

The Dawn of the Space Mining Age

blogs.scientificamerican.com

72 pointsprotomyth71 comments

I know that SV seems to have abandoned the idea of good unit economics, but the concept of asteroid mining seems to take that to a whole new level. The cost of developing autonomous asteroid mining equipment, finding asteroids suitable for mining, getting this equipment to the asteroid, operating it, maintaining it, and shipping the mined product back to earth must be in the billions of dollars, if not more. This article talks about moving an asteroid into lunar orbit to make this easier, but it seems to me that the amount of delta-v needed to do that would be staggering, not to mention that even if we had engines capable of generating that amount of thrust, we would still need to somehow get them out of the Earth's gravity well and to the asteroid in question. Plus, even if we could somehow do any of the above, is there any evidence that asteroids like the article's $50 billion platinum asteroid even exist? As far as I am aware, less than 10% of the asteroids in the asteroid belt are metallic in nature (most are composed of carbon and silicon), and the metallic asteroids we do know about are all iron and nickel based, not exactly high-value metals. I'm all for space exploration, both by governments and by private enterprises, but this whole thing seems completely far-fetched and impractical.

There are many asteroids in so-called near-Earth orbits, with nearly zero delta-V (beyond Earth escape) to reach them and return to Earth. The delta-V is even less than an insertion into lunar orbit.

Mostly it's just a matter of being patient and letting the orbits phase, given the right nudge.

(Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.)

>Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.)

Thanks for the condescending reply. Seeing as I have a degree in Physics, I am well aware of the technical difference between thrust and delta-v. However, when talking about rocketry, it's hard to have delta-v without corresponding thrust, and my usage of both terms was more for rhetoric than a desire for absolute technical correctness.

Wasn't trying to be condescending, but the reason I mention it is that in rocketry, the required thrust is very different (not linearly proportional, I mean) from required delta-V, especially in deep space missions where you have lots of time to do your burns.

This really makes me want to play Kerbal Space program again, to see if they have added asteroids, or if I can build a rocket big enough to go to one of the smaller moons, and nudge it into different orbit...

They have added asteroids. And you can redirect them to Kerbin.

The moons are on rails though. They can't be moved.

Can't, or just .. not enough rockets .. ?

Imagine we have a particle-assembly device which we can trustily feed raw components and out comes planned assemblies. We could call this thing, a "3D printer" because it allows us to print things but in this particular case its literally the best 3D printer in the known universe, because: it recycles everything it prints.

So, we have this ideal device, and we send it up to one of these asteroids, in some form of redundancy of course (i.e. there is more than one ideal device, rather now a fleet of them), and the first thing that happens is that the fleet duplicates itself.

Then, we have the ability to remotely send print jobs, some sort of .. inter-spacial network of some variety or brand or another .. whereby anyone on Good Ol'^WNew Earth can send something to the print queue. If the job is printable (it is/will be) then the asteroid is consumed, bit-by-bit.

These bits fly themselves back to Earth for use. OR! They fly themselves somewhere else in space, for use ...

Okay, I think I'm getting a nice video game idea from this article at least. Time for some science!

You're missing the entire point. You don't mine asteroids to bring precious metals back to earth's surface. You mine asteroids to produce much less exotic raw materials outside of earth's gravity well, where the cost of importing them is over $4000 per kg.

TL;DR: Congress signs law about space enabling people to profit, journalist excitedly retells current state of space mining.

Nation that can't launch (human-carrying) rockets launches paperwork.

Potentially illegal violation of international law paperwork, at that.

Ironically space mining may have been the first mining method of early humans. Before smelting was discovered, the occasional iron meterorite provided raw iron for tools and jewelry.

Pedantricly, wouldn't that rather be space-harvesting? They did fall from the sky.

Space.. foraging?

"Who would have been foolish enough to squander the money, lives and resources needed to travel to and explore the New World?"

You can only argue that the exploration of the Americas was a good affair if you ignore the cost of all the pillaging and killing and deaths and slavery... If you include the inhabitants of the Americas when you judge the benefit of the "exploration of the new world", I'm not sure it ends up being a net positive for several centuries.

Maybe, but there are no intelligent natives on asteroids.

For someone interested in the future of the...err...space, what type of technical background is required to be hired today to work at a company with plans to attempt this type of mining?

Look at the job reqs at SpaceX or Blue Origin. Often they raided bored, talented young engineers at NASA or established space companies.

I worked at Planetary Resources. They are mostly looking for the various engineering roles you'd expect when building a spacecraft, especially mechanical engineering types. Most people had some sort of aerospace background (lots of ex-JPL), but some came from the software tech industry (like me), the auto industry, or straight out of school.

Personally, if I were doing this, and I might still, I would focus on the challenges of actually mining. The reason is that rockets and probes etc are pretty well plowed areas but while Curiosity, the mars rover, can drill a small hole and using non-replacable reagents look for certain compounds, these things will need to process tons of material from an asteroid to try and extract kilograms of materials. That is a very unsolved problem and a very under funded one.

A lot of current extraction techniques use liquid water (not available on an asteroid), all extraction techniques depend on the raw ore being transportable by buckets or belts with gravity keeping things in place (also not available on asteroids). And many refinement techniques are very energy expensive (challenging to ship to an asteroid). So if you can figure out how to solve even one of those problems and asteroid mining company that hires you will be ahead of the game.

Do anyone know of research groups involved in this?

None of these estimates seem to take into account that dumping huge quantities of precious metals on the free market will move the price by a substantial amount. Asteroid mining might only be profitable for a short while...

That depends on the amount and time scale. The quoted $50 billion platinum asteroid would contain around 2500 tons – the equivalent of 15 years worth of terrestrial production –, and most certainly not in a pure form. Mining all that and returning it to Earth safely is likely a long-term project.

I guess what should really be considered is, why would you return the raw ore to earth? The dawn of space mining will trigger the dawn of space refining and manufacturing I think.

You'd still have to return the final products. And with something like platinum, which is used in tiny traces, stuffing half a ton in bars into a Soyuz and sending it back would probably be more profitable than, say, building whole exhaust catalysts in space and returning those.

Well, I did say 'refining' in addition to manufacturing. In some cases refined raw material makes sense to deorbit. But if you consider the costs of lifting objects to orbit, the ability to manufacture large mass components in orbit would be a huge win. Sure, the initial costs of getting to the point where you can manufacture in orbit are large. But, if space mining becomes profitable they'll need more and more gear to do this. If they have to lift all that gear off earth then it is prohibitive. Hence space manufacturing is a self-help path for mining.

I suspect lsaferite has space uses in mind for the resources. If you wanted to build a large moon base, or maybe a giant telescope dish on the moon, not having to lift your materials out of Earth's gravity is a huge bonus.

AFAIK getting rid of heat in space is still an enormous problem, making refining/manufacturing virtually impossible.

You would have asteroids to use as heat sinks.

Isn't it as easy as shielding a radiator from the sun though? I profess, I have no real knowledge, just an assumption.

True, but the markets prices assets at "Net Present Value" and often has long time horizons for their calculations. Think about an insurance company's portfolio. It will need assets to balance against liabilities which include human life insurance policies. Some business insurance policies can be for even longer time frames, think nuclear power plants. To balanced against those liabilities part of what you need is an investment with a similar time horizon. Now, the gold or whatever ore these companies mine may not have that horizon, but their company stock and some of their company debt certainly will. And since both their stock and debt valuations will be tied to the ore they mine and return, some of that correlation will find its way back to the price of gold, platinum, etc. But the price of gold will be impacted even more directly than that. A large percentage of precious metals are held for their store of value rather than their value in industrial uses. If, as an investor, I know that over then next 30 years the price of my investment will drop 20% or more, I plug those numbers into the NPV equation, and I get the hell out of that position untill the price comes down and is in line with what I'd pay for the metal almost at the cost of an industrial commodity. That's of course a simplified version of how it'd all play out, but the broad strokes are there.

How long would you hold onto your home mortgage if you knew that at some point, you're not exactly sure when, but at some point you're home's value will plummet?

So to keep the contents of what's inside the asteroid a trade secret. Nobody will know how much of what element will be dumped on the market.

Works if you're going to privately finance everything, forgo insurance, and are able to keep all of your operations secret so that analysts are unable to estimate your operations by proxies such as fuel, craft size, the asteroids you're mining and their composition, etc. The physics of space flight are rather precise. Mass and density of the craft before and after visiting the asteroid can be worked out fairly easily with relatively few data points. Composition of the asteroid will possibly be known prior to visiting the asteroid, otherwise, why go to the expense of mining it? Could be exploratory, but then not even the people running the mission know the value of the asteroid's ore until the last minute, and in that case the market will likely have just about as good an estimate, or better, of the risk adjusted market value of the mission. Unfortunately, it's fairly difficult to keep all of this hidden due to the regulatory environment of the space industry and the wide open nature of "space". You can't really sneak out and back just staying low and below radar or benefit from the cover of darkness.

I don't know about these estimates specifically, but in a general sense, traditional miners discovering a new vein have the same problem. One can to some degree simulate the market and deduce if such plans are worthwhile. Once the legislation and insurance has figured itself out, the only difference in space is higher initial costs.

On the other hand, dumping sufficient quantities may radically reshape the market. If gold was as cheap as copper, we'd be able to use if for things we currently can't. You may not any more make precious-metal profits, but you may not care if you're raking it in making modern-electronics profits.

Aluminum was more expensive than gold (used to top the Washington Monument instead of gold) before a radically cheaper way to purify it was discovered. Now we wrap our food in it, and there is a massive aluminum market only because it's plentiful and cheap.

Space mining concept: an in-vacuum absolutely enormous mass spectrometer as a way to naturally sort plasma-ified asteroid matter into buckets of 100% pure elements. Which can then be pushed with small ion engines onto slow orbits that will eventually deliver them to Earth.

Unfortunately, the first step of mass spec is to ionize the sample. And the process you're suggesting wouldn't work so well for composite matter like, say, chunks of space rock. And I'm afraid some rather large energy inputs would be needed to convert space debris into plasma.

Free electron laser powered by a solar array. Matter gets dug up and pulverized small by asteroid surface robots, squirted out as a dust stream, laser heated to plasma, charged by beaming electrons towards the catch-buckets. It flies through a large magnet (which keeps its position with ion thrusters), then coasts through vacuum, spreading out according to atomic content, falling into catch buckets and getting its charge neutralized.

Well, you're not short on ideas.

Just visited European XFEL a few weeks ago. The linear accelerator was about 2km long and I believe the total cost of the laser is over 1 billion Euro, but nevertheless this is an awesome idea :)

Should be cheaper to build both of those sorts of things when the "making a vacuum" bit is already taken care of, and large amounts of space are available at no cost.

Why sort them in space? That work can be done on Earth.

Because sorting them on site and just moving the valuable ones is (probably) a lot less work than moving raw ore umpty squillion miles and then landing it softly somewhere it can be processed. Also it means that the things you are throwing in Earth's general direction are comparatively small and not capable of wreaking havoc.

A: You've got access to a lot of solar power, on a completely predictable schedule. Especially convenient since in this particular case you don't need to convert it to electricity first. B: Anything you release as a gas flies harmlessly out into the universe, so your environmental restrictions are a great deal less. (Also, this is not "cheating regulations" or anything... this is truly an environment with fewer restrictions. If you can vaporize it, it can be made to truly go away forever.) C: You've got zero G, and this sort of "massive mass spec" plan, while I question the numbers in general, is probably a great deal more practical in zero G than not zero G.

And it would all tie together; if the exhaust is in excess of escape velocity, which it probably is by an order of magnitude or two, you can just let anything you don't care to catch fly into space.

I'm not saying this is practical or necessarily a good idea, just pointing out that you do have some options in space that you don't have on Earth.

I actually expect it will be something like that (eventually). Only with the resources mostly going to other in-space activities. Like the Disney Deathstar/StarWars theme park.

If one wanted to invest in this($100-$1000's - not millions), what entry points would they have?

Mutual funds of some sort, I'd guess. Assuming there are any.

Are you aware of any publicly traded company operating in this field? If not, then there won't be any mutual funds. This area seems too new for mutual funds.

Mutual funds can hold private assets. Fidelity holds SpaceX assets in several funds. http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2015/03/25/see-which-fidelity-...

That said, I don't think you can get your hands on Planetary Resources stock.

Mutual funds invest in private equity and venture capital funds and even directly into startups, such as Fidelity: http://recode.net/2015/11/10/one-of-snapchats-latest-investo...

Get your ass to work.

What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds?

#kidstoday

> What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company

Profitable space mining is easily 100+ years out. So, IMO your best bet is to invest in an existing company you expect to get into the field in the long term.

PS: We could extract gold from sea water, and there is a lot of gold in the sea. That does not mean it's a good investment.

Simple supply and demand: Sell commodity futures. If there really are huge influxes of an existing scarce resource on the horizon (the article mentions platinum), prices will drop.

Per my other comment in this thread, you could perhaps provide funding for researcher studying mining techniques in exchange for a partial interest in any patents that arose out of that work. But beyond that I don't think there is a way to participate yet as an outside investor, lots of ways to participate if you're just jumping in and doing the work yourself right?

Perhaps you could invest a few thousand in an S&P500 ETF with instructions to use the account value to buy into the first space mining company to go public? Might take awhile but you're investment would grow while it was waiting to be put to work.

Well, it makes complete sense: we save planet earth by moving all our industry to space.

I'm all for it. Close every factory that we can down here, as fast as we can, and put the iPod-assembly 'bots up in sk. I'd happily spend my days remotely managing a small fleet of robot miners on the Asteroid#71238, work comfortably on the beach while remotely hunting valuable commodities some 1,000,000 miles away, or at least have a harvest of asteroids parked within our reach at any part of the planet, so .. in the end, anywhere any time can just dial the # and down from the sky comes a little edible parachute with the latest iDevice.

Earth returns to paradise, kids get to play with robots in space, everyone wins. Whats not to like?

Does this make anyone else nervous?

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