An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion.

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.

(minus shipping and handling)

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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

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

Perhaps Nasa can become a profit center. :-P

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.

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?

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.