Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived' | Hacker News Reader

Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived'

businessinsider.com

29 pointsptrptr15 comments

"It used to cost $35 million (£28 million) to send one person up on a Soyuz rocket. Today, Virgin Galactic hopes to get space tourists into space for something like $250,000 (£200,000), Goldman says."

This made me wince. Suborbital is not anywhere near the cost of orbital vehicles. Although the cost HAS gone down. A SpaceX Dragon 2 costs about $70M with a crew of up to 7 reducing the cost to $10M a head. (When they start manned flights.) But this isn't 3 orders of magnitude =/

I would hope SpaceX and Blue Origin would have think-tanks planning out these things, after all once you have a shit tonne of re-usable rockets waiting for customers you may as well put them to work.

Problem I see is robotics, nobody wants to go to the effort to put up a space miner with all the human problems so all the work is focusing on robotics that could do this, however this is something that could ramp up quickly into a race once someone starts making a concerted effort or books some flights as the payoffs are enormous for the winner and Humanity.

Yup. All it takes is that someone starts the ball rolling making a serious effort, then everyone will follow suit and we might see a new "space age".

The article highlights the problem: one asteroid would tank the entire platinum market.

would this be a problem? not sure. will certainly require adjustment in how we do things but in the long run it would benificial

Exactly. What could we do differently with a lot of platinum? What could we use platinum for instead of say, gold or silver or titanium?

But not to zero. It's not going to be worth trillions, but it might still be worth enough to bring a tidy profit.

Yes, but the other factor is, with much cheaper platinum available, new applications are likely to be found which were previously ignored due to cost. Today, for instance, (this is an unrealistically simplistic example) if you could make something out of either copper or platinum, with copper not working quite as well but still fairly close, you're obviously going to choose copper because platinum is so expensive. If platinum is now cheaper than copper, you're going to choose that instead.

However, this does make me wonder: are there any applications where platinum would actually make more sense than what we're already using? It doesn't conduct electricity better than copper, for instance. So aside from catalytic converters and jewelry (which we already use platinum for, so it'll just drop the cost rather than expand the market), what is it good for?

Secondly, what about other metals? Surely these asteroids have other valuable metals besides platinum, such as iron and nickel. Considering how much we use copper, we could really use a copper-rich asteroid.

Fuel cells are expensive due mostly to the cost of platinum.

Platinum, along with other metals like iridium, are valuable for industrial purposes. Their price would fall if supply increased, but it wouldn't collapse. Demand would also increase as the price falls and it would probably still be valuable when it levels out.

It'll be very interesting to see the cost-benefit calculation of chucking the raw materials down the gravity well vs parking them in orbit and waiting to sell it at a premium as they could easily beat the price of anyone that wants to fly something up.

How does one go about getting a 500 meter wide asteroid back to Earth's surface? It seems like there is a non-zero chance of accidentally creating Chicxulub v2.

Or do you just leave it in low earth orbit and build a space factory?

Much of the asteroid is likely not that valuable; it's not like there's pure ingots of metals floating around out there. So you'd want to have some kind of refinery in space which can capture the asteroid and extract the valuable ores.

Here's something helpful: http://www.space.com/15391-asteroid-mining-space-planetary-r...

So will it be "first in, first served" on all the roids/matter in the universe?

A world where Goldman has first dibs on these resources, or any say in the matter at all actually, is a grim one to me.

The money has to come from somewhere. Why shouldn't private spaceflight use our financial system's existing infrastructure for raising capital? In my mind, spending tax dollars on space is fine for exploration and science. But when it comes to industrial development, letting the free market sort it out is a good thing -- if asteroid mining's profitable, this part of our space presence can become self-funding.

As far as who owns what, I imagine the first successful exploitation of extraterrestrial resources will quickly be followed by the governments of countries with this capability hammering out some kind of international agreement on who can mine where.

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