Company backed by James Cameron & Google founders may mine asteroids

One wonders if the rise of markets, global communication, etc., have rendered the nation state somewhat obsolete.

In theory, we still depend on our governments for things like public works, for ensuring peace, for promoting justice, and protecting personal property. These are things that we believe corporations would be ill-suited for.

And yet, in practice, at least in the United States and in the PIGS of Europe--we see that hey, holy shit, they've dropped the ball in a lot of cases. I'm willing to wager that we wouldn't be too much worse off with a different system.

Note: I take this position not in support of our new corporate overlords, but out of the necessity born from the realities of our government. If our government actually helped the public, actually had a legal system that worked justly and fairly, and actually did Good, I'd shun the amorality of the free market. But it doesn't, so I can't.

I'm with you on the enthusiasm, but consider:

a) the history of previous innovations like railroads and flight. Private actors have always made big contributions, it's just that government was often an early client or monopoly grantor. The big projects that government finances and implements directly tend to be things like defense and infrastructure.

Edit: relatively low tech but large infrastructure - giant damns, highway systems, rural electrification. I've always thought of NASA as a half-defense project. But this is a tendency rather than an iron rule, the pendulum swings back and forth on public/private sector involvement.

b. Hell no, it's not possible to do these things on your own. you need a team (who share some executive power) and a pool of labor, and ideally you stay open enough (like Steve Jobs) to the innovative bubbles that bubble up from any part of your organization. An individual with sufficient capital and vision has the opportunity to overcome the economic inertia of a big project and get things moving, but to look at it as something you do 'on your own' is to fall into an ego trap right out of the gate. Extreme example of this: Muammar Gaddafi.

c. Bureaucracy is a side-product of organization. Government is bureaucratic because it has reasons to persist as an organization. But almost all commercial entities have bureaucracy of their own, proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. Bureaucracy can be annoying or inefficient, but it is not a bad thing in itself: it's just organizational infrastructure and an entirely rational division of labor. Naturally, there's a problem when the interests of individual bureaucrats or bureaux come into conflict with those of the organization as a whole, but that's often the result of an incomplete or inchoate conflict resolution process. In the right circumstances it can be an asset; the software company my wife works for originally threw its product together as an internal job-tracking tool for paper-based archive/records management. Nowadays what used to be its core business is outsourced to subcontractors.

The fulcrum of decision making was remarkably focused on a single point: him.

And yet the company has not undergone a dramatic collapse since his death. This is because he built a strong organizational infrastructure in which he played a central, but replaceable, role.

I don't know the end game for capitalism [...]

I don't believe there is one, any more than there's an end game for math or physics. Capitalism is in my view a phenomenon rather than a philosophy, as is communism (in the non-ideological sense of people doing things together for mutual benefit). As I get older I think a great deal of political conflict is the result of a confusion between means and ends, but that's another story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#On_wealth

Taking a devil's advocate approach here, the scary thing is that individuals are now vested with the power of a nation state.

The logical conclusion of that is feudalism, and I think with more or less the same consequences. Basically:

• You'll get some good kings and some bad kings

• Some will be into exploration for wealth, prestige and to further an ideology

• Wealth and power will be passed down through families

• A person being a good king is probably a bad predictor of their great grandson being a good king

Democracy and a strong central government aren't an optimal solution to the distribution of power, but they do tend to average out systematic performance over time to produce less ups and downs. Technology and finance seem to be the largest pseudo-king making disciplines these days, but I'll leave musing over their relative distribution of good and bad kingliness as an exercise to the reader.

I think you've made the mistake of reaching a conclusion by cherry picking. You think of a few select cases like Page, Musk etc. and think maybe it's good there's a concentration of wealth, that there are billionaires. But you are ignoring all the other billionaires and "fat cats" who are arguably doing bad or selfish things, who aren't pusing the human race forward, just being parasites. Does the existance of Musk, Cameron, Bezos, etc. efforts somehow more than outweigh the negatives of the other guys? Perhaps. But we can't ignore the other folks, the more parasitic aristocracy, like the Koch brothers, possibly the Rockefellers, the Morgans, etc.

You're cherry picking a handful of nerd billionaires who are getting into, lets face it, a pretty big gamble right now. SpaceX is the only success story of all the commercial space companies and the whole "The rich will find a way to become immortal and sell us the serum" scenario is this weird opposite of classism.

I'd also add that this mentality is why we had kings and dicators in human history. We're just too prone to thinking a few alpha males will Fix Everything and pesky things like division of power, politics, just get in the way of our Ayn Rand heroes. I think you can figure out in the lifecycle of kingdoms and dictatorships that the endgame is never paradise. Its usually a long ongoing nightmare of cronyism and human rights violations.

Weird to see a western person dismiss the incredible priviledge he has and free speech rights and lack of obligations of serfdom/slavery suddenly take up the mantle of 'let the alpha males fix everything you stupid bureaucratic peons.'

Just out of curiosity, do you think these gentle nerds would have thrived in a environment like the one you're applauding? Imagine Bill Joy or Wozniack or Bezos born into a crony capitalistic environment. Something tells me without the nannying of the western enlightened nanny state with its safe streets and cheap public education, would any of these guys have had the class mobility or opportunity to move upwards? Makes me wonder how many geniuses are being pissed away in places where the alpha males rule harshly. The world has probably lost hundreds of north korean and somalian genuises.

What I really want to read in the press is how "100,000 hackers from the online site called [insert Hacker News/reddit, etc] worked cohesively for X years and were instrumental in solving problem Y."

Certainly there must be some problems where a large number of people can solve them together.

What we seem to be seeing is that these "new money" entrepreneurs spend a great portion of their wealth, using their skills at innovation and bulldogging people into doing what they need, to make great changes. It's worthy of note that Rockefeller, who was the worlds first billionaire, donated $550 million through his philanthropy by 1918. He essentially made the University of Chicago. From about 1900 to 1940 his personal wealth was steady at approximately 1% of the US GDP. More notable still, is that from his first pay check he gave 10% of his earnings to his church. His funding of medical research was instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever.

Bill Gates is rather fittingly working in Rockefeller's shoes.

I think its fantastic that these "new money" billionaires are literally chasing their dreams and dragging us along with them.

I'm 24, and at 16 I was thinking that my chance of seeing another planet or even space was solely reliant on finding some LSD. Essentially I put the factual chance of my seeing space to be 1 in a trillion. With SpaceX and announcements like this, I feel like they must have when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I feel like I should be sleeping in the back seat of my car while it flies me to work and that I'll go vacation on Mars and go for a weekend getaway in LEO.

It's amazing to me that in such a short time that this shit has become possible again.

Well you have to consider that people who were able to make a great amount of money through capitalistic means usually are not "EVIL" people. Because they have to sell their products/services to others, they need to please their clients/customers on an everyday basis. They have to have a rather good profile in order to keep their business going (and their own organization, for the matter).

You'd rather have to wonder about politicians, who get rich by diverting voters' resources, misusing the state money, and lying about their own responsibilities. And in History, they have been the fat cats enslaving populations and mass-murdering people. We have yet to see any example of this happening in the private sector.

Anyway, rich people are not unique in terms of profile. How you make your own money tells a lot about you and what you are really worth.

Its called Fascism, and its no nugget.

SpaceX + Xe (Blackwater) == DOOM. We will turn back to government to save us from these crazies, I'm pretty sure of it ..

And people have been talking for a long time about how eventually launch costs would drop. In theory. But with SpaceX's recent successes, with their stated intentions, with the nature of their leadership, I think the folks behind Planetary Resources thought, "You know. Now might be the time. SpaceX, in particular, looks about to really bring down cost to orbit. Let's get in on that. What's going to be enabled by that? That's right, asteroid mining. Let's fill out the paperwork and start assembling the cash, the team, to get the ball rolling."

The only ones I can think of would be Luna, Phobos, Deimos and the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars' orbit.

Are these really viable targets? Aside from Luna, they're all pretty far away, or am I missing some obvious asteroids that are known to be within convenient distance of Earth?

1) They may not necessarily think they're going to be able to deploy a cost effective business service overnight. They may realize it's going to take a while, and more pieces have to be put in place. But there are things they can start working on now that push in that direction.

2) SpaceX. And to a lesser extent, the other space teams and competitions that have had successes in last few years. Surely one of them, or a combination of a few of them, are going to bring that cost/risk to orbit down significantly. Opening up new business possibilities as potentially profitable.

3) All the recent apparent advances in robotics capabilities, embedded computing and submersibles (where the mission demands are so extreme they are not too unlike spacecraft in many ways). Drones. Pack mules. Exo-wear. Quadcopters. Powerful computers that also happen to be small, lower power draining and super cheap -- cost of risk goes down, variety of potential applications goes up.

4) Increasing sense of impending resource wars on Earth, due to the rise of the BRIC countries, all the key minerals needed by modern electronics/computing/batteries/PV only present in China or Africa or country-that-is-not-the-US. The predicted water shortages. The increasing sense that the way that modern large-scale agriculture is done (high yields via chemicals that are toxic to humans in the long run) and so might need to switch back to lower-yield-per-acre methods. And so on. The strategic takeaway is that if population grows, Earth resources grow more scarce, and especially US-controlled resources grow more scarce, then there may be an increased demand for resources from somewhere off-Earth, or kept entirely out of control of some particular Earth-based nations or companies. Is this an immediate need requiring an overnight solution? No. But if you have billions, you can afford to think about the longer term, and you have the money to risk starting those investments today. Just in case. Also, to kick it up a notch, consider the alternative: do you really think that, say, the US Congress or Presidency is going to take any bold decisive action that's going to positively address these long term concerns? Do you think they're even allowed to, by the rules they have to follow, or by their political patrons? Or do you think they'll stick to addressing more ephemeral, near-term concerns, to quick wins, political point scoring, propaganda, etc.? I know how I'd bet. :)

Helium-3 http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283...

It may not matter. Assuming Cameron has enough wealth to support himself and his family for the rest of his life, what else is he going to spend his money on?

He's already made it pretty clear that he's keen on exploration, and that space is an interest. If his net worth is $650m (wikipedia), I would imagine that he'd be quite comfortable spending $500m of that on something that he's passionate about - even if it's not profitable by the time he's dead.

Mining the asteroids is inevitable. Maybe it wont be profitable in 10 years, or 20, or 50, or 100. But he wants to spend some of our Avatar dollars bootstrapping a new industry, I don't have a problem with it.

I honestly don't think that he would expect to be profitable in the near term, but I don't think that's a factor for him.

- Replacing terrestrial mines with asteroid mines.

- Bring an asteroid to L5. Mine. When done you have a place to live.

and it becomes weaponized.

Anything moving fast enough is a potential weapon. We need to get used to this idea now.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

You can get a free app for your iPhone that tells you the next few close approaches.

(Very excited about this whole thing, btw. Have been hearing rumors around town about a bunch of MSL folks moving up north to work on something very cool...have been dying to find out what that something cool is.)

In these early days, I think we'll probably be more focused on targets of opportunity, but once the technology base exists to be picky, if you could locate a body full of precious metals, say gold and platinum, it could easily dwarf the earthbound supply.

I think the most interesting opportunities lie not with traditional methods of exploiting these materials, but with the methods we will discover once previously rare materials become abundant and cheap.

Of course, devaluing gold to the point of aluminum is going to cause political upheaval and that will have to be dealt with, and while this conjures images of chaos and serious trouble, it doesn't seem like all that big of a deal compared to what will happen when a private entity starts talking about bringing a dinosaur-killer-sized body near the earth.

(somebody had to say it)

But seriously, whatever rare-earths we find there, nobody will complain about open pit mining.

Like the old "Earth first" joke implies (... we'll strip mine the other planets later), it might be a good time to, well, start stripping potentially toxic chemicals from places we aren't trying to live in, since we pulled out much of the easy stuff here. (even if that's the opposite of the joke)

Perhaps lithium is easier to find on the lighter "chondrite" (non nickel/iron) type asteroids?

Sure we do. Wrap the goods in a capsule. Make sure you aim it in the right direction. Apply energy.

It's getting _off_ the ground that is the problem.

Say hello to the Belters, I guess.

PS: An ION drive tug boats to move stuff from LEO to geosynchronous orbit is IMO the most needed infrastructure to make space cheaper.