A New Asteroid Mining Operation supported by Google Execs and James Cameron | Hacker News Reader

A New Asteroid Mining Operation supported by Google Execs and James Cameron

technologyreview.com

85 pointshristov40 comments

The economics of this could be better than you think.

A fair-sized chunk of an asteroid could contain a few trillion dollars worth of platinum group metals. If money can be found for it, a sample return mission to a near earth asteroid could probably be accomplished SpaceX-style.

A key step in all of this could be the mining of water from the asteroid Ceres, which is a much more practical destination than mars. At that point you could set up a solar or nuclear powered water cracking factory that would make large amounts of fuel available. Any needs for water in space could be so satisfied.

It's only worth a few trillion dollars if you don't actually sell it to anybody. Every kilogram they actually introduce into the market reduces the total scarcity of the resource, which means every kilogram they introduce has a lower marginal value.

It is true that increased supply -- all else equal -- decreases price, but, 1) we will find uses for the element that we don't currently use/know about and 2) we will never find infinite amounts of any resource so this means that. Prices will decrease marginally, but theres no way to know to what extent prices would fall.

Thought experiment: SpaceX is able to lasso up a 100% diamond asteroid and bring it to earth. Suddenly supply of diamonds is 1000x what it was expected to be that year. Diamonds will be worth marginally less as a result, however, it does not mean all that diamond asteroid is worthless. I am sure diamond mines would close for a bit as that asteroid is likely cheaper per unit than some other methods. Suddenly because diamonds because relatively cheaper they can begin to be used for all kinds of currently uneconomical uses. Maybe diamond fiber becomes the next typed of networking cable, or diamond asphalt makes our roads last forever, or diamond knives become all the rage for top chefs -- I don't know, but we'll find a way to use cheaper diamonds, and that asteroid is going to be worth a boatload no matter what.

Wish I had more time to think about this, but work calls.

As far as diamonds go, we already have more than enough here on Earth, and the price is being kept artificially high by a cartel. Industrial diamonds are only worth 1/1000th of what you pay for jewelry diamonds, so there's not much incentive for that.

But I see your argument.

Personally though I would want to keep the minerals up in space, figure out how to refine them there, and then use them up there. Since the cost of getting large quantities of materials up there is still rather expensive.

Yes, but by then you have disrupted the market so thoroughly that asteroid mining becomes a matter-of-fact standard and, very soon afterwards, the only feasible source of certain substances. It'll be an inversion of the status quo and if they can pull this off, this could restart our space-faring technologies.

Going beyond our planet for resources constitutes a huge step in human development - a step we're currently opting out of, but one day a mining program such as this might get the ball rolling again.

Yes but you could compensate for that by buying appropriate futures contracts.

Meh. First off, you'd have an effective monopoly on a handful of industrial metals. Gold aside, the main use for these metals dissipates them: I worked at a place that consumed several precious metals for hi-tech purposes, and couldn't recover them afterwards (not economical).

I've thought people would mine asteroids in the future because they're a great source for my favorite metal, iridium. I just didn't think it'd happen so soon.

Effectively you're arguing that an asteroid mining operation would be able to corner the market. I fail to see how that is a bad thing (for them).

You don't need much fuel to get the materials back down. As I note below, a railgun is all you need to send the materials on their way, and aerobraking/controlled re-entry gets them back down to earth.

Unmanned cargo can withstand high G forces, high temperatures, long transit times, and there is so much material available that losses due to ablation are likely acceptable.

Coming soon: a James Cameron movie featuring real footage from a space mining operation interlaced with a rather stereotypical love story. Title: Avatanic.

I'd watch it.

Seems like the most valuable and obtainable natural resource in space is energy (solar or He3). Raw materials are a distant second, especially since almost all new technologies do more with less (how many physical gadgets does one smart phone replace?)

Space may not be the best place to get raw materials (being, after all, mostly empty space) but you are mistaken about falling demand for materials. Commodity prices alone should tell you that demand is hitting the limits of current production. One smart phone may replace N others gadgets, but only 500 million people had the other gadgets, and _everyone_ wants a smartphone.

I didn't say overall demand is falling. But per capita demand is, if not falling, decelerating -- your car is made of less metal, one gadget does what ten heavier gadgets used to, etc. otoh almost all of us are using more power.

Armageddon?

Is there anywhere James Cameron doesn't want to go? He was just at the bottom of the ocean last month. He and Richard Branson should have a race into space!

You are too much empiric, there is no need to build something right now: writing some generic patents will to the job.

Prob. want to use a Hulk fitted with some T2 lasers. Scordite's trading pretty high right now in Jita.

http://spacewealth.org/

No web site, nothing on google, I'd start by creating a marketing department

Seriously, I'd buy some shares even if its a very high risk venture, if I knew how too.

Concept video is a bit rough though http://bit.ly/J3YOnt

Oh come on! No-one stands the remotest chance of getting viable amounts of rock down from space for another two generations. We don't have any mechanism to get the rocks down (a space anchor - not even remotely close to necessary material strength / weight ratio), let alone the ability to survive journeys to closest rocks.

Give it 20 years of people living on the moon or Mars and solving the supply, radiation and working problems, then I will believe we might risk throwing a megatonne of iridium at Earth orbit.

But great way for rich dreamers to hob nob with other rich dreamers. Enjoy it folks. Just don't invest.

Why would the mining operation need to be manned?

Also; people said a lot of similar things about SpaceX...

SpaceX is about commercialising an already-achieved process (ascending into Space and returning safely to Earth). We know we can do it - can we do it cheaper, or with different re-entry profiles?

And to be honest, with the record of successful unmanned missions to Mars (running at what, about evens just to make it to the surface) I am not holding out hope.

My best guess will be space-swarm -launch 500 independent solar powered motors, fling them at the general direction of a rock, and hope the 20 that attach can nudge it in side the moons orbit, where a later permanent colony can grab it. Smashing into the moon is less damaging. Hell, just bang it straight into the moon and pick up the pieces later on.

Damn, from "it'll never work" to "why not try it this way guys" in less than an hour. Need to work on curmudgeonly.

Still, even if it's on the moon, we cannot get it back to earth without the same risks. And picking it up from the moon, yeah we have guys just waiting around right now.

Ah, back to curmudgeon - hello old friend:-)

It's a rock. Just drop it in chunks of suitable size.

Rocks with enough metal ores to be useful and in sizes that can make it through re-entry with a useful quantity of material left tend to do other undesirable things, like smash stuff, just ask the dinosaurs.

just ask the dinosaurs

Well, that one might be on the large side. Besides, a controlled re-entry from LEO would have lower speeds than a random solar system impactor and could also use aerobraking.

It still might be too risky, but it doesn't seem totally, obviously infeasible to me.

It takes rich dreamers to create a new industry.

In-orbit infrastructure will have to be built, though probably not anything as exotic as a space elevator.

One approach to get material down: create basketball-sized meteors during the mining process or in-orbit with smelters. Coat or cover them in a material that will make their re-entry less wasteful. Using some kind of thruster, direct these into a de-orbit ending on a raft thing in the Pacific Ocean or parachuted to a deserted area.

For the more precious or dangerous material mined: use cheap glider-style re-entry vehicles.

And iPhone will fail ;)

I can see a way to get the rocks down. Cut off chunks of particular size, cover them in nets and tie the nets to a little robotic space tugboat, that uses rocket power to pull the rocks into earth orbit and then lands with the rocks in a parachute. The space tug boat will be reusable of course.

Radiation is also a tough problem. Most space metals should be radioactive. They have been swimming in space radiation for millions of years, so even metals that are usually non-radioactive, like iron should get plenty of opportunity to get activated. And once a metal is radioactive we have no way to fix that. The only fix is to wait for it to deplete itself. And that is usually a very long wait.

But now that I think of it, perhaps in an asteroid only the outside metals are radioactive. Perhaps the inside of the asteroid gets shielded by the metals on the outside that absorb all incoming particles. If that's the way things work, one should be able to mine non radio-active metals on the inside.

So I see nothing impossible, but it will be difficult.

http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html

Radio isotopes of iron. Unlikely that you'd have to worry too much about it. Did you have a particular nucleotide you were concerned about?

Why is that something that we should not worry about? (I am not being sarcastic, honestly asking, nuclear physics is not my primary expertise.) Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years.

Also I am not sure these are the only iron isotopes. This seems to be a list of "naturally occurring" iron isotopes which usually means "naturally occurring on Earth".

Also another thing to worry about is the isotopes of platinum and platinum group metals that seem to be the main and most lucrative target of space mining.

> Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years.

Which means it's completely safe. If it has a half-life that long, it won't be releasing radiation at a very high rate. Hardly enough to register above background. The isotopes you have to worry about are the ones with in-the-middle half lives- long enough that they don't deplete themselves in a conveniently short period, but short enough that they produce a dangerous power output.

That depends on concentrations of the isotope in the metal and the amount of metal we will be using. I have no idea what the concentrations of iron isotopes in meteors are and which iron isotopes are there, but I do not think it is correct to automatically say that radioactive isotopes with long half-lives are completely safe.

Don't you need free neutrons to cause radioactive activation? Space is full of radiation, but not AFAIK the activating kind.

> Most space metals should be radioactive. They have been swimming in space radiation for millions of years, so even metals that are usually non-radioactive, like iron should get plenty of opportunity to get activated.

Simply false.

Why would they try to bring the resources down to earth? It is so expensive to send things out of our orbit they should be selling the material to future floating stations, like the ISS. Also, satellite manufacturers and space probes could be constructed in something like the ISS with the majority of their heavy parts being made from asteroids.

Hmmmm. I don't know much about material science, but maybe they are mining silicon and fabricating solar panels? What is the heaviest part of a probe or satellite?

Not quite sure why we would want to get it down to earth myself. Think of the markup you could sell it for by just leaving it in space. No more need to launch rockets carrying materials/prefabs - it will just happen in space.

"Yea, I know our iron is XXX% more, but you know its already in space...."

And if its for mining for energy just create the energy in space and beam it down. Rather simple.

Actually from a technical point of view it is simpler to land on an asteroid than on Mars (you avoid the gravity wheel).

It will be cheaper to extract the minerals locally than to "take the rocks" back to Earth.

The materials are far more useful in space to build factories for building more things in space.

One should never presume to be able to predict that any human advancement will take multiple generations. History does not crawl, it leaps.

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