Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
slate.com
slate.com
In order to sell the minerals, there must be a way to attain ownership.
How does one come to own an asteroid, or the minerals it contains?
A land grab under a single government is manageable. When there are 200 sovereign states, who decides which asteroids are owned by whom? First to discover? First to land? First to return minerals? Passed though a parsec I have rights to? Or perhaps you don't own the minerals until you cross low-earth orbit with them in your possession. Sign me up as an asteroid pirate.
If a company does attain ownership of an asteroid, can they sell the asteroid before ever landing on it? Will asteroid futures be traded on the CME?
If an asteroid is found to contain 100 tons of palladium, what happens to the palladium market? (Cha-ching! I hold put options on Pd!)
Ya, far more interesting....
Wired started a dialog with: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/opinion-asteroid-m...
Discussed ownership, but there is no answer.
The Economist touched on it: "The most important members of the team, then, may not be the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who put up the drive and the money, nor the engineers who build the hardware that makes it all possible, but the economists who try to work out the effect on the price of platinum when a mountain of the stuff arrives from outer space."
Someone who's played EVE for a significant amount of time (it's been years since I've touched any game) could probably answer everything above.
This is all to say that we'll of course fight over it.
Seems like, loosely speaking, chasing down sunken treasure, or possibly wildcatting for oil can offer precedent in some form. The notion of 'international waters' perhaps can apply to space. However, someone, sometime owned the treasure that was lost and may lay claim to it.
My real question is, apparently, nations can not claim ownership of asteroids. But they will have to mutually define the legal ways any citizen or corporation on Earth can acquire ownership. What is the most likely method, once they all agree on it?
Planetary Resources is at the same time forcing the issue by proceeding with their endeavor, and, making a pretty big bet that when the laws are in place, they will have legally acquired their booty.
"Their calculations were based on Nasa’s forthcoming OSIRIS-REx mission, which aims to launch a probe in 2016 to pluck samples from an asteroid called 1999 RQ36 and bring them to Earth.
Nasa hopes it will be home by 2023, with a couple of ounces of dirt. By then, the cost will have reached $1bn – made up of $800m for the vehicle, plus another $200m for the rocket launch.
Since that outlay will return just a couple of ounces of material, Barclays says it could use it as a baseline to estimate break-even prices for asteroid mining. Using the metrics proposed by Barclays, the Financial Times commodities team estimates that copper prices would need to rocket from today’s $3.81 an ounce to $476m for a similarly funded space mining project to cover its costs.
Clearly, it does not look like base metals from space are likely to provide a good return on capital.
So what about precious metals? Gold trades at $1,665 a troy ounce, setting a price of $518m a troy ounce for space-gold to break even."
"Asteroid mining is for space cadets", The FT, April 30, 2012 - http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144...
Astonishing that anyone can take this seriously as a baseline. You don't become a commodities analyst for being able to include flexibility and imagination in your analytical capability.
Also NASA isn't, ah, the best example of a cost conscious and frugal organization. They probably don't make a good baseline for the expense of these trips.
Planetary Resources still may never come close to turning a profit, but it's possible you're dismissing them a little too quickly.
In no way is asteroid mining cost effective at the moment. However, that's not actually very relevant.
Several companies are working toward bringing down launch costs, SpaceX being the farthest along. If such efforts are successful they could result in lowering launch costs by around a factor of 10 to 100. That fundamentally changes what it is possible to do in space. Which obviously has a very direct impact on the feasibility of asteroid mining. More so, it will probably spur development in Earth orbit as well, including things like inhabited orbital stations, hotels, and eventually cities. That will create a hungry market for materials in orbit, and there the advantage of mining from an asteroid vs. launching from Earth (even given the reductions in cost mentioned above) makes asteroid mining all the more competitive.
Additionally, advances in robotics and automation could potentially make asteroid mining very cost effective. Consider that when mining an asteroid there is no environmental concern and the most effective mining methods can be made use of with brutal efficiency. And, of course, the development of advanced robotics to facilitate asteroid mining would of course be valuable for other uses and thus be a profitable spin-off invention.
There are other points of interest but they are relatively less important. The core point is that if these developments happen then asteroid mining could quite easily become profitable. Of course, there is no guarantee that any of this will happen. So why not wait until the opportunity is ripe and then start? You certainly could, but you'd find that you're just enough steps behind Planetary Resources to be at a significant disadvantage. They'll already have experience with operating spacecraft. They'll already have developed the core technologies necessary for mining asteroids. They'll already have identified the most valuable asteroid targets. They'll already have run pilot operations and overcome several key roadblocks. And on the day that it becomes profitable to sell asteroid mined resources they'll be there with the goods. And if it turns out not to be feasible then overall they'll still have made a better use of their funding than, say, buying instagram, and they likely will not have spent nearly as much money either.
Assuming the launch costs are the same or slightly more, how much extra will it cost to attach a rocket to an asteroid and slowly push it back to Earth orbit? I would wager that the engineering costs would be exceedingly more than the marginal cost of hardware/fuel. Couple that with keeping the resources in orbit and building new ships off-planet, economics of scale will easily take care of the cost issue.
One asteroid mentioned in Planetary's plan had more platinum than existed in the entirety of Earth. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't make money from that.
I seriously find this mind-blowing. $1 million for a telescope launched into space sounds ridiculously cheap to me.
"PM: You've suggested an asteroid could be brought closer to the Earth to make it easier to mine. Is that really feasible? EA: It is. One of the ways that we could do that is simply to turn the water on an asteroid into rocket fuel and burn it in a thruster that nudges its trajectory. Split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you get the same fuels that launch space shuttles. Some asteroids are 20 percent water, and that amount would let you move the thing anywhere in the solar system."
Wtf? EA just suggested a perpetual motion machine. He suggests using energy to hydrolyze water, but then de-hydrolyzing the water to get energy. He's making it sound like more energy will come out than went in (allowing propulsion), when really it would be == at best, and really < because of inefficiency. The only way his concept of storing the energy is even slightly useful is if you were to spend years and years collecting solar energy and storing it as H2 + O2 to burn later in one quick burst. But that's you storing the energy over a long long time, and getting back less than you put in.
Say, you've got a nuclear reactor (or whatever else is more practical) on an asteroid. You cannot use the energy from the reactor to propel the rock, you need to generate thrust. So you take water, you split hydrogen & oxygen, you burn it, you get thrust.
Oh, and fun safety fact: a nuclear reactor isn't actually particularly radioactive until it's turned on. If you launch it out of Earth's orbit before turning it on, you're sitting pretty.
Also, nuclear reactors aren't the ideal way to make electricity in space. Proper nuclear reactors work as heaters for a heat engine, and heat sinks are proportionally much more expensive in space than on earth.
However, solar power is much more efficient. You get 100% efficiency all the time, and it's 30% better in space (near Earth) than it is down here at best. Also, since no structure has to carry any significant weight, you can build things like a flexible paper-thin sheet of solar cells printed on plastic that is spun about it's axis to keep it deployed and spread out.
I have no idea if that's the best way to convert solar energy to thrust, or if it's even feasible, but bringing perpetual motion into it seems a little harsh.
That energy could come from solar panels as you mentioned, with the drawbacks you mentioned. But it looks to be a good enough method.
So you have energy collected over a long period of time, then released in a short period of time. That means you need to store that energy. It's not feasible to ship batteries up from the surface with current battery technology, since the energy/mass ratio is awful, so you'll need some other way to store the energy. Chemical storage would be one way. Use local materials and transform them into new materials with more chemical potential energy. Chemical storage tanks can be reasonably light. When the time comes, you can reverse the process and transform your stored chemicals back into electricity.
But wait, we don't actually want electricity, we want thrust. A traditional rocket engine is a great way of transforming chemical potential energy into thrust. So let's skip the electrical middleman, and burn our chemical energy storage reagents in a rocket engine.
All that's left to do is choose the chemicals. If there's water, then it's easy to make oxygen and hydrogen from it using electricity, and hydrogen is a great rocket fuel.
I still think it's very practical to consider moving asteroids around from a technical perspective. The political ramifications are huge. If the people in charge are malicious they could completely devastate the planet.
I think this is generally solvable by using lots of small thrusters that are independently controlled to make sure that no one can smash the thing into the planet, but getting sign-off from everyone who might have veto power is huge.