Asteroid Database and Mining Rankings
asterank.com
asterank.com
I'm not saying that bringing this quantity of metal into the economy is a bad thing necessarily, but it would have enough of an impact on the market to make these values completely inaccurate.
Introduction of extraterrestrial resources will cause these commodity prices to fall. But falling prices will cause industrial use (and world GDP) to rise. How much will prices fall, and how much will demand rise, and therefore how much maximum revenue can be extracted? This is not an easy calculation.
A good historical parallel for this kind of situation might be aluminum, which was a precious metal for many years. When it suddenly became available in large quantities due to new chemical processes for extracting it, supply skyrocketed and led to whole new industries. I don't think anyone in 1890 could have guessed what the ultimate demand for aluminum would settle at, even though it was clear the price was dropping precipitously.
"On Sept. 10, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on the Asteroid Act, a refreshingly short and readable five-page bill that would recognize the ownership by companies of resources they have extracted from asteroids and would also prohibit companies from interfering with the operations of competitors. Planetary Resources sent a letter to the committee in support of the bill."
http://www.amazon.fr/Mining-The-Sky-Asteroids-Planets/dp/020...
> The combined mass of all of the asteroids is about 25 times less than the Moon's mass (with Ceres making up over a third of the total)
http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s2.htm
Moon mass: 7x10^22 kg
Total asteroid mass: 3x10^21 kg
Earth mass: 6x10^24 kg
Density Earth's crust: 2.7 g/cm^3
Earth area: 5.1x10^8 km^2
Mass Earth's crust to 1km depth: 1.4x10^21
But like I said, I have no idea about the composition.
Chondritic asteroids, on the other hand, are left over from the primordial solar system and have the original relative abundances of rare earth materials. Hence the interest as a source of industrial resources.
In the spirit of constructive criticism, I would suggest the following changes which might make the site more useful for people like me who run calculations on asteroid mining for fun:
1) Make the formulas for value and cost explicit somewhere easily found on the site. Maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it.
2) Make it possible to alter the variables to allow exploring different scenarios. For example, the cost in $/(km/s) of delta-v depends upon the technology used. Maybe have different selections (chemical rockets, nuclear rockets, solar sail, cool unknown technology, magic fairy asteroid whales) which have different costs associated with them. This would change the rankings of which asteroids would be more profitable, since high metal asteroids with a high delta V cost are more profitable if more accessible. The opposite effect occurs if there is a technology which lowers mining and processing costs (such as directed solar heating and in-situ smelting). It would be nice to tweak that cost too. Being able to change technology scenarios makes this site much more fun.
3) Show some estimate of ore concentration. Yeah, I know the data isn't exactly definitive. Spectra don't give you good information on internals. But an estimate is being used in there somewhere, it would be interesting to show it, especially if it could be compared with earthling ores.
Seems like there might be an interesting intermediary phase, maybe something like a gilded age, until we figure out how to exploit these resources under a framework of instantiating extra-terrestrial colonies.
He's got some other fun projects: http://www.ianww.com/
You make me laugh tough :)
Just mine the asteroids, they require lower delta V than Mars (yay no gravity well) and there are, as demonstrated by this site, better economic incentives to do so.
Suggestions in science fiction include foaming the metal in space and landing it into the ocean, then hualing the "metalberg" back to a drydock where it can be cut apart and hauled off for refining.
Foaming the return mass means it will have a slightly lower terminal velocity, and it will float!
Now to work on a deorbiting system that provides accuracy with low cost … perhaps a solar electric linear accelerator?
The problem is time horizons. Extraterrestrial mining projects from conception to first delivery is probably a 20-30 year timeframe. That is way, way outside of what could be reasonably financed on the open market.
On the other hand, if you could reasonably get a return on investment in the 5-7 year time frame, then there'd be no trouble getting financing for each step of the project. However that requires having liquidity events before you're able to actually get resources to market, and the only way I see that to be possible is to sell some sort of contract valued by future revenue potential. You see the same problem in remote areas of the Earth where mining efforts take considerable planning, e.g. northern Canada. And we have solutions there: mining claims and a sense of legal ownership of resources that are still in the ground.
Break that mining project into 5 to 7 year chunks with a mechanism for contracts exchanging hands inbetween, and the free market will solve the problem of bootstrapping space settlement.