As much as I'm a fan of space exploration, it's a bit silly to say that an asteroid is worth $20 trillion.
The ore in an asteroid, REFINED, is worth that much.
It's a fair bit of work to move that ore from pt A to pt B, crush it, smelt it, refine it, anneal it, etc.
A cubic kilometer of sea water is worth a similarly preposterous amount ... and yet, noone has become a trillionaire by refining sea water. It costs more to do it than the minerals are worth.
Will it happen some day? Sure. Is it relevant today? No.
Its not really about that. The point is that the wealth of a single small planet is insignificant compared to the wealth of even the extra bits floating around our solar system.
What could we build if titanium was free (or very close)? What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?
A vital step to us getting off this planet in a meaningful way is sending robots out to gather resources, both to build the ships we'll need outside of our gravity well and to return some of that abundance to the surface so we can alleviate our scarcities here.
> What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?
There IS a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy.
...just like processing an asteroid.
Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.
There's "plenty" of titanium here too, most of its just in the form of titanium dioxide which happens to be very hard to turn back into the good stuff. (But its fantastic for making paint..)
As I recall, the allure with metals in asteroids that they are "hunks of cut up planets". Instead of digging and processing, you just scrape the good stuff off the surface and (being in deep space and all) its not oxidized or otherwise contaminated like it is when found on earth. You build your kickass starship out of it right then and there or encapsulate it in some heat shielding and drop it in the nearest ocean for retrieval.
A great many people who bought a bunch of gold as a hedge against inflation might be disappointed though...
I suspect the metals are oxidized on the asteroids, too. If aluminum takes so much energy to liberate from the oxygen, it must really like to combine with oxygen. I'd guess there was a fair amount of oxygen floating around with the aluminum before it clumped together into asteroids, even if there isn't now.
Asteroidal resources are unique and diverse. In general, they are different from the dirt beneath our feet and the ores that we mine from our planet's crust. Likewise, they are much different than the Moon, Mars, and other planets' crusts. Asteroids are much more metal-rich, like the core of the Earth, Moon, Mars and any other planet, and unlike their crusts. The asteroids are normally not as enriched in oxides, silicates, and the other lighterweight elements that floated up to dominate a planetary crust. Many asteroids are like a mixture of a planetary metal core plus a crust plus the mantle in between. Some are entirely like a core or a mantle or a crust, having come from a large parent body which was broken up. In most asteroids, free metal is abundant in the mix, and often dominant. This free metal can be used without any further industrial processing.
I don't have a good explanation why (lack of pressure, maybe?) but this doesn't seem to be the case. For example, I've seen the 60-ton Hoba meteorite in Namibia, and although the surface has corroded and oxidised, its bulk is definitely solid metal (mostly iron, some nickel).
It would still take some processing to separate the compounds, but nowhere near as much as ores.
Which is exactly why we need fusion power and not the hydro, wind and solar power the shortsighted environmentalists keep pushing. Those will never produce the vast additional amounts of energy needed to make the next step in our general wellbeing. With cheap limitless energy, you can produce all the water you want, bind all the CO2 you want, produce all the O3 you want, recycle everything you want and even use fission to produce whatever materials you want.
And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap? People said the same thing about fission, but it's turned out to be quite expensive, and the technology is likely to be very complex. If you calculate how large area of photovoltaics you can build for the price of developing and building a fusion reactor (not that anyone has any idea what this cost will be), I suspect you'd get a lot of it.
And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap?
Because fusion scales well. With time, everything limited by technology becomes cheap as technology advances. There are no fundamental problems or limits in fusion, just practical problems. Fusion has never received the amount of funding it should have received. How long did it take ITER to get the measly 10 billion dollars required?
As for fission: the all important difference is that the fuel for fusion is much easier to get, is unlimited and the garbage that gets left behind isn't nearly as much of a problem. Moreover, there is no risk of blowing up half the nearby city and irradiating the area for the next 100K years. Fusion and fission are incomparable as for their ability to provide energy.
Solar power is you sitting 200 feet away from a bonfire. Fusion reactor power is placing a space heater directly in front of you. If you were cold, which would you prefer?
A mirror is orders of magnitude cheaper than any fusion containment system you care to name, also orders of magnitude less mass.
Seriously, do the math, for the applications we're talking about (asteroid mining), given that the solar constant at earths orbit is roughly 1400 Watts/m^2 a relatively modest set of mirrors could be used to heat metal up to working temperature.
Yeah, the same bit of ignorance bothered me about alchemists: The only purpose alchemy could serve would be turning gold into lead, with respect to the marketplace.
If you haven't read _Entering Space_ I highly recommend that you do. Published in 1999, it was my first introduction to the basic economics and technology required for asteroid mining. It not only that, but also many other topics from possible Lagrange point space stations to Helium 3 fusion. As a bonus, it is old enough that your local library probably has it for you to check out with no reservations.
"Moore's Law has given us exponential growth in computing technology, which has led to exponential growth in nearly every other technological industry."
I doubt that earth has the resources to serve as a processing facility for space asteroids. Even if we get metals from asteroids we would still have to smelt and refine them on Earth, which is a polluting and resource demanding process.
Would it not be possible to create a nuclear powered robotic installation on that asteroid as well? I guess the initial costs are high, but it would pay off in the long term (just move the factory once you are done, the low gravity requires little fuel)
If you're only going to the asteroid belt, you can probably get away with photovoltaics instead of nuclear power, too. And yeah, it seems it would be better to do it in place. But if it's really quite pure metal, there's not much refining that would need to be done.
Refining almost-pure metals is fortunately NOT as polluting as refining ore. It may come to the point where it becomes illegal to refine anything BUT roid-metal.
An interesting article, but full of speculation. Many assumptions where made to produce the conclusions and the data (like an asteroid being worth 20 trillion).
Yes, I agree with many of the predictions of the article. Like how private industry will take over the space exploration. But the opinion of the author and I is about as valuable as a crystal ball.
If we are going to play the speculation game, here is what interests me about the subject.
1) Who would get the mining rights in space?
Or would it be a 'gold rush?' If so, would it be like international waters with no laws?
Could I achieve my childhood dream of being a space pirate? ;)
2) Most of the asteroids of our solar system take months to reach reach with our fastest ships. If you want a human presence we are talking YEARS. Humans on prolonged space flights are very, very tricky to take care of. That makes a strong case for only sending robots, and that would require some very wicked AI, since the transmission times for controls would be too great.
Think about all the hazards and procedures the robot(s) would have to perform. Guidance, acquisition, positioning, detection of surroundings, plotting return course, AVOIDANCE, ext. And the hardware implications, the fuel, the power, capturing, ext.
It would make a Mars rover look like an RC car. And the two mars rovers cost us approx. 820 million dollars.
The cost of development may be justified by a 20 trillion dollar prize, but the cost to buy in is very high.
If a corporation did want to fund it with billions of dollars without knowing if they were going to see a return, and willing to wait years for it. Then you have a winner, I don't see anyone jumping at the bit to take that risk though.
3) While asteroid mining seems like a great idea. Why are aren't we being more creative about the other things we can do in space? Where is the startup mentality?
How about technicians that repair satellites in orbit? Great place to hone the programing for the asteroid gatherers.
>First, private capital is seeing space as a good investment, willing to fund individuals who are passionate about exploring space, for adventure as well as profit. What was once affordable only by nations can now be lucrative, public-private partnerships.
For the moment being, that sounds specious at best. We (the US) are not able to get back to the moon because of a lack of funds (NASA accounted for some 5% of the entire federal budget in 1966, now it's down to .5%); any amount of funding by private entities for such tasks is minuscule in comparison, and therefore obviously insufficient.
But I suppose that'll change in interesting ways with time.
It is unfortunate that he uses the Alaska purchase as the benchmark for shrewd public investment as there is some thought that maybe it wasn't, see: http://bit.ly/d3WsHn The purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, ridiculed in 1867 as “Seward’s Folly,” is now viewed as a shrewd business deal. A purely financial analysis of the transaction, however, shows that the price was greater than the net present value of cash flow from Alaska to the federal government from 1867 to 2007.
It's not really supposed to, is it? There are plenty of parts that could make a profit, but we prefer the government providing stuff for free instead. For example, if the federal government were allowed to hold copyrights, it could make good money licensing all sorts of military photographs (WW2 photography alone would be worth quite a bit). And the rate for interstate highway travel that the market would bear is probably higher than $0.00/mile. Instead photographs are public domain, and highways are free.
The post office couldn't make a profit if it didn't have laws supporting it. They have terrible customer service, take sundays off, various other problems, UPS and Fed Ex would destroy them.
Of course the Patent and Trademark office is law supported too.
Perhaps FexEx and UPS could "destroy" the USPS if they didn't have to worry about guaranteeing relatively quick delivery for envelopes from Kirby, WY to Boone, TN for the same inexpensive price as deliveries within a few blocks. The USPS may have laws supporting it, but don't we have expectations of it that far exceed whatever private business could hope to accomplish for profit?
(And, naively, aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?)
What's good about that guarantee? Remember TANSTAAFL. Any time there is a Governmental "free lunch" that most people don't want or use, it's just favoring a few people at the expense of everyone else.
I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly regulations for some (legal) reason.
Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might sound snarky.)
I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like "any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government".
Of course, by that standard, I'm not sure how many "truly private" companies exist, since it seems to rule out (among others) any company that relies on intellectual property law, including trademark enforcement to prevent bootlegs and cheap imitations.
I think what might finally send us to the asteroid belt will be the military. If we are able to pick an appropriate sized asteroid and deflect it off it's course, the asteroid can easily be accelerated using Mars or Venus or the Sun. We can take it anywhere we feel like. We can destroy any target on earth - as small as a city or as large as you want. The energy needed to deflect the asteroid is minuscule compared to the kinetic energy you can exert on your target. The ultimate WMD.
Agreed. They also already exist in sufficient quantity to do whatever you'd imagine doing with an asteroid and still inhabit the Earth. Unless, of course, you don't have nukes. Maybe Iran should consider this? ;-)
Unfortunately this article overlooks the "startup" costs for developing and deploying the requisite technologies for harvesting the profits (which are significant enough to preclude privatization, IMO).
And there is another more grievous oversight in the article which pertains to the sinister slight-of-hand on the administration's policy: they intend to slough off the cost of developing and deploying what portends to be mankind's greatest engineering feat, while planning to reap the profits: do you really think for one second that good old Uncle Sam will not find away to skim away a hefty share of these (potential) profits? do you think that such asteroids will be corporate or "social" property (read government)?
Tying together one last point, does anyone really believe that this administration has a new found faith in the free markets - or is all of this pandering and innuendo just a red hearing to keep us from sobering up to the cold fact that the promising Constellation project was just killed?
WOW, I guess no one on HN remotely thinks humans and the earth are facing any sort of environmental problems at the moment. All everyone here is talking about is the profit margins and logistics of pulling this preposterous, albeit very cool, idea off. I'm all for adventure, technology, progress, blah blah blah. I am thrilled about the possibilities of space. But realistically I think we as a species need to better undertand ourselves and create better; more sustainable systems on our native plannet before we embalance our natural habit and ecosystem on an intergalactic scale.
Here is something to think about, nearly everyone who's been intimately involved in supporting habitat in space has developed a deep and abiding respect for how difficult it is and how fragile and precious the biosphere we take for granted is.
Our world is a small watery dot floating in the dark. We don't have a backup.
The ore in an asteroid, REFINED, is worth that much.
It's a fair bit of work to move that ore from pt A to pt B, crush it, smelt it, refine it, anneal it, etc.
A cubic kilometer of sea water is worth a similarly preposterous amount ... and yet, noone has become a trillionaire by refining sea water. It costs more to do it than the minerals are worth.
Will it happen some day? Sure. Is it relevant today? No.