I just looked at world wide gold production. Its 2500 tons a year roughly lately. So, IMO to just start to take the edge off the price you’d have to bring in 250 tons. I’ll let you guys figure you how much capital investment in spacecraft technology is required to bring back that much from asteroids every year (much less the technology and cost to go there and mine it in the first place).
Or in other words, no investors are going to invest so much they cause the price of gold to plummet. They couldn’t invest that much money even if they wanted to IMO because they wouldn’t have enough.
Of course, the only way enough “space gold” (or space anything else) to matter economically reaches Earth’s surface is if we have a space elevator in place.
Getting up theres expensive but once in place the costs plummet.
Doing everything in situ, with an abundance of solar power etc.
As to the price of minerals dropping if there becomes an abundance, if they’re, then they are still valuable.
If its just intrinsic value as in jewellry and theres an abundance, then yes the "value " would drop.
I believe that De Beers restricts the output of diamonds to prevent this very thing happening, though I could be wrong.
Money making aside, we need to get into space because we are due an Earth impacting asteroid/comet in the not too distant future.
And we won’t have time to do anything about it if we only try to develop that capability once we’ve detected it on its home run, no matter how much money and resources we throw at the problem.
The annoying thing is that people like myself won’t get the satisfaction of saying "I told you so " to the Luddites who have an illogical fear of space exploration when that happens because we, and most of the life on this planet, will all be dead.
Oh, come on, that kind of thing is entirely random. Even we had enough past instances to go by that some kind of statistical predictions were available, we could not say when we’re “due,” no more than we can say when California is “due” for its next major earthquake.
“F**k you; those are my grounds.” Doesn’t roll off the tongue like one of the originals, but I think you get the point.
The energies involved in interplanetary travel—which is what we’re talking about if they’re not just going to the Earth Trojans—and large mass manipulation are, appropriately, astronomical in size. I have a difficult time imagining any of our present significant world governments allowing that kind of capability in private hands without oversight tantamount to control. Hence my use of the word, ‘cede’.
If you think I’m overstating things, play with the calculations of the energy required to get to and direct a 30 m mass of processed rock, ~ density 5 g/cc. Then see what happens when that mass of rock is directed directly on top of a city. At 10 miles per second+, which I understand is the ballpark speed for an impacting meteor. I like this calculator, but I’m sure there are others. The impact energy of the above scenario is comparable to a multi-stage nuclear device. Cover it with carbon black, direct the exhaust impulse away from any detectors, and you probably wouldn’t even see the damned thing coming. I don’t want to divert this discussion of asteroid mining with closer to home political concerns, but compare the destructive capability of Iran’s alleged nuclear program with that of this proposed idea.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of asteroid mining. I like the idea of the spinoffs I mentioned in my first post. I think we’d all be better off. But asteroid mining by necessity implies some awfully significant energies, all too easy to weaponize.
Talk of the Nation on NPR today interviewed Eric Anderson, Chairman & CEO of Space Adventures and Co-Chairman & Co-Founder of Planetary Resources who is leading up this group of would-be space miners. You can listen to the whole interview here. They talked a lot about the primary resource being water that can be used as rocket fuel, but also the precious metals and how they might extract them.
Seismologists can perhaps predict California will get X number of earthquakes in a century, but don’t press them to specify by decade. I doubt astronomers can narrow down Earth’s next asteroid-impact to the nearest million-year period.
“I have to admit, Lewicki’s answer surprised me. “The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment,” he told me. “They’re basing their decisions on our vision.””
Which is fine, but means my take is correct - its not being done for foreseeable profitability, but for other reasons, ie the ‘this is neat’ factor.
Naw, it was a good analogy, as far as analogies go, you simply missed the point. Early European exploration and colonization were all losing propositions for years, even decades. That’s because they had to transport all manufactured goods and even a lot of their food from Europe, especially in the early days, and relative to the amount of wealth they had at the time it pretty much cost a lot of money relative to today. Remember, to outfit Columbus expedition he had to go to the crown for enough scratch to make it happen.
EVENTUALLY Europeans exploration and colonization and exploitation of resources in the new world paid off, but it took a long time before that happened, and if you look at the relative costs (compared to today when countries like the US are so much richer than the most powerful nations in the past that there is no comparison) and the long return on investment it works out pretty even. Consider…what percentage of GDP did it cost Spain for their early explorations? What did the early colonizations cost? What did it cost for Spain to start to set up their trade network to begin exploiting resources in the new world? What did it cost to set up all the slave trading system to make that early colonization work?
I have no idea, but I bet it cost them more as a percentage of their GDP than it cost the US to put a man on the moon…and certainly more than even a bunch of billionaire types are going to spend doing this, as an overall percentage of the US’s annual GDP. We don’t want to spend the money, but consider what we could do with, say, 10% of our GDP (say, roughly $1.5 trillion spent annually). What COULDN’T we do for that kind of money? My wag is that a fraction of that spent over a decade or so would give us access to a huge supply of space resources that would eventually turn a profit…a rather large one when you think of what all is out there waiting to be exploited.
This isn’t pie in the sky…it’s stuff we could do today and could have done decades ago. We CHOOSE not (to paraphrase) ‘go to the moon for the last several decades and do the other things, not because they are impossible, but because they are hard and cost money that we’d rather spend on other things’. It’s a choice though, and other countries are starting to catch up and develop their own space programs because the solar systems resources are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited, and the knowledge and prestige that will accrue to the country that does it will be vast.
Take Elon Musk, for example. His motivation for creating SpaceX was to take humanity to the stars. He intends to build Mars missions and wants to be a leader in creating a permanent presence for mankind off of Earth. But being a practical man, he understands that he needs to find a way to do that which will also return money on his investment. So he launches commercial satellites into orbit, on May 7 his company will send a re-supply rocket to the ISS, and his new lifter, the Falcon Heavy, will be able to launch large private and military payloads into LEO or GEO or even to other planets.
What’s interesting is how he’s building his capability to match commercial requirements while building the capacity for his grand vision. For example, his cargo pod also happens to be a 7-astronaut man-rated capsule when so configured. His rockets were built with man-rating in mind, even though he’s got no planned manned missions. SpaceX’s escape system, rather than being a jettisonable rocket on top of a latticework on the nose of the rocket like Apollo’s, is instead managed by rockets built into the capsule itself - rockets which just happen to have been designed to be fully throttleable and reusable, allowing them to be used as retro-rockets for soft landings on Earth or other planets.
SpaceX is slowly building a capability to send manned missions to the moon or deep space, but they’re doing it on the back of a commercial launch delivery service. I think Planetary Resources is doing the same thing - building a commercial model that builds into a capability to do extraordinary things for which no market yet exists.
Between all of these companies and a few others, the private space industry is ramping up faster than I ever thought was possible. Bigelow Aerospace has inflatable space habitats. SpaceX will have a booster flying next year that will lift more than the shuttle ever could, at 1/6 the cost. SpaceX’s contract with ISS will allow them to build out and prove space rendevous and docking technology. Planetary Resources will have telescopes and rendevous capability. Other companies are working on airlift for cheap access to orbit, ascender balloons that could reach orbit with very low cost, and other radical technologies.
At the rate private space is accelerating, we could be seeing absolutely amazing things happening just a few years from now. Asteroid mining may not be as far away as you’d think.
NASA could never have done this. It is too mired in bureaucracy, conflicting requirements, political power struggles, and mission creep. Cutting LEO and manned space development away from NASA was the smartest thing the Obama administration has done.
And if you can launch an orbital rocket, you have the capability of delivering a weapon of mass destruction (even a block of tungsten would do the trick) to anywhere on Earth. Surely no government would ever let a private company do that…
As for driving down the price of resources - that’s just fine. Remember, though, that there is always an equilibrium price. You can’t and won’t drive it down to zero.
Gold is a very useful material. We’d like to use it for many applications that today are unaffordable. If we suddenly found ourselves with an increased supply of gold, the price would decline - until it gets to the point where new applications for gold become feasible. Then demand for gold will increase. Where the price will stabilize, I have no idea. Probably somewhere near the cost of recovering it from space, plus an amount representing the risk and the recouping of the R&D investment, plus a small amount of profit. At first the profit will be larger, but once a new market has been established for gold, competition will set in and we’ll see competing asteroid mining companies and they will drive the price down to the equilibrium price plus the amount that represents the capital investment, risk, and competitive profit.
That’s what has happened in all other commodity industries. At first, a new material may sell at high profits. But those profits attract new producers, and they compete with each other and eventually drive the profit down to the level where it barely makes sense to produce the material when the cost of risk and capital is factored into the equation.
Read the whole article. It’s very interesting. For example, they’re planning to mass-produce their telescopes. That will lower unit costs, and make it cost-effective to sell access to them to governments, education, and other facilities - profiting from each sale.
Years ago when the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars, I remember reading that the NASA web sites for them had received hundreds of millions of hits. That level of interest can be monetized. Imagine a fleet of telescopes that have enough availability that scientists and even astronomy clubs could rent telescope time or share time with others observing the same region of space. There might be a real market in that. if the company has an Arkyd 300 approaching an asteroid, they might even be able to sell the video feed to the public like we buy pay-per-view sports events today.
I remember years ago reading of a speculative business model where a company wanted to design a micro-lander that could be landed in quantity on the moon or some other body. One mission could land hundreds or thousands of them. With a swarm of landers, new scientific exploration techniques become available, but you can finance it by selling the ability for people to rent ‘lander time’. Imagine paying $20 for the right to fully control a robot lander on another world - to look at whatever you wanted, draw your name in the dust, whatever. Or hell, maybe the lander is just programmed to be able to draw in the lunar regolith with a styulus, and for $50 you can have an image drawn right in the lunar soil, to be undisturbed for millenia. Your money gets the image drawn, a high resolution photo of it taken, and an image of the moon with the location of your drawing highlighted.
There are many ways to monetize space, if you can get the cost low enough.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
As for driving down the price of resources - that’s just fine. Remember, though, that there is always an equilibrium price. You can’t and won’t drive it down to zero.
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Yep…platinum and rare earth metals as well. The potential markets for those materials is huge, if you consider what is needed for a lot of this green energy stuff. A lot of the more exotic battery technologies cost so much because the metals and other materials are so scarce. But imagine if you sell hundreds of millions of batteries that use the now cheap metals available because of asteroid mining. Gold is the same…it’s quite useful, even leaving aside it’s value for prosaic stuff like jewelery, which is also expanding and would further expand in an era of more abundant gold.
Exactly. Remember when aluminum was priced higher than gold? It used to be. Now it’s cheap, but it’s so abundant and available that it’s penetrated myriad markets and changed our society by doing so. Imagine titanium and platinum or gold or other rare earth metals that were cheap and plentiful…and what that could do for our society, the new products it could enable, the new world wide markets it could penetrate.
Look its great if you win a lottery ticket too. But the issue here is the odds of success, not whether winning will be great.
If they’re ‘positive cash-flow’ thats great - but without a breakdown of how thats done, it doesnt mean much, and it doesnt meant this project will be a money maker.
The problem is Im being drawn into proving a negative, and by definition I cant until they actually fail, until then ‘anythings possible’. But I wont be too shocked if Im not watching gold asteroids coming into orbit in my lifetime, or even a credible roadmap of achievements thats on the way towards managing that
The nice thing about the free market is that you don’t have to care. If their venture fails, the people who lose will be the owners and investors - not you. There are lots of very expensive, very risky business models out there, and society is better off for people taking them on - even if most fail. It took a long time for deep-ocean drilling to be feasible, then profitable. There were lots of failures along the way, and still are. Commercial aviation was risky and expensive and there have been so many failures of aviation startups that as of the 1980’s the industry had still not turned an overall profit. It sure is a good thing that no ‘reasonable’ people decided it was crazy and stopped the industry before it got a chance to start.
[QUOTE=Otara]
Look its great if you win a lottery ticket too. But the issue here is the odds of success, not whether winning will be great.
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You seem to see it in terms of pure luck, while to me it looks more like calculated risk with the potential for huge rewards if proven correct. Hell, even if these guys fail, that doesn’t mean the effort will be a failure in the long run. To me it’s win/win…I think it’s important, and that no matter how it turns out we’ll all learn something.
I doubt they will be, initially at least and maybe not ever, even with all the interesting revenue streams they are looking at. It might never be a money maker for these guys…again, think in terms of European colonialism. Not every venture was a money maker…certainly not every exploration was successful for the government or even private company that attempted it. There are plenty of historical examples of out and out failure, and even the successful ventures took a long time to spin up to be money making propositions.
It works the other way as well…no way to prove to the nay-sayer types that such things are even possible. I’ve seen that before in threads like this…it’s almost a choreographed dance. I doubt we’ll see gold asteroids coming into orbit either…but then, I doubt that’s the plan. What I’ll be shocked with, however, is that if at the end of my life there isn’t serious and permanent manned exploration and the beginnings of exploitation happening out in space. THAT will be shocking to me, especially the way things are moving forward with the private sector taking more and more interest in space, let alone with the various governments out there also taking an interest.
It might be, but then again it might not be. Imagine if somebody had tried to start an Ebay or an Amazon.com back in the 1970s. It’s hard to believe they would have accomplished much besides wasting money.
My gut feeling is that asteroid mining is the same way. That these guys have a good idea, just a bit too early.
