Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
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Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#2"Our telescopes, which we call the Arkyd 100 spacecraft, are cubes half-a-meter on a side and will cost around $1 million each, though the first one, of course, will cost much more."
I seriously find this mind-blowing. $1 million for a telescope launched into space sounds ridiculously cheap to me.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#3"Our telescopes, which we call the Arkyd 100 spacecraft, are cubes half-a-meter on a side and will cost around $1 million each, though the first one, of course, will cost much more." I seriously find this mind-blowing. $1 million for a telescope launched into space sounds ridiculously cheap to me.
At $10k/kg to orbit I'd guess these will have to weigh less than 100 kg. Some articles report they will be 20 kg each: http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/20/12326161-aster...
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#4The technology to discover and retrieve minerals from asteroids is likely to be simpler than resolving politics and economics of it:
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."
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#5Uh oh...
"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 you storing the energy over a long long time, and getting back less than you put in.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#6The technology to discover and retrieve minerals from asteroids is likely to be simpler than resolving politics and economics of it: 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 di…
You've clearly not played EVE Online. This sounds like a joke, but it's probably the closest thing out there to an example of what the future will be like if mining of asteroids becomes insanely lucrative (and technology advances fast enough for us to even witness it).
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.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#7Uh oh... "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 wa…
It doesn't seem unreasonable to split water using a solar or nuclear energy source, and then use the hydrogen and oxygen as rocket fuel to actually move the asteroid. Anderson's goal is not a net energy gain, it's to move the asteroid.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#8Uh oh... "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 wa…
I think he's not de-hydrolyzing water to get energy per se, but to generate thrust.
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.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#9Uh oh... "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 wa…
I didn't see anything about using the H2 O2 as an energy source. Presumably, he meant that they would use some other energy source (presumably solar) to hydrolyze the water, then use that to generate thrust.
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.
Re: Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
#10Uh oh... "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 wa…
do the man the basic favour of assuming he isn't an idiot. the problem here isn't energy, it's momentum; storing energy over a long time and then releasing it in precisely timed bursts to eject reaction mass when you need a course correction is perfectly feasible way to do things. you could probably even supplement the energy collection with some sort of moon-based laser if you threw enough up-front resources at the problem.