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The Dawn of the Space Mining Age
- sslayer 11y agoIf one wanted to invest in this($100-$1000's - not millions), what entry points would they have?
- creshal 11y agoMutual funds of some sort, I'd guess. Assuming there are any.
- sidko 11y agoAre you aware of any publicly traded company operating in this field? If not, then there won't be any mutual funds. This area seems too new for mutual funds.
- zardo 11y agoMutual funds can hold private assets. Fidelity holds SpaceX assets in several funds. http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2015/03/25/see-which-fidelity-funds-invested-in-spacex/ http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2015/03/25/see-which-fidelity-... That said, I don't think you can get your hands on Planetary Resources stock.
- ucaetano 11y agoMutual funds invest in private equity and venture capital funds and even directly into startups, such as Fidelity: http://recode.net/2015/11/10/one-of-snapchats-latest-investors-just-downgraded-its-valuation-by-25-percent/ http://recode.net/2015/11/10/one-of-snapchats-latest-investo...
- waterlesscloud 11y agoGet your ass to work. What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds? #kidstoday
- clock_tower 11y ago> What other "entry point" do you truly expect for emerging worlds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company
- Retric 11y agoProfitable space mining is easily 100+ years out. So, IMO your best bet is to invest in an existing company you expect to get into the field in the long term. PS: We could extract gold from sea water, and there is a lot of gold in the sea. That does not mean it's a good investment.
- mbroshi 11y agoSimple supply and demand: Sell commodity futures. If there really are huge influxes of an existing scarce resource on the horizon (the article mentions platinum), prices will drop.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoPer my other comment in this thread, you could perhaps provide funding for researcher studying mining techniques in exchange for a partial interest in any patents that arose out of that work. But beyond that I don't think there is a way to participate yet as an outside investor, lots of ways to participate if you're just jumping in and doing the work yourself right? Perhaps you could invest a few thousand in an S&P500 ETF with instructions to use the account value to buy into the first space mining company to go public? Might take awhile but you're investment would grow while it was waiting to be put to work.
- chishaku 11y agoDoes this make anyone else nervous?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Frenchgeek 11y agoJust park a small asteroid in orbit and drop it on the first one who complain. ( Call it a free sample delivery )
- tomp 11y agoWhich treaties, exactly?
- kiiski 11y agoThe 1967 Outer Space Treaty mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat's amusing. A document proposing to regulate ownership and activities of the rest of the universe?! That'll be up to the folks who end up living out there. Busybodies back on earth can write all the fiction they like, but unless they're prepared to project their sovereignty then its all hot air.
- clock_tower 11y agoI doubt that projection of sovereignty is going to be a problem anytime soon...
- tomp 11y agoThat's just a red herring. Noone is claiming celestial bodies... it's just that if you mine something in space, and bring it to Earth, you can claim it (i.e. when it's already on Earth). The bits left unmined in the space are still unclaimed.
- Expez 11y agoNone of these estimates seem to take into account that dumping huge quantities of precious metals on the free market will move the price by a substantial amount. Asteroid mining might only be profitable for a short while...
- jp555 11y agoAluminum was more expensive than gold (used to top the Washington Monument instead of gold) before a radically cheaper way to purify it was discovered. Now we wrap our food in it, and there is a massive aluminum market only because it's plentiful and cheap.
- creshal 11y agoThat depends on the amount and time scale. The quoted $50 billion platinum asteroid would contain around 2500 tons – the equivalent of 15 years worth of terrestrial production –, and most certainly not in a pure form. Mining all that and returning it to Earth safely is likely a long-term project.
- lsaferite 11y agoI guess what should really be considered is, why would you return the raw ore to earth? The dawn of space mining will trigger the dawn of space refining and manufacturing I think.
- creshal 11y agoYou'd still have to return the final products. And with something like platinum, which is used in tiny traces, stuffing half a ton in bars into a Soyuz and sending it back would probably be more profitable than, say, building whole exhaust catalysts in space and returning those.
- lsaferite 11y agoWell, I did say 'refining' in addition to manufacturing. In some cases refined raw material makes sense to deorbit. But if you consider the costs of lifting objects to orbit, the ability to manufacture large mass components in orbit would be a huge win. Sure, the initial costs of getting to the point where you can manufacture in orbit are large. But, if space mining becomes profitable they'll need more and more gear to do this. If they have to lift all that gear off earth then it is prohibitive. Hence space manufacturing is a self-help path for mining.
- golergka 11y agoTL;DR: Congress signs law about space enabling people to profit, journalist excitedly retells current state of space mining.
- rektide 11y agoNation that can't launch (human-carrying) rockets launches paperwork. Potentially illegal violation of international law paperwork, at that.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoSpace mining concept: an in-vacuum absolutely enormous mass spectrometer as a way to naturally sort plasma-ified asteroid matter into buckets of 100% pure elements. Which can then be pushed with small ion engines onto slow orbits that will eventually deliver them to Earth.
- mr_overalls 11y agoUnfortunately, the first step of mass spec is to ionize the sample. And the process you're suggesting wouldn't work so well for composite matter like, say, chunks of space rock. And I'm afraid some rather large energy inputs would be needed to convert space debris into plasma.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoFree electron laser powered by a solar array. Matter gets dug up and pulverized small by asteroid surface robots, squirted out as a dust stream, laser heated to plasma, charged by beaming electrons towards the catch-buckets. It flies through a large magnet (which keeps its position with ion thrusters), then coasts through vacuum, spreading out according to atomic content, falling into catch buckets and getting its charge neutralized.
- mr_overalls 11y agoWell, you're not short on ideas.
- Hockenbrizzle 11y agoJust visited European XFEL a few weeks ago. The linear accelerator was about 2km long and I believe the total cost of the laser is over 1 billion Euro, but nevertheless this is an awesome idea :)
- JulianMorrison 11y agoShould be cheaper to build both of those sorts of things when the "making a vacuum" bit is already taken care of, and large amounts of space are available at no cost.
- Mtinie 11y agoFor someone interested in the future of the...err...space, what type of technical background is required to be hired today to work at a company with plans to attempt this type of mining?
- peter303 11y agoLook at the job reqs at SpaceX or Blue Origin. Often they raided bored, talented young engineers at NASA or established space companies.
- typpo 11y agoI worked at Planetary Resources. They are mostly looking for the various engineering roles you'd expect when building a spacecraft, especially mechanical engineering types. Most people had some sort of aerospace background (lots of ex-JPL), but some came from the software tech industry (like me), the auto industry, or straight out of school.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoPersonally, if I were doing this, and I might still, I would focus on the challenges of actually mining. The reason is that rockets and probes etc are pretty well plowed areas but while Curiosity, the mars rover, can drill a small hole and using non-replacable reagents look for certain compounds, these things will need to process tons of material from an asteroid to try and extract kilograms of materials. That is a very unsolved problem and a very under funded one. A lot of current extraction techniques use liquid water (not available on an asteroid), all extraction techniques depend on the raw ore being transportable by buckets or belts with gravity keeping things in place (also not available on asteroids). And many refinement techniques are very energy expensive (challenging to ship to an asteroid). So if you can figure out how to solve even one of those problems and asteroid mining company that hires you will be ahead of the game.
- Hockenbrizzle 11y agoDo anyone know of research groups involved in this?
- peter303 11y agoIronically space mining may have been the first mining method of early humans. Before smelting was discovered, the occasional iron meterorite provided raw iron for tools and jewelry.
- InvisibleCities 11y agoI know that SV seems to have abandoned the idea of good unit economics, but the concept of asteroid mining seems to take that to a whole new level. The cost of developing autonomous asteroid mining equipment, finding asteroids suitable for mining, getting this equipment to the asteroid, operating it, maintaining it, and shipping the mined product back to earth must be in the billions of dollars, if not more. This article talks about moving an asteroid into lunar orbit to make this easier, but it seems to me that the amount of delta-v needed to do that would be staggering, not to mention that even if we had engines capable of generating that amount of thrust, we would still need to somehow get them out of the Earth's gravity well and to the asteroid in question. Plus, even if we could somehow do any of the above, is there any evidence that asteroids like the article's $50 billion platinum asteroid even exist? As far as I am aware, less than 10% of the asteroids in the asteroid belt are metallic in nature (most are composed of carbon and silicon), and the metallic asteroids we do know about are all iron and nickel based, not exactly high-value metals. I'm all for space exploration, both by governments and by private enterprises, but this whole thing seems completely far-fetched and impractical.
- DavidSJ 11y agoThere are many asteroids in so-called near-Earth orbits, with nearly zero delta-V (beyond Earth escape) to reach them and return to Earth. The delta-V is even less than an insertion into lunar orbit. Mostly it's just a matter of being patient and letting the orbits phase, given the right nudge. (Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.)
- InvisibleCities 11y ago>Also, note that delta-V is not thrust. Delta-V is a change in velocity, thrust is force.) Thanks for the condescending reply. Seeing as I have a degree in Physics, I am well aware of the technical difference between thrust and delta-v. However, when talking about rocketry, it's hard to have delta-v without corresponding thrust, and my usage of both terms was more for rhetoric than a desire for absolute technical correctness.
- viola11 11y ago"Who would have been foolish enough to squander the money, lives and resources needed to travel to and explore the New World?" You can only argue that the exploration of the Americas was a good affair if you ignore the cost of all the pillaging and killing and deaths and slavery... If you include the inhabitants of the Americas when you judge the benefit of the "exploration of the new world", I'm not sure it ends up being a net positive for several centuries.
- DavidSJ 11y agoMaybe, but there are no intelligent natives on asteroids.
- fit2rule 11y agoWell, it makes complete sense: we save planet earth by moving all our industry to space. I'm all for it. Close every factory that we can down here, as fast as we can, and put the iPod-assembly 'bots up in sk. I'd happily spend my days remotely managing a small fleet of robot miners on the Asteroid#71238, work comfortably on the beach while remotely hunting valuable commodities some 1,000,000 miles away, or at least have a harvest of asteroids parked within our reach at any part of the planet, so .. in the end, anywhere any time can just dial the # and down from the sky comes a little edible parachute with the latest iDevice. Earth returns to paradise, kids get to play with robots in space, everyone wins. Whats not to like?