7 ms·

A New Asteroid Mining Operation supported by Google Execs and James Cameron

85 points by hristov 15y ago

lifeisstillgood 15y ago
Oh come on! No-one stands the remotest chance of getting viable amounts of rock down from space for another two generations. We don't have any mechanism to get the rocks down (a space anchor - not even remotely close to necessary material strength / weight ratio), let alone the ability to survive journeys to closest rocks. Give it 20 years of people living on the moon or Mars and solving the supply, radiation and working problems, then I will believe we might risk throwing a megatonne of iridium at Earth orbit. But great way for rich dreamers to hob nob with other rich dreamers. Enjoy it folks. Just don't invest.
- warfangle 15y ago
  Why would the mining operation need to be manned? Also; people said a lot of similar things about SpaceX...
  - lifeisstillgood 15y ago
    SpaceX is about commercialising an already-achieved process (ascending into Space and returning safely to Earth). We know we can do it - can we do it cheaper, or with different re-entry profiles? And to be honest, with the record of successful unmanned missions to Mars (running at what, about evens just to make it to the surface) I am not holding out hope. My best guess will be space-swarm -launch 500 independent solar powered motors, fling them at the general direction of a rock, and hope the 20 that attach can nudge it in side the moons orbit, where a later permanent colony can grab it. Smashing into the moon is less damaging. Hell, just bang it straight into the moon and pick up the pieces later on. Damn, from "it'll never work" to "why not try it this way guys" in less than an hour. Need to work on curmudgeonly. Still, even if it's on the moon, we cannot get it back to earth without the same risks. And picking it up from the moon, yeah we have guys just waiting around right now. Ah, back to curmudgeon - hello old friend:-)
- leon_ 15y ago
  why trying get the minerals "back" to earth? just build more mining drones on location and expand the mining operation.
- lutorm 15y ago
  It's a rock. Just drop it in chunks of suitable size.
  - camiller 15y ago
    Rocks with enough metal ores to be useful and in sizes that can make it through re-entry with a useful quantity of material left tend to do other undesirable things, like smash stuff, just ask the dinosaurs.
    - lutorm 15y ago
      just ask the dinosaurs Well, that one might be on the large side. Besides, a controlled re-entry from LEO would have lower speeds than a random solar system impactor and could also use aerobraking. It still might be too risky, but it doesn't seem totally, obviously infeasible to me.
- jamespitts 15y ago
  It takes rich dreamers to create a new industry. In-orbit infrastructure will have to be built, though probably not anything as exotic as a space elevator. One approach to get material down: create basketball-sized meteors during the mining process or in-orbit with smelters. Coat or cover them in a material that will make their re-entry less wasteful. Using some kind of thruster, direct these into a de-orbit ending on a raft thing in the Pacific Ocean or parachuted to a deserted area. For the more precious or dangerous material mined: use cheap glider-style re-entry vehicles.
- huhtenberg 15y ago
  And iPhone will fail ;)
- hristov 15y ago
  I can see a way to get the rocks down. Cut off chunks of particular size, cover them in nets and tie the nets to a little robotic space tugboat, that uses rocket power to pull the rocks into earth orbit and then lands with the rocks in a parachute. The space tug boat will be reusable of course. Radiation is also a tough problem. Most space metals should be radioactive. They have been swimming in space radiation for millions of years, so even metals that are usually non-radioactive, like iron should get plenty of opportunity to get activated. And once a metal is radioactive we have no way to fix that. The only fix is to wait for it to deplete itself. And that is usually a very long wait. But now that I think of it, perhaps in an asteroid only the outside metals are radioactive. Perhaps the inside of the asteroid gets shielded by the metals on the outside that absorb all incoming particles. If that's the way things work, one should be able to mine non radio-active metals on the inside. So I see nothing impossible, but it will be difficult.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html Radio isotopes of iron. Unlikely that you'd have to worry too much about it. Did you have a particular nucleotide you were concerned about?
    - hristov 15y ago
      Why is that something that we should not worry about? (I am not being sarcastic, honestly asking, nuclear physics is not my primary expertise.) Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years. Also I am not sure these are the only iron isotopes. This seems to be a list of "naturally occurring" iron isotopes which usually means "naturally occurring on Earth". Also another thing to worry about is the isotopes of platinum and platinum group metals that seem to be the main and most lucrative target of space mining.
      - gliese1337 15y ago
        > Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years. Which means it's completely safe. If it has a half-life that long, it won't be releasing radiation at a very high rate. Hardly enough to register above background. The isotopes you have to worry about are the ones with in-the-middle half lives- long enough that they don't deplete themselves in a conveniently short period, but short enough that they produce a dangerous power output.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  Why would they try to bring the resources down to earth? It is so expensive to send things out of our orbit they should be selling the material to future floating stations, like the ISS. Also, satellite manufacturers and space probes could be constructed in something like the ISS with the majority of their heavy parts being made from asteroids. Hmmmm. I don't know much about material science, but maybe they are mining silicon and fabricating solar panels? What is the heaviest part of a probe or satellite?
- Cyndre 15y ago
  Not quite sure why we would want to get it down to earth myself. Think of the markup you could sell it for by just leaving it in space. No more need to launch rockets carrying materials/prefabs - it will just happen in space. "Yea, I know our iron is XXX% more, but you know its already in space...." And if its for mining for energy just create the energy in space and beam it down. Rather simple.
- octopus 15y ago
  Actually from a technical point of view it is simpler to land on an asteroid than on Mars (you avoid the gravity wheel). It will be cheaper to extract the minerals locally than to "take the rocks" back to Earth.
- MPSimmons 15y ago
  The materials are far more useful in space to build factories for building more things in space.
- drewblaisdell 15y ago
  One should never presume to be able to predict that any human advancement will take multiple generations. History does not crawl, it leaps.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
sparknlaunch12 15y ago
Armageddon? Is there anywhere James Cameron doesn't want to go? He was just at the bottom of the ocean last month. He and Richard Branson should have a race into space!
kijin 15y ago
Coming soon: a James Cameron movie featuring real footage from a space mining operation interlaced with a rather stereotypical love story. Title: Avatanic.
- trafficlight 15y ago
  I'd watch it.
lutorm 15y ago
http://spacewealth.org/ http://spacewealth.org/
saddino 15y ago
Concept video is a bit rough though http://bit.ly/J3YOnt http://bit.ly/J3YOnt
PaulHoule 15y ago
The economics of this could be better than you think. A fair-sized chunk of an asteroid could contain a few trillion dollars worth of platinum group metals. If money can be found for it, a sample return mission to a near earth asteroid could probably be accomplished SpaceX-style. A key step in all of this could be the mining of water from the asteroid Ceres, which is a much more practical destination than mars. At that point you could set up a solar or nuclear powered water cracking factory that would make large amounts of fuel available. Any needs for water in space could be so satisfied.
- gliese1337 15y ago
  It's only worth a few trillion dollars if you don't actually sell it to anybody. Every kilogram they actually introduce into the market reduces the total scarcity of the resource, which means every kilogram they introduce has a lower marginal value.
  - jgmmo 15y ago
    It is true that increased supply -- all else equal -- decreases price, but, 1) we will find uses for the element that we don't currently use/know about and 2) we will never find infinite amounts of any resource so this means that. Prices will decrease marginally, but theres no way to know to what extent prices would fall. Thought experiment: SpaceX is able to lasso up a 100% diamond asteroid and bring it to earth. Suddenly supply of diamonds is 1000x what it was expected to be that year. Diamonds will be worth marginally less as a result, however, it does not mean all that diamond asteroid is worthless. I am sure diamond mines would close for a bit as that asteroid is likely cheaper per unit than some other methods. Suddenly because diamonds because relatively cheaper they can begin to be used for all kinds of currently uneconomical uses. Maybe diamond fiber becomes the next typed of networking cable, or diamond asphalt makes our roads last forever, or diamond knives become all the rage for top chefs -- I don't know, but we'll find a way to use cheaper diamonds, and that asteroid is going to be worth a boatload no matter what. Wish I had more time to think about this, but work calls.
    - daemin 15y ago
mulytani 15y ago
You are too much empiric, there is no need to build something right now: writing some generic patents will to the job.
Tloewald 15y ago
Seems like the most valuable and obtainable natural resource in space is energy (solar or He3). Raw materials are a distant second, especially since almost all new technologies do more with less (how many physical gadgets does one smart phone replace?)
- comicjk 15y ago
  Space may not be the best place to get raw materials (being, after all, mostly empty space) but you are mistaken about falling demand for materials. Commodity prices alone should tell you that demand is hitting the limits of current production. One smart phone may replace N others gadgets, but only 500 million people had the other gadgets, and _everyone_ wants a smartphone.
  - Tloewald 15y ago
    I didn't say overall demand is falling. But per capita demand is, if not falling, decelerating -- your car is made of less metal, one gadget does what ten heavier gadgets used to, etc. otoh almost all of us are using more power.
iRobot 15y ago
No web site, nothing on google, I'd start by creating a marketing department Seriously, I'd buy some shares even if its a very high risk venture, if I knew how too.
duncancarroll 15y ago
Prob. want to use a Hulk fitted with some T2 lasers. Scordite's trading pretty high right now in Jita.

85 points by hristov 15y ago

Oh come on! No-one stands the remotest chance of getting viable amounts of rock down from space for another two generations. We don't have any mechanism to get the rocks down (a space anchor - not even remotely close to necessary material strength / weight ratio), let alone the ability to survive journeys to closest rocks. Give it 20 years of people living on the moon or Mars and solving the supply, radiation and working problems, then I will believe we might risk throwing a megatonne of iridium at Earth orbit. But great way for rich dreamers to hob nob with other rich dreamers. Enjoy it folks. Just don't invest.

warfangle 15y ago
Why would the mining operation need to be manned? Also; people said a lot of similar things about SpaceX...
- lifeisstillgood 15y ago
  SpaceX is about commercialising an already-achieved process (ascending into Space and returning safely to Earth). We know we can do it - can we do it cheaper, or with different re-entry profiles? And to be honest, with the record of successful unmanned missions to Mars (running at what, about evens just to make it to the surface) I am not holding out hope. My best guess will be space-swarm -launch 500 independent solar powered motors, fling them at the general direction of a rock, and hope the 20 that attach can nudge it in side the moons orbit, where a later permanent colony can grab it. Smashing into the moon is less damaging. Hell, just bang it straight into the moon and pick up the pieces later on. Damn, from "it'll never work" to "why not try it this way guys" in less than an hour. Need to work on curmudgeonly. Still, even if it's on the moon, we cannot get it back to earth without the same risks. And picking it up from the moon, yeah we have guys just waiting around right now. Ah, back to curmudgeon - hello old friend:-)
leon_ 15y ago
why trying get the minerals "back" to earth? just build more mining drones on location and expand the mining operation.
lutorm 15y ago
It's a rock. Just drop it in chunks of suitable size.
- camiller 15y ago
  Rocks with enough metal ores to be useful and in sizes that can make it through re-entry with a useful quantity of material left tend to do other undesirable things, like smash stuff, just ask the dinosaurs.
  - lutorm 15y ago
    just ask the dinosaurs Well, that one might be on the large side. Besides, a controlled re-entry from LEO would have lower speeds than a random solar system impactor and could also use aerobraking. It still might be too risky, but it doesn't seem totally, obviously infeasible to me.
jamespitts 15y ago
It takes rich dreamers to create a new industry. In-orbit infrastructure will have to be built, though probably not anything as exotic as a space elevator. One approach to get material down: create basketball-sized meteors during the mining process or in-orbit with smelters. Coat or cover them in a material that will make their re-entry less wasteful. Using some kind of thruster, direct these into a de-orbit ending on a raft thing in the Pacific Ocean or parachuted to a deserted area. For the more precious or dangerous material mined: use cheap glider-style re-entry vehicles.
huhtenberg 15y ago
And iPhone will fail ;)
hristov 15y ago
I can see a way to get the rocks down. Cut off chunks of particular size, cover them in nets and tie the nets to a little robotic space tugboat, that uses rocket power to pull the rocks into earth orbit and then lands with the rocks in a parachute. The space tug boat will be reusable of course. Radiation is also a tough problem. Most space metals should be radioactive. They have been swimming in space radiation for millions of years, so even metals that are usually non-radioactive, like iron should get plenty of opportunity to get activated. And once a metal is radioactive we have no way to fix that. The only fix is to wait for it to deplete itself. And that is usually a very long wait. But now that I think of it, perhaps in an asteroid only the outside metals are radioactive. Perhaps the inside of the asteroid gets shielded by the metals on the outside that absorb all incoming particles. If that's the way things work, one should be able to mine non radio-active metals on the inside. So I see nothing impossible, but it will be difficult.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html Radio isotopes of iron. Unlikely that you'd have to worry too much about it. Did you have a particular nucleotide you were concerned about?
  - hristov 15y ago
    Why is that something that we should not worry about? (I am not being sarcastic, honestly asking, nuclear physics is not my primary expertise.) Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years. Also I am not sure these are the only iron isotopes. This seems to be a list of "naturally occurring" iron isotopes which usually means "naturally occurring on Earth". Also another thing to worry about is the isotopes of platinum and platinum group metals that seem to be the main and most lucrative target of space mining.
    - gliese1337 15y ago
      > Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years. Which means it's completely safe. If it has a half-life that long, it won't be releasing radiation at a very high rate. Hardly enough to register above background. The isotopes you have to worry about are the ones with in-the-middle half lives- long enough that they don't deplete themselves in a conveniently short period, but short enough that they produce a dangerous power output.
3pt14159 15y ago
Why would they try to bring the resources down to earth? It is so expensive to send things out of our orbit they should be selling the material to future floating stations, like the ISS. Also, satellite manufacturers and space probes could be constructed in something like the ISS with the majority of their heavy parts being made from asteroids. Hmmmm. I don't know much about material science, but maybe they are mining silicon and fabricating solar panels? What is the heaviest part of a probe or satellite?
Cyndre 15y ago
Not quite sure why we would want to get it down to earth myself. Think of the markup you could sell it for by just leaving it in space. No more need to launch rockets carrying materials/prefabs - it will just happen in space. "Yea, I know our iron is XXX% more, but you know its already in space...." And if its for mining for energy just create the energy in space and beam it down. Rather simple.
octopus 15y ago
Actually from a technical point of view it is simpler to land on an asteroid than on Mars (you avoid the gravity wheel). It will be cheaper to extract the minerals locally than to "take the rocks" back to Earth.
MPSimmons 15y ago
The materials are far more useful in space to build factories for building more things in space.
drewblaisdell 15y ago
One should never presume to be able to predict that any human advancement will take multiple generations. History does not crawl, it leaps.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

sparknlaunch12 15y ago

Armageddon? Is there anywhere James Cameron doesn't want to go? He was just at the bottom of the ocean last month. He and Richard Branson should have a race into space!

kijin 15y ago

Coming soon: a James Cameron movie featuring real footage from a space mining operation interlaced with a rather stereotypical love story. Title: Avatanic.

trafficlight 15y ago
I'd watch it.

lutorm 15y ago

http://spacewealth.org/ http://spacewealth.org/

saddino 15y ago

Concept video is a bit rough though http://bit.ly/J3YOnt http://bit.ly/J3YOnt

PaulHoule 15y ago

The economics of this could be better than you think. A fair-sized chunk of an asteroid could contain a few trillion dollars worth of platinum group metals. If money can be found for it, a sample return mission to a near earth asteroid could probably be accomplished SpaceX-style. A key step in all of this could be the mining of water from the asteroid Ceres, which is a much more practical destination than mars. At that point you could set up a solar or nuclear powered water cracking factory that would make large amounts of fuel available. Any needs for water in space could be so satisfied.

gliese1337 15y ago
It's only worth a few trillion dollars if you don't actually sell it to anybody. Every kilogram they actually introduce into the market reduces the total scarcity of the resource, which means every kilogram they introduce has a lower marginal value.
- jgmmo 15y ago
  It is true that increased supply -- all else equal -- decreases price, but, 1) we will find uses for the element that we don't currently use/know about and 2) we will never find infinite amounts of any resource so this means that. Prices will decrease marginally, but theres no way to know to what extent prices would fall. Thought experiment: SpaceX is able to lasso up a 100% diamond asteroid and bring it to earth. Suddenly supply of diamonds is 1000x what it was expected to be that year. Diamonds will be worth marginally less as a result, however, it does not mean all that diamond asteroid is worthless. I am sure diamond mines would close for a bit as that asteroid is likely cheaper per unit than some other methods. Suddenly because diamonds because relatively cheaper they can begin to be used for all kinds of currently uneconomical uses. Maybe diamond fiber becomes the next typed of networking cable, or diamond asphalt makes our roads last forever, or diamond knives become all the rage for top chefs -- I don't know, but we'll find a way to use cheaper diamonds, and that asteroid is going to be worth a boatload no matter what. Wish I had more time to think about this, but work calls.
  - daemin 15y ago

mulytani 15y ago

You are too much empiric, there is no need to build something right now: writing some generic patents will to the job.

Tloewald 15y ago

Seems like the most valuable and obtainable natural resource in space is energy (solar or He3). Raw materials are a distant second, especially since almost all new technologies do more with less (how many physical gadgets does one smart phone replace?)

comicjk 15y ago
Space may not be the best place to get raw materials (being, after all, mostly empty space) but you are mistaken about falling demand for materials. Commodity prices alone should tell you that demand is hitting the limits of current production. One smart phone may replace N others gadgets, but only 500 million people had the other gadgets, and _everyone_ wants a smartphone.
- Tloewald 15y ago
  I didn't say overall demand is falling. But per capita demand is, if not falling, decelerating -- your car is made of less metal, one gadget does what ten heavier gadgets used to, etc. otoh almost all of us are using more power.

iRobot 15y ago

No web site, nothing on google, I'd start by creating a marketing department Seriously, I'd buy some shares even if its a very high risk venture, if I knew how too.

duncancarroll 15y ago

Prob. want to use a Hulk fitted with some T2 lasers. Scordite's trading pretty high right now in Jita.