5 ms·

One billionaire's mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025

81 points by nsns 15y ago

SlipperySlope 15y ago
On one hand a 500-ton asteroid is way too small to make a difference if the smelted iron and nickel could be safely landed on Earth. Nickel ore is quoted at about 30 USD per ton in Indonesia, so the asteroid's material might only be worth 15,000 USD on the Earth's surface. But on the other hand, the smelted ore is much more valuable if used for earth-orbit construction, especially high orbit construction. SpaceX charges about 2,000,000 USD per ton to launch a payload into low earth orbit. The cost to put 500 tons of ore into space from earth would thus be 1 billion USD. By comparision, the mass of the International Space Station is about 500 tons. This rough analysis shows that the most cost-effective mission would be the construction of large space facilities using material smelted from a well-chosen asteroid. Maybe the investors have in mind something like the Stanford Torus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus
- daniel-cussen 15y ago
  First off, not all ore is created equal. Meteors have an incredibly high concentration of the better metals, so this might not be a terrible idea. On the other hand, you're right: it's worth more money in space.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Maybe that method of construction where you heat up the ore with mirrors, then blow air into it to inflate it, then let it cool would be easier, given how little industry we have in space at the moment. Anyways, I think its good that we're starting with something 500 tons. Big enough to be interesting, not big enough to cause a huge catastrophe if it ends up colliding with Earth. When we're better at it we can go for larger asteroids.
- run4yourlives 15y ago
  Excuse my ignorance here, but wouldn't the easiest solution of all just be both mining minerals and performing construction on the moon? Once you are established there, you pretty much have the space construction port you're looking for, do you not?
  - SlipperySlope 15y ago
    Low earth orbit might be where the investors are interested in. If so, it has been proposed for decades that an electric mass driver be constructed on the Moon for delivery of lunar ores to Earth orbit - or to a nearby Lagrange point. A lunar base would be very expensive in terms of initial construction because it costs so much to climb from the Earth's surface through the Earth's gravity well, and then to descend safely on to the Moon's surface. An interesting solution that I've followed has been the proposal to send tiny self-replicating robots to the Moon and have them construct everything else from Lunar materials. See for example: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ This good idea was most recently promoted by Newt Gingrich during his US presidential primary campaign. My own opinion is that private investment, not government money, should be used for space-based economic projects.
    - cpeterso 15y ago
      "Lunarcrete" is an example of a (proposed) construction material that could be manufactured on the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete
  - aqme28 15y ago
    It is much much much cheaper to get to low-earth orbit than it is to get to (and from) the moon. See: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalaltitudes.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal...
    - read_wharf 15y ago
      I know nothing, but I would think gravity smelting and related operations would be much more technically difficult and risky than gravity based operations on the moon.
- fennecfoxen 15y ago
  I think the only real investment proposition here is to build and develop institutional knowledge and technology know-how so that at such a time that it is profitable and practical to extract resources however they may be extracted, that knowledge is worth the billions they spent on acquiring it (plus ~4% annual real opportunity costs, plus risk exposure).
cheddarmint 15y ago
Without reading the article, what I imagined was a mad billionaire trying to eradicate life on earth by 2025. Yes, I realize 500 tons is far too small to do that.
- SlipperySlope 15y ago
  Moving asteroids amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction. I expect some sort of space treaty to regulate the safe operation of such a venture, and in return provide some liability limits on the required insurance. Otherwise the investors have a tiny chance of being wiped out financially if some city gets hit.
  - andrewflnr 15y ago
    Honestly, should they not get financially wiped out if they hit a city? Or do we just let them keep their money to fund criminal defense lawyers. I want the reaction to killing people to be more than "oops, that will be expensive".
    - SlipperySlope 15y ago
      Sorry for my poor word order. I agree with you. I expect that should a city get hit, then international outcry would lead to the confiscation of all of the investor's assets, despite being shielded by a limited liability corporation. For that reason the investors need insurance - and a very large amount of it considering the damage that a direct hit on a major city might cause. The investors would seek some sort of limit on the liability - say 100 billion dollars, and in return they should eagerly submit to regulatory oversight of their plans, procedures and operations. In order to insure such an asteroid moving scheme and establish a premium, insurance companies must determine a risk probability distribution, and they must know what the maximum liability would possibly be. Over many decades, there may be observations of close calls or actual damage causing situations that can inform the actuarial calculation, but at the initial point its simply educated estimates.
      - 15y ago
waterlesscloud 15y ago
Has anyone seen official confirmation that this is what will be announced next week? I've seen nothing but speculation. I guess the fact that the speculation hasn't been quashed is weak confirmation, but I wondered if there was more...
signa11 15y ago
i think folks should start seeing on how to secure those lagrangian points...
- SlipperySlope 15y ago
  Looks like the Chinese are there too ... "Perhaps more significantly, low-energy pathways lead away from L1 and L2, which can be exploited to send spacecraft to Jupiter, Mars, asteroids, for less fuel. They make an excellent staging point," Belbruno said. "Placing spacecraft at these points gives one a high ground, so to speak." Not only would they be interesting places to position a space station, but from there China could perform planetary exploration, both in piloted and automated mode. from: http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-mission.html http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-missi... And also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
  - Cushman 15y ago
    Not getting at you, but there's something profoundly disgusting about talking about "China" doing planetary exploration. Surely the word should be "Earth". (Kinda curious what y'all find objectionable about this idea.)
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - jahmed 15y ago
      Whoever gets there and establishes themselves first will reap the benefits and set the terms. Its not a bad thing though. If the Chinese established an operating moon base or started mining an asteroid it might shock the US government into funding more adventurous ideas.
    - SlipperySlope 15y ago
      Of course exploration should be done on behalf of all humankind. My remark was a reflection about, but not agreement with, the notion that the resource motivated wars of exploitation a couple of centuries ago are possibly about to begin anew in Space. It should be entirely possible to craft international treaties to preclude extraterrestrial resource conflict while maximizing the commercial opportunities that will benefit us - either as owners or as customers.
hkmurakami 15y ago
I wonder if sometime in the future, we will have exhausted Earth's fuel and metal resources so badly that we are no longer capable of building the tools necessary to make our way into space, including projects like this one.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Tuna-Fish 15y ago
  Metal resources don't get exhausted -- nearly all of the copper mined at the time of the pharaohs is still in use. When the cost of mined material rises, we simply reuse some of the metal that is in use in lower-value places. Example: all the copper piping that is presently being ripped up and replaced with plastic everywhere in the world. Nuclear fuel resources are essentially inexhaustible -- there is enough Thorium to feed constant growth for at least tens of thousands of years. Which should be enough for development of fusion.
  - _exec 15y ago
    >>nearly all of the copper mined at the time of the pharaohs is still in use. Source?
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      Any physics textbook. Look up "conservation of mass".
      - cpeterso 15y ago
        I think _exec was asking for a source to back up the claim about the pharaohs' copper mines.
        _exec 15y ago
        Yes. I couldn't find anything online about that :)
Porter_423 15y ago
Why does this sound like a science fiction horror movie plot? I anticipate the Xenomorphs will be invading us in the coming decade - guess I better stock up on supplies and practice barricading my home.
jboggan 15y ago
Is it possible to bootstrap this process by capturing low mass asteroids crossing near LEO? A small tug device paired with a separate crude ore processing unit with 3-D printing capabilities seems like a minimum viable unit. A few of these units in orbit, a few at LaGrange points, and we'll start leveraging the amount of re-usable construction material under human control in near space. It might also be a way to clean up 50+ years of exploration debris. Instead of de-orbiting a satellite when its productive life has ended we could just melt down, salvage, and repurpose much of the material. Literal pie-in-the-sky, but that's what it would take.
fennecfoxen 15y ago
It's a disaster movie. </cameron>

81 points by nsns 15y ago

On one hand a 500-ton asteroid is way too small to make a difference if the smelted iron and nickel could be safely landed on Earth. Nickel ore is quoted at about 30 USD per ton in Indonesia, so the asteroid's material might only be worth 15,000 USD on the Earth's surface. But on the other hand, the smelted ore is much more valuable if used for earth-orbit construction, especially high orbit construction. SpaceX charges about 2,000,000 USD per ton to launch a payload into low earth orbit. The cost to put 500 tons of ore into space from earth would thus be 1 billion USD. By comparision, the mass of the International Space Station is about 500 tons. This rough analysis shows that the most cost-effective mission would be the construction of large space facilities using material smelted from a well-chosen asteroid. Maybe the investors have in mind something like the Stanford Torus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus

daniel-cussen 15y ago
First off, not all ore is created equal. Meteors have an incredibly high concentration of the better metals, so this might not be a terrible idea. On the other hand, you're right: it's worth more money in space.
Symmetry 15y ago
Maybe that method of construction where you heat up the ore with mirrors, then blow air into it to inflate it, then let it cool would be easier, given how little industry we have in space at the moment. Anyways, I think its good that we're starting with something 500 tons. Big enough to be interesting, not big enough to cause a huge catastrophe if it ends up colliding with Earth. When we're better at it we can go for larger asteroids.
run4yourlives 15y ago
Excuse my ignorance here, but wouldn't the easiest solution of all just be both mining minerals and performing construction on the moon? Once you are established there, you pretty much have the space construction port you're looking for, do you not?
- SlipperySlope 15y ago
  Low earth orbit might be where the investors are interested in. If so, it has been proposed for decades that an electric mass driver be constructed on the Moon for delivery of lunar ores to Earth orbit - or to a nearby Lagrange point. A lunar base would be very expensive in terms of initial construction because it costs so much to climb from the Earth's surface through the Earth's gravity well, and then to descend safely on to the Moon's surface. An interesting solution that I've followed has been the proposal to send tiny self-replicating robots to the Moon and have them construct everything else from Lunar materials. See for example: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ This good idea was most recently promoted by Newt Gingrich during his US presidential primary campaign. My own opinion is that private investment, not government money, should be used for space-based economic projects.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    "Lunarcrete" is an example of a (proposed) construction material that could be manufactured on the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete
- aqme28 15y ago
  It is much much much cheaper to get to low-earth orbit than it is to get to (and from) the moon. See: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalaltitudes.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal...
  - read_wharf 15y ago
    I know nothing, but I would think gravity smelting and related operations would be much more technically difficult and risky than gravity based operations on the moon.
fennecfoxen 15y ago
I think the only real investment proposition here is to build and develop institutional knowledge and technology know-how so that at such a time that it is profitable and practical to extract resources however they may be extracted, that knowledge is worth the billions they spent on acquiring it (plus ~4% annual real opportunity costs, plus risk exposure).

cheddarmint 15y ago

Without reading the article, what I imagined was a mad billionaire trying to eradicate life on earth by 2025. Yes, I realize 500 tons is far too small to do that.

SlipperySlope 15y ago
Moving asteroids amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction. I expect some sort of space treaty to regulate the safe operation of such a venture, and in return provide some liability limits on the required insurance. Otherwise the investors have a tiny chance of being wiped out financially if some city gets hit.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  Honestly, should they not get financially wiped out if they hit a city? Or do we just let them keep their money to fund criminal defense lawyers. I want the reaction to killing people to be more than "oops, that will be expensive".
  - SlipperySlope 15y ago
    Sorry for my poor word order. I agree with you. I expect that should a city get hit, then international outcry would lead to the confiscation of all of the investor's assets, despite being shielded by a limited liability corporation. For that reason the investors need insurance - and a very large amount of it considering the damage that a direct hit on a major city might cause. The investors would seek some sort of limit on the liability - say 100 billion dollars, and in return they should eagerly submit to regulatory oversight of their plans, procedures and operations. In order to insure such an asteroid moving scheme and establish a premium, insurance companies must determine a risk probability distribution, and they must know what the maximum liability would possibly be. Over many decades, there may be observations of close calls or actual damage causing situations that can inform the actuarial calculation, but at the initial point its simply educated estimates.
    - 15y ago

waterlesscloud 15y ago

Has anyone seen official confirmation that this is what will be announced next week? I've seen nothing but speculation. I guess the fact that the speculation hasn't been quashed is weak confirmation, but I wondered if there was more...

signa11 15y ago

i think folks should start seeing on how to secure those lagrangian points...

SlipperySlope 15y ago
Looks like the Chinese are there too ... "Perhaps more significantly, low-energy pathways lead away from L1 and L2, which can be exploited to send spacecraft to Jupiter, Mars, asteroids, for less fuel. They make an excellent staging point," Belbruno said. "Placing spacecraft at these points gives one a high ground, so to speak." Not only would they be interesting places to position a space station, but from there China could perform planetary exploration, both in piloted and automated mode. from: http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-mission.html http://www.space.com/13375-china-moon-probe-deep-space-missi... And also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
- Cushman 15y ago
  Not getting at you, but there's something profoundly disgusting about talking about "China" doing planetary exploration. Surely the word should be "Earth". (Kinda curious what y'all find objectionable about this idea.)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jahmed 15y ago
    Whoever gets there and establishes themselves first will reap the benefits and set the terms. Its not a bad thing though. If the Chinese established an operating moon base or started mining an asteroid it might shock the US government into funding more adventurous ideas.
  - SlipperySlope 15y ago
    Of course exploration should be done on behalf of all humankind. My remark was a reflection about, but not agreement with, the notion that the resource motivated wars of exploitation a couple of centuries ago are possibly about to begin anew in Space. It should be entirely possible to craft international treaties to preclude extraterrestrial resource conflict while maximizing the commercial opportunities that will benefit us - either as owners or as customers.

hkmurakami 15y ago

I wonder if sometime in the future, we will have exhausted Earth's fuel and metal resources so badly that we are no longer capable of building the tools necessary to make our way into space, including projects like this one.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Tuna-Fish 15y ago
Metal resources don't get exhausted -- nearly all of the copper mined at the time of the pharaohs is still in use. When the cost of mined material rises, we simply reuse some of the metal that is in use in lower-value places. Example: all the copper piping that is presently being ripped up and replaced with plastic everywhere in the world. Nuclear fuel resources are essentially inexhaustible -- there is enough Thorium to feed constant growth for at least tens of thousands of years. Which should be enough for development of fusion.
- _exec 15y ago
  >>nearly all of the copper mined at the time of the pharaohs is still in use. Source?
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    Any physics textbook. Look up "conservation of mass".
    - cpeterso 15y ago
      I think _exec was asking for a source to back up the claim about the pharaohs' copper mines.
      - _exec 15y ago
        Yes. I couldn't find anything online about that :)

Porter_423 15y ago

Why does this sound like a science fiction horror movie plot? I anticipate the Xenomorphs will be invading us in the coming decade - guess I better stock up on supplies and practice barricading my home.

jboggan 15y ago

Is it possible to bootstrap this process by capturing low mass asteroids crossing near LEO? A small tug device paired with a separate crude ore processing unit with 3-D printing capabilities seems like a minimum viable unit. A few of these units in orbit, a few at LaGrange points, and we'll start leveraging the amount of re-usable construction material under human control in near space. It might also be a way to clean up 50+ years of exploration debris. Instead of de-orbiting a satellite when its productive life has ended we could just melt down, salvage, and repurpose much of the material. Literal pie-in-the-sky, but that's what it would take.

fennecfoxen 15y ago

It's a disaster movie. </cameron>