Planetary Resources: thar's gold in them thar space rocks

Surprised no thread on this yet, and I'm sure many already heard this, but hey why not talk about it?

Actually, one credible estimate says that one particular asteroid, Amun 3554, is worth TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS. That's talking real money.

I fucking love the 21st century.

I am as far from being an economist as Amun 3554 is from Earth, but might there not be diminishing returns from a resource like that? Like, clearly all those materials would be worth phenomenal amounts, but a windfall would drive the price down a bit? I guess just saying that they had to go to SPACE to get them might let them charge market prices, though.

Some of those issues are covered in the links I linkened. (Not being snarky, just mentioning a fact for the non-TL;DR types.)

I'm a little excited about this kicking off, hopefully it actually leads to some kind of serious operations rather than just rich nerd dreaming. So excited it even got a mention in the D&D contraception thread.

I guess that the market price would also reflect the cost of obtaining them, I mean the mining corporation wouldn't flood the market all at once if there wasn't the demand, that's economics 101 (see OPEC). They also predict that the kinds of metals obtained would be in such large quantities compared to their availability on earth that it would unlock entirely new applications and thereby create new demand. This is the relevant part from their website:

In a further note I love their spacecraft names:

Also useable against alien threats.

I want this to happen as mining asteroids is The Future and I want to live there in my lifetime.

Heh thanks, and yes, didn't read, had to go out.

I'm with Jon Stewart, re: space mining: "So rarely do news headlines in 2012 read like what you imagined news headlines in 2012 would read when you were a kid."

Constrain your expectations. All they will be doing in the next decade is launching cheap space telescope micro-satellites piggybacking on other launches to do data collection. They are already a little too optimistic about how quickly they'll be able to launch their first satellites, I think.

What I want to see is Belters. When you see a project to melt an asteroid and turn it into a habitat for independent asteroid miners, you know we've made it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson sais this isn't bullshit. I'll take his word for it.

Aside from the coolness factor of this stuff, it strikes me as one of the necessary steps to get out of our current economic plateau. For example, one theoretical way out of petroleum dependence is solar power satellites. Such things are much cheaper to build if you can use materials that are already in space to make them. Mining precious metals in asteroids is one way to bootstrap to a real orbital industry.

I hope I muster out with Free Trader (Type A).

Prepare for asteroidal enema.

That's my ship!

The best game I ever played on my old 3GS. I am inspired to play it again!

Sigh, such a good game and such a nonexistant followup.

Ah yeah, the "economic analysis" in those pieces is laughably fucking wrong. or at least this one: http://mashable.com/2012/04/26/planetary-resources-asteroid-mining-trillions/

It commits the cardinal fallacy of any estimation of the "in ground value" of resources and commodities before they have been mined - not accounting for the cost to get the product out in a saleable form. If you have a gold mine that produces gold at a cost of a $2000 an ounce, you actually have a money pit because the price of gold currently is around $1665 ounces.

So you might have $8 trillion of "metal" in an asteroid but if it costs you $9 trillion to land it in saleable form..... well.

As an aside, coming along to any credible resources / commodity stock exchange (Australian or Canadian exchanges for example) and saying "HEY - this unmined deposit/asteroid over here totally has BIG NUMBER worth of metal sitting in the ground" would be illegal, because you failed to say how much it would COST to get the stuff out of the ground and into a saleable form. The COST may very well be BIG NUMBER + 1, in which case your deposit is totally worthless.

Looking at some of the specific numbers:

1. $8 trillion of platinum = 155,000 to 160,000 kgs of platinum (at ~ $50,400/kg). That is just shy of one years world supply of platinum of about 192,000 kgs.
2. Having one years supply of platinum suddenly come on to the market would be disturbing to say the least
3. The answer apparently is "sell it a little bit at a time and borrow against the rest". I defy you to find a bank that would lend against an entire years supply of one commodity. Goldman Sachs maybe.

Some of the other stuff is stupid. $8 trillion worth of iron? For a commodity that trades at $140 a tonne? Good luck getting a TONNE of material down for less than $140 space nerds. so that $8 trillion is worth nothing.

$8 trillion of nickel? Again, it trades at $18,250 per tonne. Slightly more believable that you might land a tonne of LME grade space nickel for less than $18,000 per tonne than $140 per tonne, but only just. Its also about 438,000,000 tonnes, or 240 years worth of supply of 1,800,000 tonnes. If you could land that much nickel, the market would be utterly FUCKED for centuries, so forget the whole "sell a little at a time" crap.

$6 trillion of cobalt? at $30,000 per tonne, that is 200,000,000 tonnes of cobalt. 2000 years supply. TWO MILLENNIA OF SUPPLY. Cobalt is called a "minor metal" for a reason, no one needs much of it. World supply is 98,000 tonnes.

I think the space nerds just pulled a giant scam on some stupid silicon valley venture capitalists who know jack about resources.

You're making the assumption that the metals are of no value in orbit, whereas if you're going to use them in orbit, they're much more valuable there, because you don't need to pay to lift them out of a gravity well. The question is more what can you construct that will provide a return.

Your reasoning on the value of retrieving the platinum is weird. Why do you have to borrow, exactly? Is there some pressing reason that you must realize the entire value of the metal today? If you're going to sell a year's supply of platinum, selling it over the course of a year makes sense - and I think "only" $20 billion / day in cash flow is acceptable.

Your repeated jabs at "space nerds" pulling "scams" are just plain trolling. If you're going to make a point, stick to the facts.

I don't really understand the high level of excitement this has generated, especially given that there are already several very solid and completely attainable commercial space ventures right now that are worth getting really excited about. This project on the other hand seems really far out of reach.

I understand that this is something that's very cool on paper and I'm happy to see them go forward and I hope it contributes to the future of space exploitation but I will be stunned if it ever gets any significant resources from any asteroids.

Here's a short survey of some of the more realist reactions:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144feab49a.html#axzz1tX2WFxDx

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors...ry-resources-can-make-a-profit/?feed=rss_home

http://news.discovery.com/space/mining-asteroids-not-mankinds-silver-bullet-yet-120424.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/25/asteroid_mining_uncertain/

This is the HE3 moon argument - there's no damn thing to use them for in orbit in the first place, because there's no viable earth-based consumption scenarios. It's all circular.

(Also ignoring the even-harder problem of space-based manufacturing; if you thought space-based mining was hard....)

It's because space cadets making the same silly arguments for years on end gets annoying.

No, it isn't "all circular." You're just declaring by fiat that there's no possible value in space-based manufacturing, and then concluding that items that are primarily of value for supporting it are of no value.

So you repeat the slur using a different phrase, and link to an article blasting Libertarians? Great non-sequitor, there! Who said anything about libertarianism in this thread? Why should I object to an organized effort to create orbital industry? There's not a word in that article about whether it's a good idea or not, or whether it can be done; it's just an attack on treating space as the same as the Western expansion which no one in this thread has done.

Haha, a slur.

There's no value in space based manufacturing because even greatly reduced launch costs make it unprofitable for anything but space based uses of the output. Of which there are none, because governments aren't ponying up for exploration anymore.

Wouldn't just dropping it in controlled chunks on unpopulated areas would be that expensive? I don't think it is huge deal if a ton of gold lands at march 3, as long as it hits the right spot.

Well March 8th will be more convenient for me next year but I'm flexible as long as the ton of gold is hitting my house.

Gold is pretty soft.

You wouldn't be getting a SUV-sized nugget, you would be getting a golden shower.

Now THAT'S worth paying trillions of dollars for. THE JAMES CAMERON PLANETARY VENTURES TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT

Oh darn it. I'm pretty sure my municipality has an ordinance against those. ;)

First I thought you were wrong and then I acutally worked it out :-)



Assuming you LAND a tonne of iron ore or gold (a lot more would have burnt up in the atmosphere on the way down, lets not worry about the cumulative pollution effects of burning up tonnes and tonnes of asteroid stuff into the atmosphere on a regular basis for a little while yet)

e = 0.5 *1000 * 90^2 = 4 million joules of energy.

That doesn't seem that bad actually, about the same energy as a kilogramme of TNT ( I think)

Thanks to this site for information:

http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/#12

I got the figure of 90 m/s for terminal velocity of an asteroid from there. Note the range they quote is actually 90 - 180 m/s

Stick to the facts? Uh sorry did you not see the part where I did all my own calculations on the amount of each commodity (platinum, iron, nickel , cobalt) the quoted values would represent? These don't count as facts? Seeing as the space nerds (sorry, visionary space pioneers) didn't bother to quote any of those actual details in their puffery. I then linked to the US Geological survey market surveys for each of those commodities that would show how many years supply each of those represent - which is highly relevant in judging the market effects of a disruptive amount of new supply appearing. Clearly you cant physically sell $6 trillion worth of cobalt this side of a MILLENNIUM, so claiming an asteroid "contains" $6 trillion "worth" of cobalt is farcical.

To address the first bit, I'm all ears to see what you could construct in space out of pure platinum that would be worth the money you spent setting up an orbital space refinery.

You can't sell a years supply of platinum over a year, because you've doubled the world's supply of platinum for the year overnight. Commodity prices are based in supply and demand, and you just created so much supply you have absolutely "cratered' (hahaha a pun) the platinum market. The price would fluctuate significantly. Effectively you would become the marginal setter of price for platinum - whatever it cost you to make all that platinum becomes either the new maximum price (if it is higher than other peoples costs) or the new low price because you put all the other platinum mines in the world out of business for the year by producing cheaper than all of them.

It would be like the people who make twinkies deciding next year to make twice as many twinkies for the year. They wont make double the amount of money, because how many Twinkies can you eat? The price for Twinkie would fall.

Implats reckoned in 2010 the cheapest produced platinum in the world cost 10,000 ZAR per ounce (~1,300 $US) to produce (http://www.implats.co.za/implats/downloads/2010/investor media/Investor-presentation-key-strategies-November 2010.pdf). This is about $45,000 per kg.

They got similar results in 2011, there was a few cheaper producers but not of pure platinum (thus they get less when they sell) http://www.implats.co.za/implats/downloads/2011/interim_results/presentation_interim_17feb2011.pdf

So the space people are going to have land that platinum for not much more than that, or they make little to no money, because the price falls to a level where they are unprofitable and Implats and co is (barely) profitable.

You reason you need to borrow against the value of the platinum or realise it is that presumably you spent QUITE A LOT of capital getting that asteroid down and you need to repay it.

I called them "space nerds" pulling "scams" because, in my opinion, the economics behind mining space asteroids are at best fatuous and at worst fraudulent.

I note that articles at Forbes and the Financial Times share my dubiousness over the economics, as linked earlier. The Forbes guy talks about the market effects much better than me.

the FT was a little tongue in cheek

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1tcx155IT

I am reminded of the Price Revolution. And tempted to write a really bad sci-fi novel.

Price Price Revolution is the only game Tyler Cowen owns.

Interesting link, but I think this terminal velocity is low-balled for landing iron-gold ore chunks. Typical meteorite consist of porous rock, so drag is much, much higher. At the same time you also don't have to worry about cosmic velocity, because we assume entry is somewhat controlled.

Yes, a whole bunch of it will burn off in the atmosphere unless you find a way to slow it down, but even primitive heat shield and shaping (and why wouldn't you do that?) would greatly reduce it. Last but not least - some form of slow-down parachute can be used in combination with a minimal heat shield to keep disintegration in the atmosphere to the minimum. You only need to slow it down enough to keep it from burning up.

Think about cone-shaped 5ton gold chunk with a polished gold heat shield and a re-entry parachute landing somewhere on 100% corporate-owned pacific island. I think not having to worry about how it lands greatly removes technological constrains for the process, because it isn't a huge deal if it dissipates all of its energy after the landing, and not much-more-expensive before.

Not sure what it would do to world economy if gold cost as much as copper, but I guess our electronics and power transmission lines will improve overnight.

This whole thing has made me realize how trivial space piracy will be relative to it. We should encourage other countries to refine crap in space and focus on things designed to steal it from them.

Even better - forget nukes, we will just rain kinetic 100 ton chunks of gold and platinum on their cities then use surviving population as a slave labor to build ourselves pyramids made of pure gold.

Even primitive ion engine could get it fairly fast while in constant burn from the asteroid field, but we probably could develop much better solution of magnetically ejecting gold plasma for propulsion.

ARISE DEAD THREAD!

I just wanted to pointed out that these guys totally ripped off my post, albeit with less snark:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/24/planetary_resources/

They are totally going for the trickle down effect - $15 per pound platinum for all the kiddies!!

Planetary Resources is a bit boring since it'll be years before they even launch any telescopes and decades before they attempt anything really interesting.

The new hotness rumbling through the space world is "Golden Spike". Apparently a private consortium is interested in setting a giant pile of money on fire doing private moon missions. For serious. Before the end of the decade.

What is their ostensible purpose? Or does goldenspikemoonshot.com really have this on their front page?

The short answer is it seems as if there are some wealthy potential clients (from a region of the world where wealthy individuals and governments intersect), that are actually willing to write large enough checks to make it happen as a prestige project.

Water, carbon and oxygen would be much more valuable. A nice "worthless" ice&dirt ball would benefit any future space industry more than a lump of actually worthless gold by orders of magnitude.