Planetary resources in announces ASTEROID MINING venture.
polycounter lvl 17
Yay! More super cool scifi business ventures becoming a reality.
The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for asteroid targets rich in resources. The intention will be to open deep-space exploration to private industry.
Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services. It plans to tap some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials.
Replies
Yea, same with medical technology. When we're ready to have a cure for cancer, we need to do it with publicly funded money, not when some evil corporation wants to make a buck.
Otherwise this is a cool announcement. About time someone looked skywards at all those metals.
Play Deus Ex, the first game. That's pretty much the premise of it.
On another note, Yay! Begin the rape of space ;')
Space Indians better watch the fuck out.
Actually could turn out more efficient this way. Moving humankind forward is kind of abstract concept and people might not be so eager to invest their money/time/effort in it. Financial gain on the other hand is entirely different business
Privatising it is the way forward while the worlds governments are too busy blowing each other up to unite towards our own future.
Jokes aside. I'm all for the idea regardless of who's doing it.
How is it a dumb concept? If no one else is doing it and they want to start a company that does it....should they be stopped?
I -completely- agree that governments and the human race in general should be pushing for space exploration, but saying privatization is dumb is kind of a strange viewpoint. If someone wants to attempt to make money at exploring space, no one should stop them. Its just like someone sailing a ship and trading goods, only in space.
So yeah, "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" pretty much fits here...
just look at history... government takes the first, most expensive steps in each new phase of exploration. Once the groundwork is laid, private enterprise takes over and pushes it further than any government could afford or be motivated to.
I think this is the best thing ever, soooo stoked I'm gonna live to see our species start mining asteroids (assuming I don't get run over by a steam roller next year or something)
Really? Who do you think it going to pay trillions and trillions of dollars to finance decades of research and devlopmment? Some magic future utopian civilization 400 years from now? With no payback?
If we can make a buck pushing the boundaries of the human race, why not do it. corporations are not inherently evil or bad, everyone is just people!
edit: I watched the press conference on a live stream, It's pretty insane how big their estimated returns are. "One asteroid half the size of this room will have billions of dollars of retrievable materials".
Out of the blue they just happen to find some kind of weird Alien beacon on one of those asteroids then our technology is bumped up about 200 years worth skipping all the unimportant stuff the Reapers come and a population decrease follows...That'd be lovely!
Other than that, they need to get up on the moon to mine Helium 3, so we can get cheaper, safer energy than nuclear down here!
There are large asteroid fields orbiting the sun.
If that's too far there are ways to guide asteroids into orbit around the earth. For example (heard about this on a TED talk) you can park a small probe that weighs just a couple tons right next to an asteroid, not touching it, but still floating in space, and that probes gravity field will exert a pull on the asteroid and move it where we want. It only takes a miniscule amount of power to keep the probe in place. Sure it wouldn't be fast, but these would be long term plans.
Here's the TED talk if you're interested: http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from_asteroids.html
yes, actually!
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2012/04/19/new-study-says-asteroid-retrieval-and-mining-feasible-with-existing-and-near-term-technologies/
i hate to be a septic here but it took the the combine scientific research and development effort of the entire world US, EU, Russia, Japan etc over 15 years and and over 150 BILLION US dollars to put what amounts to an over sized trailer into orbit which does essentially noting but sit there so some nerds at NASA can post video clips on you tube explaining how people take a poop with no gravity, fun times i'm sure... o yea and the trailer has a robot arm also :thumbup:
i think you can say with a good deal of certainty this project can be called "two board rich guys with nothing to do make fools of them selves and want us all to watch".
do you honestly think these nutters have any idea what sort of effort it would take to mine asteroids?
What an amateur! Totally the wrong kind of spirit you'd need at the head of an ambitious project like this.
/Warning: This post may contain sarcasm.
Have you considered that anything made today with relative ease, and that we take for granted, is the result of years of painstaking research and ridiculous amounts of money being pooled into ventures?
It always starts slow, but it has to start somewhere. Oh, and whatever you personally have against the people behind this, is no reason to discredit an entire venture. Posting a couple of 'wacky' pictures doesn't work for trashy tabloids, and it sure as hell won't work here.
I have no doubt. if you had a dual degree in astrophysics and aerospace engineering and two obscenely rich billionaires called you up on the phone and told you they want to MINE ASTEROIDS!!! then offered you a 5-10 million dollar a year salary to help them what would you do?
A) calmly explain what illiterate fools they are fallowed by a brief overview how ridiculous something like that would be both technically and monetarily. then hang up the phone and go back to your sad little life.
I'm pretty sure that's illegal! Anyway, research the recent interest and developments in near earth asteroid mining, dude. Not as crazy as it sounds.
do you honestly think a one passenger sub that's based on 50 years of research and development. that has been produced and tested by basically every advanced nation US, China, Germany, England etc, is even remotely equivalent to the task of MINING ASTEROIDS in outer space?
about 500 people have gone into space, James Cameron is only the 2nd person to journey that deep.
You're right, I never considered that they would turn around and throw out over 50 years of space research done by basically every advanced nation, etc. He'll just load his submarine onto a slingshot and launch it into space.
I wasn't comparing deep sea dives to space travel, or asteroid mining. I was pointing out that his dive shows the exact kind of person Cameron is - Not only has he taken something that's incredibly dangerous and impressive further than anyone else has in human history, he ACTUALLY did it, rather than merely investing in it, or sitting in a computer chair, aimlessly hating on people via the internet with bigger boundaries than his.
He hasn't said he's going to be doing this tomorrow. There's obviously a lot of problems to be solved and progress to be made. But the ball's rolling and is in motion. It has to be tried to be accomplished.
You're talking to me over the internet, most likely from a different continent. How long did it take to develop the technology and implement it for you to be able to do that? Would you have thrown your hands up in the air at the start of that development, too?
i think its great. the more money the give to people who have the skills to engineer spacecraft the better. because those people i'm sure will not spend one cent of it on MINING ASTEROIDS IN OUTER SPACE!!!. and maybe invest in projects that have a snow balls chance in hell of advancing the science and technology.
after a few years of development and 'massive parties' that probably what the final plan will be. :thumbup:
tldr; it's ambitious, not crazy.
Like? If anything Cameron's deep sea dive was a waste of cash. Space is the future. The only future. It's the only thing after earth. You can disagree and think the cash should go somewhere else, but you'll be wrong, and in 100 years you'll be considered a hilarious old-timey dinosaur. And that's not an insult, that's exactly how you'd be viewed, same as the people who scoffed at computers, airplanes and automobiles.
hehe perhaps
Why is MINING ASTEROIDS IN OUTER SPACE so bad? You'll need these ressources anyway after you've excavated every site on earth.
Astronauts taking a dump in zero gravity has done more towards the progress of humans as a species than any other thing.
For serious, NASA's shuttles run on 286 processors and are fast approaching FIFTY years old. Is it really that hard to believe that if that tech could take humans to space and the moon, that we can't do better with over four decades of advances in hardware and knowledge? Brain think power go!
To be fair though, those old processors has got the job done pretty fine, it's always been about fuel and propulsion, the cost required to launch something into space.
Have a more powerful computer (which isn't as easy as slapping any new computer into the craft), would not improve that situation at all.
New satellites are built with these special-built $200000 per unit 200mhz computers while we down on earth have sloppy machinery that is astronomically more cheaper and vastly more powerful. But for a good reason.
If you take a shuttle launch for example, shuttles are a worst-case-scenario because it's manned which makes it inherently heavy since it has to be filled with junk to keep the crew alive. Almost 95% of the weight being launched is just the fuel needed to get the remaining 5% (the actual shuttle) into space.
It's unfortunate but while processing power might have improved tremendously, we still have no real efficient way of getting shit into space.
you are correct. that is precisely the point. it is not even remotely commercially viable to mine anything in space. its about as commercially viable as sending satellites into orbit to make ice cream. it would require a totally new and radical as yet undiscovered propulsion system. that has been the goal of the greatest minds in astrophysics and engineering for the past 60 years.
people have been dreaming of mining asteroids and calculating the cost for 60 years or more.
does anyone seriously think that some hollywood film director and guy who worked at a internet search engine have found some key to the puzzle that the most serious brainpower of the 20th century could not figure out and has yet to figure out?
the reason why you have not seen anyone else start a company with the intention of MINING ASTEROIDS in space is because they would be immediately discredited and laughed out of the building down the street and into the nut house. and no one with serious scientific credentials or a serious aerospace company would commit suicide like that.
there's a saying that gos "if it sounds to good to be true it probably is".
commercial space and space travel is great, space science is great. Eric Schmidt and James Cameron MINING ASTEROIDS IN OUTER SPACE for precious metals as a commercially viable enterprise is completely and utterly ridiculous.
they say they will have a "fuel depot"??? in space by 2020. huh? if they manage to put an orbiting craft up that can dock and refuel satellites and other spaceships??? in 8 years i will perhaps take this seriously. until they do they look like complete nutters.
Because once again, no matter how unviable it is, it'll push more money into space sector, and in the very end when we have more viable sources of fuel we will be mining places that are more rich in obtainable minerals than earth.
It says they're going to mine platinum group metals. Platinum is around $50,000 per kilo. Launch of a falcon 9 rocket (which would be the likely platform) is around $27 million per flight for 9500 kilos. 9,500x$50,000 = $475 million if you can recover one payload' worth of platinum, and it will be even bigger earnings if you create a system that can operate out of space instead of requiring a launch every time you need to mine a new rock. And lets not forget that the platinum group is not one metal, and others (for example Rhodium) are even more expensive and rare.
Obviously the research, development, materials, engineering, and other costs will add up to huge amounts, but with the resources up there you could recoup loses. It would take a while, but it's doable, and once you break even you'll be making big money with no other real competition.
There is obvious risk involved in this venture, but saying it's crazy is just ignorant. But to be honest I don't think they'll manage to hold to their timetables at all. Lets say asteroid mining by 2040, not before, and by then other players might well overtake them. However if commercial launch platforms become more ubiquitous it could happen earlier. Falcon is taking a big step for the commercial market, and it should be joined by a few other companies in the next decade. All in all things are looking up for space travel, so don't count Cameron and co out (primarily because they're investors, not the people doing the legwork).