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Planetary Resources, Inc. Asteroid Mining: First telescope launch within 24 months
Mojo_Jojo
We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered User regular
We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered User regular
Who the hell are Planetary Resources?
These guys. More specifically, it's a company made up of ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, planetary scientists, with the backing of not several billionaires (James Cameron and some Google types).
They have two goals, which they state like this
“will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”
In short, they're going to mine astroids
Here are the founders, introducing themselves and their technical cojones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aozEVAhSkdMIs this a joke? Or a viral ad for a film? Or some shit like that?
I don't think so. I had a look and it seems to be legit. Here's a link to a guy who seems to agree. And another.
You can easily dig up thoughts on how top mine asteroids. Like here. Generally, you want to process it all in space, then drop some kind of metallic foam down to earth (if you inject liquid metal with nitrogen you can fairly easily make floating masses, so they'd just sit on the sea until you went to pick them up).
Hell, even the respectable, popular press have picked this up now.
What are they actually planning to do?
Phase 1: Find an asteroid
Phase 2: Extract volatiles from it (things like water, oxygen and nitrogen) to create some kind of supply depots in space
Phase 3: Get our hands on those precious metals (things like platinum, palladium and so on)
Phase 4: Profit!
What else?
Planetary Resources did a press conference the other day (on the 24th of April) and now their website contains useful bits of info.
But, within 2 years they expect to have launched space telescopes to find a suitable asteroid. And by 2020 they want to have the first of their supply depots in place. Frankly, it's exciting shit.
No, seriously, is this a joke?
It doesn't look like it, but that doesn't mean it'll happen. Even if they fail though, they claim to have already started work on the hardware, so it'll push things forwards.
When are they going to launch something?
Wihtin 24 months. Two years.
And it's one of these.
ARKYD SERIES 100 - LEO SPACE TELESCOPE
This is for finding an asteroid (as well as proving that they can launch something). It sits in low earth orbit and they seem to be pushing it as an Earth imaging tool as well as a telescope for looking out to space.
There's a few more models of prospector that they seem to have in mind before any mining happens.
Here's a nice diagram of their plans. Linked because it's big.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Mojo_Jojo on
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I support this venture.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
My imagination senses are tingling. 8->
The quantity of metal resources in those asteroids is unimaginably huge. They're also really nice places to do manufacturing, because you don't have to worry about shitting up the ecology and environment of a lifeless rock in hard vacuum.
I'd also like to find a big gold asteroid and bring it all back to Earth, destroying the gold standard dumbasses once and for all.
I think the cost needed to extract said platinum renders this point in time a fair distance away.
The profit is that humanity has a chance after we burn up all of our own natural resources. This kind of thing is the first step to The Next Phase for us.
There is an asteroid out there with the equivalent of trillions of dollars of platinum that passes close enough to us to be doable.
Of course, this skirts the real problem of platinum becoming worthless if there were millions of tons of it.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Well, it'll still be worth a lot because of the cost of getting it. I'm not expecting Space Minerals to be cheap. Sure, value might drop a bit, but it should be stable for a while.
Of course I don't make my money in the platinum game, so w/e.
Which is fine, because it is pretty useful in a lot of electronics applications and the only thing that keeps it from being used is the immense cost.
Incidentally, assuming this is actually allowed to go ahead, it will almost immediately precipitate the militarisation of space. Which makes for some nice technopr0n admittedly, but will also perpetuate the military-industrial complex.
And in space, no one can hear your employment grievences...
The military-industrial complex isn't going anywhere anytime soon anyway. Might as well get my warp drive out of it.
With the current cost of launching things into high orbit being what it is, those materials are going to be most valuable exactly where they are.
This would actually be a kick-ass way to get space-based solar power up and running (build some big-ass polished surfaces, then send up a concentrator solar cell, then use the things you mine to build waveguides and heat-sinks for the microwave stuff).
or
or
C) Both
*puts on sunglasses
*runs out of bubblegum
Hey, blue LEDs are exciting! Especially as the material we generally use for them can be alloyed to cover the full visible spectrum. Plus it's the blue ones that you use with YAG phosphors to give those ultra-bright white LEDs.
But yes, asteroids are really heavy and mostly metal. If we take the sexily named (6178) 1986 DA, which is a near-Earth asteroid. It's 2.3km across and contains 10,000 tons of gold, 100,000 tons of platinum, 10 billion tons of iron (around 4 or 5 times the global output) and a billion of nickel (a whopping five hundred times global annual output).
Not until we can eat carbonaceous chondrites, no.
Longer term, it potentially means that a lot of unpleasant, unsightly horribly polluting industries can be moved out of the ecosphere, reclaiming it for biological purposes. One example that springs to mind is silicon chip foundries; these use dreadfully toxic materials, are incredibly expensive, take a surprising amount of space, and would just work better in an ultralow G / vacuum environment.
Plus you have much greater availability of any number of metallic elements from Iron to Indium. There are lots of nice things we could do if Iridium were to become common as Silver. And it should be noted that bulk metal ore extraction usually involves ripping apart vast areas of land, consuming titanic amounts of energy, and often using toxic materials (eg: Gold) with all the associated environmental overhead.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Exactly. I don't think gold is so useful in silicon systems, but cheap platinum would really shake up microelectronics (and that's ignoring all the cool industrial catalysis uses).
Billionaires are investing in this because they want a return on that investment. I want daring moves like this to be rewarded.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
It would be, more specifically, a victory for the cornucopians and even more specifically, the late Julian Simon.
Is this a Hydrophobia reference? Because I didn't get past the first ten minutes.
The initial money would be returning to Earth and then just selling asteroid fragments.
I have so many nerd boners for this company you have no idea.
Seriously though, I think the future of the human race is outside of our atmosphere and this is a thing that needs to happen. Maybe we need a Kickstarter rocket program.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Like an immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space? We have dismissed this claim.
I can't decide if 'Yes, "Reapers"...' or an image of Giogrio Tsoukalos is the proper response to this.
On topicly, this makes me slightly less angry when I think about how stupid humanity is for clinging to this dying rock and not just agreeing "Yeah, we need to work together at least long enough to have a backup when we all fuck this up".
Slightly.
Remember, cut off their limbs. It's the only way to kill them.
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