Planetary Resources Confirms Plan To Mine Asteroids 500
Matching widespread predictions, The Bad Astronomer writes with word that "The private company Planetary Resources has announced that it plans to mine asteroids for water, air, and even precious metals in the next few years. Your initial reaction may be to snicker a bit, but it's headed by Peter Diamandis — who established the X Prize — has several ex-NASA personnel running the engineering, and also has the backing of a half-dozen or so billionaires. So this is no joke — their plan looks solid, and may very well be the first step in establishing a permanent human presence in space."
Re:Best of Luck (Score:4, Informative)
Wise choice. From TFA:
I asked Lewicki specifically about how this will make money. Some asteroids may be rich in precious metals — some may hold tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in platinum-group metals — but it will cost billions and take many years, most likely, to mine them before any samples can be returned. Why not just do it here on Earth? In other words, what’s the incentive for profit for the investors? This is probably the idea over which most people are skeptical, including several people I know active in the asteroid science community.
I have to admit, Lewicki’s answer surprised me. “The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment,” he told me. “They’re basing their decisions on our vision.”
These guys aren't even making excuses, they're throwing money down a hole for the lulz. And if this is one of Elon's "playing the long game" ideas he's going to be really disappointed that this will never be profitable as long as spaceships are being pushed from A to B. The only material that could possibly be profitable to bring back to Earth would be He3 from the Moon for use in fusion power.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck off and die -- it's not scary, because there's almost no conceivable way you can mess up popping an asteroid into Earth orbit that doesn't either leave it on a slow (LEO-like), grazing path through the atmosphere, easily burning/breaking up before it hits ground, or cause it to miss the Earth entirely. Orbital mechanics just don't work the way you alarmists seem to think, and the only way you'll get a weapon-like trajectory is if someone actually tried for that.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_(film)/ [wikipedia.org]
It was made 3 years before I was born. But I did catch original transformers & spiderman & gi-joe. (and a-team re-runs) Ahhhh the 80's, could do no wrong..
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Its the in-orbit/lunar infrastructure ... (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
5 year, 25 year, 100 year?
The real return will not be from delivering things to earth, rather it will be delivering things to orbit and the moon to further orbital and lunar construction and habitation. Lifting metals and waters from the earth to orbit or the moon is very expensive. Getting those resources "locally" (local in terms of gravity well not absolute distance) is the way to go and someone will get very rich doing so. The problem is that a profitable mining enterprise is optimistically many decades in the future, more likely something for the next century at our current pace.
Re:I'll believe it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, for starters, dinosaurs didn't roam the planet in the Pliocene (which only started 5 million years ago, give or take).
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Finally, let's keep in mind that an asteroid the size that is being looked at for mining in orbit reentered the atmosphere over the weekend and exploded over California without hitting the ground. And it was on a parabolic course, moving a lot faster than orbital speed. They estimated a 3.8 kiloton airburst from it, with no damage to the ground, no EMP, no radiation.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Thing is, they won't be aiming for us, they will be aimed at low orbit. If they miss orbit, one possibility is to come down in some sort of impact event, but even a miss is only likely to do what happens to most natural misses: either miss the planet entirely, bounce off the atmosphere with a glancing blow, or break up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere. And if you are aiming for an orbit, you are much more likely the be starting off in a trajectory that is glancing to begin with. The only thing that will be different from a natural miss is that we are directing an extra rock at the Earth, which given the number of rocks that hit us every day, is probably going to be a mere statistical aberration for the foreseeable future.
In short, if one of them does blast us, it will be more of a hit to our pride (because we aimed it at us) than anything that was impossible before.