Space-Mining Company Prepares for Launch

[Hevva]

Space-Mining Company Prepares for Launch

All the drama and excitement of Mass Effect's resource scanning is coming to the real world.

Galactic quantity surveyors rejoice! A Washington-based engineering firm called Planetary Resources has just secured funding to begin developing its nascent range of survey and mining vehicles intended for use on mineral-rich rocks in space. The little fleet of "low-cost, very small spacecraft" will begin life doing nothing more complicated than scanning passing asteroids for minerals, and will later graduate to more complex mining tasks. The vehicles will be available for use by private companies and government agencies alike.

Individuals investing in the company include Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Titanic 3D director James Cameron, and former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi. Armed with financial backing of this caliber, Planetary Resources co-founders Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson say that they expect to launch the company's first test-surveying mission within two years.

"If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land," said Diamandis in an interview with Reuters.

"Those precious resources caused people to make huge investments in ships and railroads and pipelines," he continued. "Looking to space, everything we hold of value on Earth - metals, minerals, energy, real estate, water - is in near-infinite quantities in space. The opportunity exists to create a company whose mission is to be able to go and basically identify and access some of those resources and ultimately figure out how to make them available where they are needed."

The company, overseen at the moment by the former NASA Mars Mission manager, intends to begin full survey and mining projects on nearby asteroids within the next five to ten years. Interim projects will include developing methods for extracting water from asteroids and depositing it in orbiting fuel depots for use by NASA and others. Could they help with moon-bases? Is the future of space advancement really in the hands of private companies? Moon and Alien say hello...


Source: Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/planetary-resources-googl_n_1447871.html?ref=technology]


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[gigastar]

Makes sense to start space mining. We cant keep dragging iron out of Earth, we need to start importing some. Not like the Asteroid belt needs it as much as we do...

 

[Cowabungaa]

*reads the article*

...

*blinks twice, reads it again*

Is this really happening? Like, really? Are they really going to start this stuff in 2014?!

Wake up and smell the future. Damn this is awesome. I don't even care that this sort of thing isn't going to be profitable any time soon, just the fact that it's already starting is mindboggeling.

 

[Albino Boo]

Commodities prices are high right now but by they time they launch they could have tumbled. I don't think its going to be economic in the next 50 years to exploit even near earth asteroids. The launch costs are just to high and the risks involved with landing minerals comes close irresponsible. The only way to make it worth while is to launch 10s tons which will be moving at 25000 mph. Get the re-entry wrong and say goodbye to a major city.

 

[Albino Boo]

Makes sense to start space mining. We cant keep dragging iron out of Earth, we need to start importing some. Not like the Asteroid belt needs it as much as we do...

Err precisely where do you think the iron has gone? As far as I am aware it hasn't left the planet. In fact the total launch weight of things shot in to space and didn't come back down can't be more than 10k tons. Far less than the accumulation of iron from meteorites over the last 30 thousand years.

 

[weirdee]

maybe they should focus on reclaiming the space garbage around earth first...

 

[Jodah]

Commodities prices are high right now but by they time they launch they could have tumbled. I don't think its going to be economic in the next 50 years to exploit even near earth asteroids. The launch costs are just to high and the risks involved with landing minerals comes close irresponsible. The only way to make it worth while is to launch 10s tons which will be moving at 25000 mph. Get the re-entry wrong and say goodbye to a major city.

This. Sure its a nice idea but nowhere near practical until we find a cheaper way to get things into and out of space.

 

[therandombear]

Can't wait until we discover the archives on Mars!
Or moon rocks to grind into white moon gel for portals!

OT: Sounds awesome, but I doubt we will find anything "worthwhile" in the start, gonna take a while to get the good stuff...whatever that is.

 

[Desworks]

Well, given that Governments around the world seem uninterested in giving Space Exploration the funding it really needs, Private Companies are a lot better than the alternative. Plus, once there's a profit in it, we'll see large leaps in Space Technology, which is better for everyone.

Commodities prices are high right now but by they time they launch they could have tumbled. I don't think its going to be economic in the next 50 years to exploit even near earth asteroids. The launch costs are just to high and the risks involved with landing minerals comes close irresponsible. The only way to make it worth while is to launch 10s tons which will be moving at 25000 mph. Get the re-entry wrong and say goodbye to a major city.

Commodity prices are unlikely to fall by any substantial amounts in the future, as the easy to mine materials are going to be harder and harder to find as time goes on. And while launch costs are indeed high, the risks of landing materials is nowhere near as bad as you think. Re-entry calculations are not very difficult to do, and there's more than enough uninhabited area's on the planet to drop things safely.

In any case, their mining plans are not their main focus at the moment. For now, they plan to survey what's orbiting us, to find out if there's enough stuff up there to make mining worth it.

 

[Galimor]

I think this will be a wonderful idea for building projects on the moon and in earth orbit, since launching materials into orbit is expensive. If they get manufacturing facilities into orbit, they are looking at the platform from which to launch the next wave into further development, with larger vehicles and probes possible and cheaper.

 

[gigastar]

Makes sense to start space mining. We cant keep dragging iron out of Earth, we need to start importing some. Not like the Asteroid belt needs it as much as we do...

Err precisely where do you think the iron has gone? As far as I am aware it hasn't left the planet. In fact the total launch weight of things shot in to space and didn't come back down can't be more than 10k tons. Far less than the accumulation of iron from meteorites over the last 30 thousand years.

True that the iron isnt really going anywhere, but we are using it. Its not like when someone needs some more iron theres always going to be someone who doesnt need it anymore.

And strictly speaking it doesnt just apply to iron. Several commonplace metals are going up in price because its getting harder to find fresh supplies on Earth.

 

[Robert Ewing]

What would a job application look like?

Do you play eve? Yes

What role do you play? Miner

You're hired!

 

[Shoggoth2588]

A part of me is really excited by the prospects of waking up in 60 to 70 years from now and watching a news story about the implications of strip-mining Luna. The idea of mining asteroids is an awesome one but I can't wait to see how environmental activists will evolve from here on out. We probably won't see anything too crazy until someone tries mining Haley's Comet.

 

[Nouw]

And thus, shooting for Moon finally began. I'll get Sam Rockwell, someone start up Lunar Industries. We require more minerals!

 

[Evil Smurf]

that is so cool! we could find new chemicals! new stuff!

 

[CleverCover]

We probably won't see anything too crazy until someone tries mining Haley's Comet.

Is that feasibly possible? To mine something that continuously moves at great speeds around the universe? Who would fund that project and really expect positive results?

OT: Hell yes. It's about time someone decided to start looking to outer space for stuff. One step closer to our colony on Mars...

I really hope they get good results to pay back their investors. Maybe a world like Star Trek isn't so far away.

Captcha: time lord.

Shhhh! That's a secret!

 

[Beryl77]

This is great and about fucking time we started with this! I made a thread about this earlier today and watched the livestream.
It's really exciting stuff. Also, it actually may be not as expensive as some think.
The way NASA handles things is unbelievably inefficient. The way these people plan to do this is comparably cheaper. If it goes according to plan, they'll be much more efficient than NASA ever was. They're also only going to use robots for now which has many advantages over using astronauts.
There are other things to consider. For example, there are a lot of Near Earth Objects which are easier to reach than the moon's surface and we went there decades ago with the help of computers which were vastly inferior than the one I carry around in my pocket!

They said that a single platinum-rich asteroid, which is about 500km wide, has the same amount or even more platinum that we've ever mined on earth. Just one big, rich asteroid would give you probably a few trillions. A study conducted by NASA and others [http://www.space.com/15405-asteroid-mining-feasibility-study.html] says that it's pretty feasible. Mining an asteroid for "only" 2.6 billions.
Of course the initial costs are going to be higher but they'll drop over time.

For now, the most valuable resource to gather from asteroids will be water. It a great fuel and in more quantities available on asteroids than we'll need. They want to build galactic "gas stations". That would be incredibly useful for deep-space explorations and we wouldn't have to transport the water from earth.
The other valuable resource will be metals, to be more precise the platinum-group metals (platinum, palladium, iridium etc.). Like I said, they're in high concentrations on asteroids and actually easier to reach. Because earth had to cool down much longer, all the heavy metals have sunk far down. Some platinum-group metal resources only exist on earth's crust because of constant meteor crashes on earth over the millions of years.
This could lead to machines being built in space instead of making on earth. No pesky and expensive gravity to overcome there.

Of course that's all a long way off but not as impossible and far away as some might think. My biggest hope is that this will attract many companies at some point and they're going to try and be competitive, which will lead to great innovations in space exploration. Ahh, greed, what a great propellant for innovations.


Anyway, this is all very early speculation and a bit dreaming. News like this always make me a bit dreamy.

Let's just hope none of the companies will start calling themself Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

 

[bfgmetalhead]

All we need now is the advent of transhumanism and the singularity. Then its the future baby!

Just imagine croytech advances combined with posible biological and technological immortality, or life extention, with advancment in space travel also this would lead to the beggining of the homo novus(or spapien) galactic empire. It will be amazing to behold, I hope I am able to witness it.

 

[Dastardly]

Is the future of space advancement really in the hands of private companies? Moon and Alien say hello...

We now return you to your lunar eclipse, brought to you by Google/Wal-Mart.