Posted on 04/24/2012 5:20:08 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Billionaire-backed space startup Planetary Resources has officially unveiled its business plan to much fanfare and with few surprises. The company’s principals--which include X-Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson, and former NASA Flight Director Chris Lewicki--today pledged that Planetary Resources would make the abundant resources of space available here on Earth, and introduced a couple of the company’s own spacecraft that will make such space prospecting possible. The rush for space resources is officially on.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
Because bottled water from Fiji, Iceland, and Houston isn’t exotic enough anymore.
We just need energy to desalinate and transport it.
Live a new life on the off-world colonies.
yeah, it’s a piece of cake. just ask Bruce Willis
Amen..
It makes perfect sense to anyone with the slightest understanding of costs involved in space flight.
If you’ve got water in space, you have hydrogen and oxygen that don’t need to be hefted to orbit at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound.
Newt was dissed for men mining on the moon. Now everyone is fascinated by the prospect of robots mining asteroids.
But if your living and working in space you need to have water that was hauled hauled up and out of a very deep gravity well. That is very expensive.
This is all going to collapse when they find a spotted owl on an asteroid.
Actually, it’s even crazier than it sounds.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
-- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in radio, 1920s
Nay-sayers have been around for a long time.
/johnny
“Actually, it’s even crazier than it sounds.”
Didn’t you read this part?
~~~Planetary Resources merely has some interesting Powerpoint slides, some big-money backers, and a press conference under its belt.~~~
There’s no room for doubt. These guys are series.
Oh, contraire, I guarantee you these operators know how to get federal funding, and they plan on getting it.
/johnny
-- Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, to brother Orville, after a disappointing flying experiment, 1901
It's not just the bronze age fuddy duddies. ;)
/johnny
Technologically it looks somehow doable today, at enormous expense that is unlikely to be repaid until many years into the future - possibly too many to for investors to hope for a return in their lifetime.
There's one glaring problem I'm sure they are still trying to calculate the full ramifications of. Asteroids (the most valuable quite large) are moving through space at a horrific rate, presenting a rather difficult obstacle - that of the fuel-power needed to overcome mass plus speed.
The solution can only lie in long-term minimal corrections in direction, and use of gravitational power to assist - with perhaps some deep-space refueling made possible. I'd love to hear or read how they expect to be able to pull it all off in a reasonable time period - i.e., within how many years.
It is that facility (and others?) placed where, when, and how productive it (they) will be able to be that the whole enterprise must rely on.
Twenty years into the future? At least, I would imagine - and with a world bankrupt and on the verge of world war again, it begins to look like 'pie in the sky.'
A cover story for what?
I smell the CIA and another Glomar Challenger stunt.
What would be cheaper, building robots to scour the heavens for water laden asteroids, or building a robotic moon-base to convert the water (supposedly a lot of it, per expert-conjecture) on the moon to rocket fuel?
They seem to be advocating bringing stuff back to Earth. Seems to me it would take as much energy to bring it to the surface (without it all burning up) as it would to blast it off.
Its always easier and cheaper coming down. Coming down is unpowered just for starters. The space shuttle is nothing but a glider.
As long as they are not circling Uranus, you’ll be ok.
But maybe someday you can grow up.
Is a glider practical for an economically significant mass of minerals?
And find it easier to disparage the person that pointed it out than to provide proof.
K. I'm fairly clear on the maturity issues now.
/johnny
And find it easier to disparage the person that pointed it out than to provide proof.
K. I'm fairly clear on the maturity issues now.
/johnny
Considering the fact that it doesn’t require fuel, I can’t think of a more economic means. After all, why would you need to do it any other way?
Also there’s the fact that we’ve been thinking of this stuff in terms of government which is always wildly overpriced.
Based on what we know now there is nothing on the asteroids that isn’t also on Earth in pretty good quantities.
I suppose hoopla is necessary o get anything done but the cold hard fact is that space exploration is basic research - you shouldn’t expect an economic return but may be worth it for it’s own sake.
Platinum is significant in small masses. So are some of the rare earths.
Water would be stupid to return, except as fuel to be used to slow a spacecraft, as would some others, unless they had been worked into valuable end items.
Meter long carbon nano-tubes might be a case for value returning.
But the bottom line is that we don't know until we get there and do it.
What use is a baby? What is the economic return? Maybe a lot, or maybe none.
Same here. Folks will fail, we will learn, and we'll move forward.
/johnny
What I’m saying is you can bring a ton of space shuttle and a few rock down that way. Can you bring 100 tons down in a glider?
See my post #34.
The shuttle weighs 165,000 lbs and can carry another 65,000 in payload. Its 30 year old government tech. I trust private industry to come up with something that far exceeds the shuttle abilities.
That is true, on the face of it, but the concentrations are very different. There are asteroids that are solid nickle-iron with a few % of other stuff.
You don't find that kind of ore on earth. Earth mixes stuff up pretty well.
And there has been economic return from space. Billions of dollars worth. Already. Without tapping any minerals.
/johnny
At current platinum prices ($1500+ per oz) I’m getting over a billion and a half dollars for a shuttle bay full of platinum which is one of the common metals in space. (Obviously that’s processed price in a shuttle that wouldn’t be used)
Those guys made their billions milking the system. They are not going to stop now.
And there has been economic return from space. Billions of dollars worth. Already.
/johnny
Worship your dotcom sluts. I don’t care.
Seen in the year-by-year breakdown listed below, the total amounts (in nominal dollars) that NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2011 amounts to $526.18 billion dollars—an average of $9.7 billion per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
A commercial comsat costs billions to put into orbit. You think companies do that for funsies? They do it for ROI.
Some do fail, but not as often as when we first started.
/johnny
/johnny
However.... commercial launches of commercial payloads have been going on as well. Those, I approve of.
/johnny
I’ve sort of lost track of the argument.
Has our collectivist investment in space been worth the cost?
That is an extremely complex question, one which I am not qualified to answer right now.
What is the proposition on the table?
Is a private venture into mining asteroids crazy, and if so, why?
/johnny
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