On April 24 2012 12:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: It's James Cameron, who else would it be?
A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.
Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.
"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."
Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) Tuesday (April 24) during a news conference at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
This is going to be a huge failure. If they wanted to sell water it would be cheaper to build a desalination plant. I also am very skeptical that the cost of launching craft out of orbit as well as landing on a NEA with telemetry (highly risky) is going to be less than any potential earnings. It would be cheaper to buy out mining companies. I hope they'll achieve their goals, but I just don't see us being there yet in terms of lack of resources on our planet to warrant such expenditures.
We'll go to space resources when the prices of commodities blows up in I don't know...200 years?
nonono , there will be a space economy for all of these commodities to be sold to. atm it costs so prohibitively much to get anything into space that a company that could mine it for much cheaper on an asteroid and send it to things like ISS or eventualy things like moonbases (helium3 is pretty kewl) and beyond for a much cheaper price. comets in particular are important because they have all that you need to make rocket fuel.. which is of vast importance. If you think mining a comet is impossible realize we've already slammed a satelite onto the surface and there are eventual plans by nasa (hopefully not stopped) to land an unmanned spacecraft in the future on a comet as it passes.
On April 24 2012 12:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: It's James Cameron, who else would it be?
A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.
Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.
"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."
Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) Tuesday (April 24) during a news conference at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
This is going to be a huge failure. If they wanted to sell water it would be cheaper to build a desalination plant. I also am very skeptical that the cost of launching craft out of orbit as well as landing on a NEA with telemetry (highly risky) is going to be less than any potential earnings. It would be cheaper to buy out mining companies. I hope they'll achieve their goals, but I just don't see us being there yet in terms of lack of resources on our planet to warrant such expenditures.
We'll go to space resources when the prices of commodities blows up in I don't know...200 years?
nonono , there will be a space economy for all of these commodities to be sold to. atm it costs so prohibitively much to get anything into space that a company that could mine it for much cheaper on an asteroid and send it to things like ISS or eventualy things like moonbases (helium3 is pretty kewl) and beyond for a much cheaper price. comets in particular are important because they have all that you need to make rocket fuel.. which is of vast importance. If you think mining a comet is impossible realize we've already slammed a satelite onto the surface and there are eventual plans by nasa (hopefully not stopped) to land an unmanned spacecraft in the future on a comet as it passes.
Of course there will be entities to sell your commodities to, that isn't the point. The point is that the returns on their investments will be negative. First off, it isn't cheaper to go however many hundreds of thousands of miles into space, with a highly explosive rocket fuel as well as a very large and cumbersome mining equipment with the highly risky process of using telemetry to land and operate your equipment than to mine here on Earth, or build a desalination plant to sell water.
Let's not even get into the technical aspects of say...fixing an unmanned mining rig / equipment with purely telemetry. I can't imagine how immense a task that is, which probably requires a lot of money and skills that simply do not exist yet. Yes, I know we have crashed satellites on a comet before, but thats a farcry from landing on one. It takes a lot more calculation to land on something than merely crashing, especially with a mining rig.
I just don't see the payoff here. There are plenty of resources on Earth to be gotten much cheaper than in space. The only profitable business venture for space right now is tourism. That'll be enough to start funneling funds back into R&D projects for future industries and ventures. A company with a healthy profit-margin can afford to invest into such projects. A company staking their entire business plan on it however..I don't see it ending well.
On April 24 2012 12:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: It's James Cameron, who else would it be?
A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water.
Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.
"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."
Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) Tuesday (April 24) during a news conference at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
This is going to be a huge failure. If they wanted to sell water it would be cheaper to build a desalination plant. I also am very skeptical that the cost of launching craft out of orbit as well as landing on a NEA with telemetry (highly risky) is going to be less than any potential earnings. It would be cheaper to buy out mining companies. I hope they'll achieve their goals, but I just don't see us being there yet in terms of lack of resources on our planet to warrant such expenditures.
We'll go to space resources when the prices of commodities blows up in I don't know...200 years?
nonono , there will be a space economy for all of these commodities to be sold to. atm it costs so prohibitively much to get anything into space that a company that could mine it for much cheaper on an asteroid and send it to things like ISS or eventualy things like moonbases (helium3 is pretty kewl) and beyond for a much cheaper price. comets in particular are important because they have all that you need to make rocket fuel.. which is of vast importance. If you think mining a comet is impossible realize we've already slammed a satelite onto the surface and there are eventual plans by nasa (hopefully not stopped) to land an unmanned spacecraft in the future on a comet as it passes.
Of course there will be entities to sell your commodities to, that isn't the point. The point is that the returns on their investments will be negative. First off, it isn't cheaper to go however many hundreds of thousands of miles into space, with a highly explosive rocket fuel as well as a very large and cumbersome mining equipment with the highly risky process of using telemetry to land and operate your equipment than to mine here on Earth, or build a desalination plant to sell water.
Let's not even get into the technical aspects of say...fixing an unmanned mining rig / equipment with purely telemetry. I can't imagine how immense a task that is, which probably requires a lot of money and skills that simply do not exist yet. Yes, I know we have crashed satellites on a comet before, but thats a farcry from landing on one. It takes a lot more calculation to land on something than merely crashing, especially with a mining rig.
I just don't see the payoff here. There are plenty of resources on Earth to be gotten much cheaper than in space. The only profitable business venture for space right now is tourism. That'll be enough to start funneling funds back into R&D projects for future industries and ventures. A company with a healthy profit-margin can afford to invest into such projects. A company staking their entire business plan on it however..I don't see it ending well.
im fairly certain this company is ultra long term and isn't even planning on doing anything of this scope for quite a few years.. which in the meantime world problems are coming crashing down on us that will lead to more reason to get resources from space. You have to also take into account that getting into space / traveling around space will become progressively cheaper as time goes on.
I get so frustrated with how under-appreciated NASA is. Work like theirs isn't going to give immediate rewards to us. We aren't going to fly to the moon and then suddenly gain something from it. But it is progress and the technological advancement of our civilization and it is extremely important to our future.
When you imagine the future, what do you think of? Space travel? Colonization across the solar system perhaps? And how do you think we get there? Do you think we just sit on Earth and wait for it to magically pop up. That somehow the passage of time naturally opens up technology to us? That we go over to our engineering bay and click our "space travel" upgrade and wait for it to finish? That's not how the world works. We have to put in a lot of time, money and effort to develop this technology one step at a time. The things that NASA does are the stepping stones upon which we will reach this future.
Each of these steps aren't always going to give us something useful. When we first send a person to another planet, we probably aren't going to get anything of immediate value out of it. It is an investment, though. There's a lot between our current technology and future useful technology, we can't simply skip over the middle. This is why private companies are not a replacement for NASA. It would have been impossible for any private company in 1958 to have done what NASA did. The investment is just too huge and there is too much uncertainty with when you will be rewarded. Through the beauty of our collective taxes and our will to forge a bright future, we are able to fund NASA and we were able to create this absolutely amazing technology that we now have 53 years later.
And now that we have done the research, we can allow private companies to start actually making use of the technology NASA has pioneered. But this does NOT at all mean that NASA is done. This just means it is time for the next step. NASA is still needed to research things that are not remotely viable for private companies to research. We have not reached the pinnacle of space travel or something, we don't just call it quits at this point on our development.
I think that this attitude seems to be getting more common lately, though, and it saddens me. It's like we're giving up on the future. We are no longer dreaming up the amazing things we could be doing, but instead wanting to remain stagnate in our current state of technology. Private companies are the answer for perfecting our already understood technology and making it accessible, but they aren't going to get us much further than that. And it has s still yet to be shown whether these private companies will really be able to come anywhere close to making a profit on this and being able to continually fund themselves independently.
Scientific research is the key to our future and always has been. But scientific research is not going to be profitable and we need organizations out there like NASA to do it. Please, just really think for a moment on what you imagine 200 years in the future being like, and then think how do we get there? By defunding or getting rid of NASA? Unlikely.
(Also, NASA's research in their field of aeronautics has proven to give many side benefits. During their research, they find lots of practical uses of the what they're doing and they give out a to the public a report annually on these things and they transfer them to the commercial market so we can all make use of them. You can look up NASA spinoff if you're interested in looking through some of them. But you would be amazed with just how much of this NASA technology we use in every day life. To name a few things: NASA is responsible for the development of kidney dialysis machines, CAT scans, LED, memory foam, portable cordless vacuums, water filters, shoe insoles, and so many more things. The amount of benefit society has gotten from NASA on health research and technology alone should be enough to warrant their continued existence.
They are truly one of the US's (/World's) greatest assets, and it would be insane to get rid of them.)
Surveying asteroids is a fine thing to do currently. But mining them is going to be a huge thing for the technology we now have.
We will be running out of stuff like copper and platinum. And some metals like iridium are very rare. Gold always has a high cost as well. But there is only one price for gold, copper and platinum. Costs of these resources need to go up and costs of mining them have to go down until mining them from space is just as cheap as mining them anywhere else.
There will be a curiosity market for these metals. I already see Rolex selling some watch at 20x the normal cost that is made entirely from metals harvested off an asteroid. But for a long time, that will be it.
As for NASA, all spin-off technologies can be developed cheaper without launching people into space. And what NASA is doing now is building the same old rockets to launch people into space with very little scientific data as a return. They pulled out of the latest Mars drone which ESA is now working alone on. Where is the Webb space telescope? Also, the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled. Kepler is doing so wel. We need more of that stuff.
Deorbit ISS asap if you ask me or sell it to Cameron. Let's see if anyone in the private sector wants to buy it. If not it's not worth anything.
Also let NASA and ESA work together on some new method to launch stuff real cheap into space. So not using chemical rockets. We have that technology down and the private sector is working on that.
On April 24 2012 19:10 Miyoshino wrote: Surveying asteroids is a fine thing to do currently. But mining them is going to be a huge thing for the technology we now have.
We will be running out of stuff like copper and platinum. And some metals like iridium are very rare. Gold always has a high cost as well. But there is only one price for gold, copper and platinum. Costs of these resources need to go up and costs of mining them have to go down until mining them from space is just as cheap as mining them anywhere else.
There will be a curiosity market for these metals. I already see Rolex selling some watch at 20x the normal cost that is made entirely from metals harvested off an asteroid. But for a long time, that will be it.
As for NASA, all spin-off technologies can be developed cheaper without launching people into space. And what NASA is doing now is building the same old rockets to launch people into space with very little scientific data as a return. They pulled out of the latest Mars drone which ESA is now working alone on. Where is the Webb space telescope? Also, the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled. Kepler is doing so wel. We need more of that stuff.
Deorbit ISS asap if you ask me or sell it to Cameron. Let's see if anyone in the private sector wants to buy it. If not it's not worth anything.
Also let NASA and ESA work together on some new method to launch stuff real cheap into space. So not using chemical rockets. We have that technology down and the private sector is working on that.
rofl, sell the ISS are you serious? So much research goes on there i would do your research before you say we need to drop the ISS . Plus nasa isnt the only one putting money into the project.. its called the international space station for a reason.
This project aligns well with our national space policies and goals," NASA spokesman David S. Weaver said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday, adding that as the space agency moves toward sending humans to an asteroid for the first time, "we will certainly look to take advantage of private-sector resources and data.
The company says it is cash-flow positive, but declined to go into much detail as to where the money is coming from other than saying it does currently have a contract with NASA. They went on to vaguely said the company already has several relationships with other companies and several customers already.
We were operating under the name of Arkyd Astronautics for the last two years quite honestly because it was not as obvious what we were up to," Anderson told Space News. "If we had been called 'Planetary Resources,' it would have been obvious to people.
The asteroid mining is a good move by the space industry. I love it because it's like they're sticking it to their governments who aren't giving them the funding they need. Imagine in fity years this actually taking off and spear heading a human space travel revolution.
I am not the only one that thinks the ISS is a white elephant. Also, a lot of research doesn't go on in there. They don't have equipment to do the research that scientists are actually interested in. So they keep growing plants, crystallizing some fluids, observe how a flame responds under zero gravity. They may even have taken up some bacteria cultures to see how the genes change as the bacteria evolves to adapt to zero gravity. But no scientific discoveries have been made. The main subject of research is still man in zero gravity.
Don't forget how ridiculously expensive the ISS is and how much time they spend sleeping doing maintanence, training their bodies to prevent muscle and bone loss. Then they also need to do this regular media thing because that's also very important since so much money is spend.
If it is so useful, sell it to the private sector. They want to do space tourism. If they need to know how the human body responds, let them send up their scientisits and do that research. Why spend tax payer money on things we already know and researching how the body of the future billionaire space tourists will respond in zero gravity?
Now they went to the moon for political reasons, not scientific ones. That is readily admitted so no need to argue about that. But the space shuttle was supposed to do science. It was an utter absurdly huge waste of resources. Then we now have the ISS and now everyone admits what a failure the space shuttle was. Can we now also realize the ISS is a waste of money and move away for human space flight? How much information does one need to come to the right conclusion? How many times does one need to make the same mistake when each mistake costs tens of billions?
On April 24 2012 15:22 Wegandi wrote: Of course there will be entities to sell your commodities to, that isn't the point. The point is that the returns on their investments will be negative. First off, it isn't cheaper to go however many hundreds of thousands of miles into space, with a highly explosive rocket fuel as well as a very large and cumbersome mining equipment with the highly risky process of using telemetry to land and operate your equipment than to mine here on Earth, or build a desalination plant to sell water.
I think you're missing the point here with the desalinization plant. The problem with a desalinization plant is that the water would still be on Earth. They're talking about mining stuff like water and other volatiles for use in space.
The main cost to getting water or fuel or such up to the ISS or other places in space, is the cost of getting it up from the surface. Getting water up to the ISS costs something like $20k/liter. Whereas if you can get it from somewhere else in space, you can bypass the huge cost of getting something up into orbit. Moving material from a near-Earth asteroid to Earth orbit takes much less energy than boosting it up from the surface would. Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system (Really, if you do the math, it takes as much energy to get from Earth surface to low Earth orbit, as it would to go from Earth orbit to Saturn orbit (And even then, disregarding inefficiencies, like air resistance and gravity, and having to use high-thrust engines, which make getting off of Earth even more difficult in practice)). And if you can make fuel in space from raw materials and solar power, you can keep on mining it and moving it indefinitely. (Until something breaks, I suppose)
Also, as far as rarer materials go, asteroids have an advantage. Larger bodies, big enough to once be molten for some time, and with significant gravity, had their heavier elements sink down towards the core, while lighter elements ended up closer to the surface. For something like an asteroid that didn't even have enough mass to be spherical, that wouldn't have happened. Elements which are rarer on planets because they mostly sunk down towards the core, would be more abundant in accessible locations at an asteroid's surface.
The company and the space agency are “targeting” Monday for the launch, but more delays could crop up if the final data check turns up problems. “We’re going to check and double-check and triple-check before launch day,” said Kirstin Brost Grantham, a spokeswoman for SpaceX.
If all goes well, the flight will deliver 1,100 pounds of food, water and other cargo to the 16-nation outpost, a capability the United States gave up when it retired the space shuttle last year. (Cargo vehicles built by Russia, Europe and Japan now supply the six-person crew.) Even more crucially, a successful docking would mark a milestone for commercial space companies.
NASA and SpaceX officials are emphasizing the excitement of the mission while tamping down expectations, noting just how difficult it will be to dock a new spacecraft to the space station. Many systems on the unmanned Dragon capsule, including its solar panels and the hardware and software needed to dock with the station, are being flown for the first time.
“This is a really tough flight,” William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA’s top official for human spaceflight, said during a recent news briefing. “What we’re asking them to do is amazing.”
i think this thread title is a little silly, given that the two entities dont seem to have an adverserial relationship in the slightest.
the reality is that government and markets have a symbiotic relationship. while some privatization of space travel is bound to occur, its always going to lag a few decades behind government programs like NASA. the current lack of interest or support for NASA will last until, and only until, the moment some other nation threatens to bring arms into space. at that point, investment in NASA as well as military space programs will skyrocket (lolz), with the private sector continuing to cannibalize r&d and make money around the edges, like it always does.
but at no point would the private sector ever become a leader in space travel/operations. centers of power in the US, private and public sector alike, are by no means collectively stupid enough to abandon the command half of their highly efficient capitalist/command hybrid economy. their lead on China is razor thin as it is.
EPT
