New Google Company Possibly Being Made to Mine Asteroids

[Chirios]

It's being backed by James Cameron as well which is just awesome.

[Darth Tanner]

Seeing as private enterprise is still trying to get out of Earth orbit I don't think we'll be seeing the Nostromo turning up carrying moon cheese any times soon.

Why is it awesome that Cameron is backing it? Unless their making a film about asteroid mining instead?

[Skgoa]

I could see several reasons:

- He is a visonary. Just like the other big names involved in this, he is one of those people who can dream big and he knows how to actually make it happen.
- He has shown quite an interest in - and understanding of - space science.
- He knows tech people and the media, that could come in handy.
- Could be crucial to early monetization by making a feature length documentary about the project.

[daredevin]

..or he just wanted a change, you know far different than the usual.

[Steel]

I could see several reasons:

- He is a visonary. Just like the other big names involved in this, he is one of those people who can dream big and he knows how to actually make it happen.
- He has shown quite an interest in - and understanding of - space science.
- He knows tech people and the media, that could come in handy.
- Could be crucial to early monetization by making a feature length documentary about the project.

Similar to the way he did with his Titanic research work, he already has with Avatar.

[Rabid]

I could see several reasons:

- He is a visonary. Just like the other big names involved in this, he is one of those people who can dream big and he knows how to actually make it happen.
- He has shown quite an interest in - and understanding of - space science.
- He knows tech people and the media, that could come in handy.
- Could be crucial to early monetization by making a feature length documentary about the project.

Similar to the way he did with his Titanic research work, he already has with Avatar.

The question being : will there be giant blue people in the Asteroid Belt ? :v

[Skgoa]

And as I learned yesterday, he served on a NASA exploration comittee.

[Sky Captain]

Could it be something about space based solar power? Mining near Earth asteorids to manufacture solar power sattelites in space may provide a workaround to high costs of launching everything from Earth since only the mining/manufacturing hardware and some sort of propulsion system to get it to asteorids would have to be launched from Earth.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Would you like to know more?

An audacious new private space exploration company backed by billionaire investors and filmmaker-turned-explorer James Cameron will unveil its master plan "to help ensure humanity's prosperity" on Tuesday, April 24.

While details of the company, called Planetary Resources, Inc., and its mission are still under wraps, officials with the enterprise did state that "the company will overlay two critical sectors — space exploration and natural resources — to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP," according to media alert sent to reporters April 18.

On April 24, Planetary Resources officials will announce details of their space exploration plans in a press conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., according to the alert. The announcement will be held in the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, which is named after billionaire software developer Charles Simonyi, a Planetary Resources investor.

"This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources,'" company officials said in the statement.

Planetary Resources was co-founded by two veteran commercial space pioneers: Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson.

Diamandis is chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, which offers prizes for technological feats, as well as a co-founder of Zero-G Corporation, which offers commercial flights to experience weightlessness aboard a modified Boeing 727-200 jet. Anderson, meanwhile, is the chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, the only company ever to broker multimillion-dollar flights for private citizens to the International Space Station. Simonyi, for example, flew to the space station twice with Space Adventures, most recently in 2009 on a trip that cost a reported $35 million.

Other big investment icons and spaceflight industry veterans form the core of Planetary Resources' team, according to the media alert.

The company named "Titanic" filmmaker James Cameron and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its groupof investors and advisors. Others on board include Simonyi, Google board of directors founding member K. Ram Shriram and Ross Perot, Jr., who is chairman of Hillwood and the Perot Group.

Former NASA astronaut Tom Jones, a planetary scientist, will serve as an advisor for Planetary Resources. Former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki, who worked on the successful Phoenix lander, serves as the company's president and chief engineer.

When Planetary Resources makes its big reveal next week, it will be the second billionaire-backed private space company to be announced within the last six months.

In December, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen unveiled his new company Stratolaunch Systems, which plans to build the world's largest airplane and use it as an air-based launch pad to send people into orbit.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/ ... z1skTTDMlu

About freaking time, I say. If this should be in N&P, would mods please move it?

[Chirios]

Posted something about this a couple of spots down, but anyway, this is the feasibility study commissioned for this project. It looks like the plan is to identify a 7m in diameter C-type asteroid, move it into high lunar orbit; and then mine the crap out of it. According to the study, it would need to be a 500 ton C-type with a Delta-V of <200m/s.

[Skgoa]

What materials are we looking at? 500 tons at a diameter of only 7m seems pretty dense.

[Skgoa]

ghetto edit: sorry, that was a geometry fail. -_-

[D.Turtle]

Merged the new topic by CaptainChewbacca with this previous thread and moved it to N&P.

[MKSheppard]

I saw a comment that it was ironic that Cameron might well end up being one of the founders of an actual factual Weyland-Yutani.

[Winston Blake]

Event will also be streamed online.

Maybe I'm just stupid or something, but I can't find where this presentation is supposed to be streamed. Can anyone find the URL?

[Pelranius]

This should be interesting. Personally, I think that this technology might be more applicable to deep space construction and on site spaceship assembly.

Wonder how unloading so much metals from asteroids would depress the market for said metals?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Bringing mundane materials from orbit to earth isn't practical, as it destroys their most valuable quality; They're already in space.

Making metals in orbit lets you USE them in orbit.

[Chirios]

Bringing mundane materials from orbit to earth isn't practical, as it destroys their most valuable quality; They're already in space.

Making metals in orbit lets you USE them in orbit.

From what I can tell, it's going to be a mixture of both. The idea is to sell water and other useful stuff to the ISS and for use in space; then I think they'll sell rare earth minerals to Earth.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Well yes, rare earths will probably head down to terra firma, but things like iron and nickel will likely stay in orbit.

[Steel]

I'm skeptical about how good the more abundant space metals are going to be. what good is a mixture of 10% nickel and iron? In order to purify metals on earth the most common method is to melt them and use gravity to have the different density metals float apart, which isn't remotely practical up there. Is a bunch of shitty iron worth anything for construction?

[Imperial528]

You could use a centrifuge-like device to sort it via density. You could even integrate that into a centrifugal gravity habitat for the mine operators.

[Grumman]

You could use a centrifuge-like device to sort it via density. You could even integrate that into a centrifugal gravity habitat for the mine operators.

Since you'd presumably want the mining centrifuge to be small and fast while the workers' centrifuge would be big and slow, I wonder if you could just use the reaction force of one to power the other - start up the motor to spin the smelter centrifuge clockwise, and let the motor's housing naturally start spinning the rest of the station counter-clockwise.

[Imperial528]

What I was thinking is that since the habitation level will be around 1 g, you can simply utilize the same methods used on Earth on a second ring on the side of the habitation ring to house the filtering equipment, or on a level below the habitation one. That would also be a useful method, though.

[Chirios]

We'll find out more tomorrow which should be cool. Hopefully someone will put the stream up on youtube so us non-Americans can watch.

[Grumman]

What I was thinking is that since the habitation level will be around 1 g, you can simply utilize the same methods used on Earth on a second ring on the side of the habitation ring to house the filtering equipment, or on a level below the habitation one. That would also be a useful method, though.

The reason I suggested it is because you're talking about a lot of mass. That 7 metre asteroid weighs as much as the entire International Space Station, so it's going to have a big effect on the inertia of the mining station as a whole. You probably don't want the station's centre of rotation to vary too much between being empty and being full.