New Google Company Possibly Being Made to Mine Asteroids

[Rabid]

Use ballasts of water you can fill and empty as you wish to act as counter-weights. When the smelt is not in use, share the water in reservoirs distributed around the habitat to avoid the center-of-gravity being off-axe.

[Chirios]

I suppose the problem with this company is that there are a lot of "ifs". If NASA's asteroid project works out and if they can successfully move an asteroid into high lunar orbit and if they can find a way of successfully mining the asteroid then it will be a profitable venture. If not, then it will be a cool, if unsuccessful, attempt by billionaires to make our lives ever so slightly more awesome.

That said we're getting more info tomorrow, so the serious speculation should wait until then imo.

[Zinegata]

Cool. I wonder if they'll do the proposed Deimos water mining project so that we'll essentially have an unlimited supply of water / rocket fuel in orbit as the first stage.

[Chirios]

New Details

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it

Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space!

Last week, the company issued a somewhat cryptic announcement saying they “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. I predicted this meant they wanted to mine asteroids, and yes, I will toot my own horn: I was right. They’re holding a press conference Tuesday morning to officially announce they’re going asteroid hunting.

The company had a pretty fierce amount of credibility right off the bat, with several ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, and planetary scientists involved, as well as the backing of not one but several billionaires, including a few from Google… not to mention James Cameron. The co-founders of Planetary Resources are Peter Diamandis — he created the highly-successful X-Prize Foundation, to give cash awards to incremental accomplishments that will help achieve technological breakthroughs, including those for space travel — and Eric Anderson, X-Prize board member and Chairman of the Board of the Space Spaceflight Federation.

These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around.

So what’s the deal?


Step 1

I spoke with Planetary Resources President and Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki on the phone Monday. He has an excellent pedigree: Lewicki was Flight Director for the NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions, and also Mission Manager for the Mars Phoenix lander surface operations. So when he says he’s confident the company can and will succeed, I’m willing to listen.

“This is an attempt to make a permanent foothold in space,” he said. “We’re going to enable this piece of human exploration and the settlement of space, and develop the resources that are out there.”

The plan structure is reminiscent of that of Apollo: have a big goal in mind, but make sure the steps along the way are practical.

The key point is that their plan is not to simply mine precious metals and make millions or billions of dollars– though that’s a long-range goal. If that were the only goal, it would cost too much, be too difficult, and probably not be attainable.

Instead, they’ll make a series of calculated smaller missions that will grow in size and scope. The first is to make a series of small space telescopes to observe and characterize asteroids. Lewicki said the first of these is the Arkyd 101, a 22 cm (9″) telescope in low-Earth orbit that will be aboard a tiny spacecraft just 40 x 40 cm (16″) in size. It can hitch a ride with other satellites being placed in orbit, sharing launch costs and saving money (an idea that will come up again and again in their plans). This telescope will be used both to look for and observe known Near-Earth asteroids, and can also be pointed down to Earth for remote sensing operations.

I’ll note Lewicki said they expect to launch the first of these telescopes by the end of next year, 2013. They’re already building them (what’s referred to as “cutting metal”). They could launch on already-existing rockets — an Atlas or Delta, for example, Europe’s Ariane, India’s GSLV, or Space X’s Falcon 9.

After that, once they’re flight-tested, more of these small spacecraft can be launched equipped with rocket motors. If they hitch a ride with a satellite destined for a 40,000 km (24,000 mile) geosynchronous orbit, the motor can be used to take the telescope — now a space probe — out of Earth orbit and set on course for a pre-determined asteroid destination. Technical bit: orbital velocity at geosync is about 3 km/sec, so only about an additional 1 km/sec is needed to send a probe away from Earth, easily within the capability of a small motor attached to a light-weight probe.

Many asteroids pass close to the Earth with a low enough velocity that one of these probes could reach them. Heck, some are easier to reach in that sense than the Moon! Any asteroid-directed probe can be equipped with sensors to make detailed observations, including composition. It could even be designed to land on the asteroid and return samples back to Earth, or leave when the observations are complete and head off to observe more asteroids up close and personal.

Step 2

Once a suitable asteroid is found, the idea is not to mine it right away for precious metals to return to Earth, Lewicki told me, but instead to tap it for volatiles — materials with low boiling points such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, which also happen to be critical supplies for use in space.

The idea behind this is to gather these materials up and create in situ space supply depots. Water is very heavy and incompressible, so it’s very difficult to launch from Earth into space (Lewicki quoted a current price of roughly $20,000 per liter to get water into space). But water should be abundant on some asteroids, locked up in minerals or even as ice, and in theory it shouldn’t be difficult to collect it and create a depot. Future astronauts can then use these supplies to enable longer stays in space — the depots could be put in Earthbound trajectories for astronauts, or could be placed in strategic orbits for future crewed missions to asteroids. Lewicki didn’t say specifically, but these supplies could be sold to NASA — Planetary Resources would make quite a bit money while saving NASA quite a bit. Win-win.

The details of exactly how they’ll collect these resources and store them may be revealed in the press conference Tuesday. If I can, I’ll ask.

Step 3

The last step is to actually get the precious minerals from the asteroids and bring them to Earth. The exact setup for this isn’t clear at this time — again, the press conference should reveal that — but for the moment it may not really need to be. There are several options. One way would be to launch equipment to a distant asteroid already explored previously by a souped-up Arkyd. Another might be to use the small spacecraft to bring a smallish asteroid near the Earth — a study of this was just released, in fact [Note: two of the authors on that study were from Planetary Resources, including Lewicki]. A rock could be brought into an orbit around the Moon (that’s easiest to do in terms of fuel) where it could then be mined. Or it could be both: a small operation could start work while the asteroid is being towed to Earth, getting a few years head start.

Step 4: Profit???

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.”

On further reflection, I realized this made sense. Not every wealthy investor pumps money into a project in order to make more… at least right away. Elon Musk, for example, has spent hundreds of millions of his own fortune on his company Space X. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is doing likewise for his own space company, Blue Origin. Examples abound. And it’ll be years before either turns a respectable profit, but that’s not what motivates Musk and Bezos to do this. They want to explore space.

The vision of Planetary Resources is in their name: they want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space. And it’s not just physical resources with which they’re concerned. Their missions will support not just mining asteroids for volatiles and metals, but also to extend our understanding of asteroids and hopefully increase our ability to deflect one should it be headed our way.

This again was a topic I discussed with Lewicki specifically. He agreed with my proposition that all three topics — science, deflection, and resource use — are tied together. After all, we need to understand asteroids scientifically if we want to use them or prevent them from hitting us. We can use them for depots to establish better exploration of them, and sometime in the future we may need to deflect one to prevent all this from being a moot point anyway.

My opinion on all this

The beauty of being me (among other things) is that I don’t always have to be objective. So I’ll say this: I love this idea. Love it.

Mind you, that’s different than saying I think they can do it. But, in theory at least, I think they can. Their step-wise plan makes sense to me, and they don’t need huge rockets and huge money to get things started. By the time operations ramp up to something truly ambitious they should already have in place the pieces necessary for it, including the track record. In other words, by the time they’re ready to mine an asteroid, they’ll have in place all the infrastructure needed to actually do it. I still want to see some engineering plans and a timeline, but in general what I’ve heard sounds good.
My biggest initial skepticism would be the investors — with no hope of profit for years, would they really stick with it?

But look at the investors: Film maker James Cameron. Google executives Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, and Google investor K. Ram Shriram. Software pioneer Charles Simonyi. Ross Perot, Jr. These are all billionaires, some of them adventurers, and all of them have proven to have patience in developing new ventures. I don’t think they’ll turn tail and run at the first setback.

Lewicki said much the same thing. “I was a harsh skeptic at first, but [when the company founders Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson] approached me we talked about a plan on how to create a company and pursue this.” Soon after, he came to the conclusion this was a logical plan and the group was capable of doing it. In the press release, he said, “Not only is our mission to expand the world’s resource base, but we want to expand people’s access to, and understanding of, our planet and solar system by developing capable and cost-efficient systems.”

That sounds like a great idea to me. And I am strongly of the opinion that private industry is the way to make that happen. The Saturn V was incredible, but not terribly cost effective; that wasn’t its point. And when NASA tried to make a cost-effective machine, they came up with the Space Shuttle, which was terribly expensive, inefficient, and — let’s face it — dangerous. The government is good for a lot of things, but political machinations can really impede innovation when it comes to making things easier and less costly. As many people involved with NASA used to joke: “Faster, better, cheaper: pick two.”

I still strongly support NASA, of course; don’t get me wrong. It should still do what it does best: the things private industry can’t, like breaking new ground. That’s what NASA has been doing in space for 50 years, and now that paved way is being taken up by private companies. I think it’s just that combination of government support and private innovation that will get us to the stars. And for now, just for now, you know what?

Getting to the asteroids will do just fine.

[Grumman]

My opinion on all this

The beauty of being me (among other things) is that I don’t always have to be objective. So I’ll say this: I love this idea. Love it.

Mind you, that’s different than saying I think they can do it.

This sums up my view. I'm not convinced that it's viable, but I'll be happy if they prove me wrong.

[Zinegata]

I love the plan too, particularly as it takes into consideration the need to develop water depots in SPACE by mining ice asteroids.

As an alternative to mining asteroids however (since it may take a long time to find one with the sort of precious metals needed to turn a profit), why not also start selling the water / fuel to the ISS or other orbital satellites?

Also, has the ISS done some experiments on possible materials that can only be produced in Zero-G? Phil Eklund proposed in High Frontier (the "hard" scifi game, not the one with O'Neill Colonies) that the first space to Earth imports may be supertensile materials that can only be produced in Zero G. Any asteroid mining may thus not need to look for especially valuable metals - just the sort needed for the ISS to make these new materials more cheaply than sending stuff up the orbit to be assembled before getting sent back down again.

[PeZook]

I suppose the problem with this company is that there are a lot of "ifs". If NASA's asteroid project works out and if they can successfully move an asteroid into high lunar orbit and if they can find a way of successfully mining the asteroid then it will be a profitable venture. If not, then it will be a cool, if unsuccessful, attempt by billionaires to make our lives ever so slightly more awesome.

Looks like win-win to me

[Guardsman Bass]

Same here. If they succeed, then we'll have some kind of asteroid mining business (which would be awesome). If they fail, then at least they'll have tried, and there will be some additional knowledge about the difficulties involved in trying to mine asteroids commercially.

[Chirios]

Link to where they are streaming the interview later. 10:30 PST and 10:00 PM Eastern

My worry though is that if it doesn't work then nobody else will try it. You either need governments to do it or you need billionaire space geeks; and the billionaire space geeks won't agree to do it forever without some expectation of profit.

[Chirios]

My apologies ladies and gents, it was 10:30 AM PST, not PM.

Anyhoo, here is a summary of what they're planning.

[HMS Conqueror]

Involvement of individual billionaires does not lend a project like this credibility. Rather it indicates that it is a hobby for rich old men. If a faceless corporation like Goldman Sachs put its financial integrity on the line for this, I might be interested. The reason they aren't and won't is that the technical problems are severe, making just about any conceivable use uneconomical. Roughly the problems are these:

1. How do you put the equipment in orbit for a low enough price? The equipment here probably == rockets to return the asteroid to earth; actually mining and refining in space just adds another layer of problems.

2. How do you return the material to earth? The current cost of earth-LEO dV is in the range of the weight of whatever you are moving's price in silver to its price in gold. The alternative to decelerating it all the way with rockets is atmospheric braking, but thermal ablation then destroys most of what you're trying to mine. You also have the problem of where to land it.

3. Given that we're looking at something only worthwhile for an asteroid mainly made of platinum or something, how much is it actually going to yield if you return it to earth? Gold may be expensive right now, but if you find a way to produce vast amounts of it then the price is likely to crash, as the Spanish discovered in the 16th and 17th centuries.

So I think this is rich old men indulging a hobby on a scale proportionate to their means. The real breakthrough in space will be making launch cost drops, and that will probably be through boring manufacturing and chemicals improvements for solid propellants, and take a long time. Once the launch costs are low enough, things like this may become viable.

[Chirios]

Involvement of individual billionaires does not lend a project like this credibility. Rather it indicates that it is a hobby for rich old men. If a faceless corporation like Goldman Sachs put its financial integrity on the line for this, I might be interested. The reason they aren't and won't is that the technical problems are severe, making just about any conceivable use uneconomical. Roughly the problems are these:

1. How do you put the equipment in orbit for a low enough price? The equipment here probably == rockets to return the asteroid to earth; actually mining and refining in space just adds another layer of problems.

From what I can tell, the main mission in the near-term is to mine water not metal, which affects the rest of your questions

The real breakthrough in space will be making launch cost drop

Which is what they are trying to do, by mining water and producing hydrogen fuel.

[HMS Conqueror]

Space water isn't worth anything. If the point is to prove that private mining of asteroids is economically viable, selling water to the ISS achieves nothing, because the ISS is itself neither economically viable nor privately operated.

Planetary Resources becomes just another NASA contractor.

[Chirios]

Space water isn't worth anything.

It is in space, for the ISS and to convert to fuel. The idea is that you use solar power to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, you keep the hydrogen and the oxygen separated in space, then you sell said fuel to people who want to use reusable launch vehicles. It costs around 20000 to get water for the ISS into space, so NASA will be happy if they reduce ISS costs.

If the point is to prove that private mining of asteroids is economically viable, selling water to the ISS achieves nothing, because the ISS is itself neither economically viable nor privately operated.

Planetary Resources becomes just another NASA contractor.

They openly state that their plan is to sell to the ISS, so, meh imo.

[HMS Conqueror]

What is the market for this fuel? Acceptable answers are 'no one' and 'NASA'.

It's nice that this company is much cooler and more innovative than other NASA contractors, but the fine print falls rather short of adding trillions to GDP and ending resource scarcity forever.

[Chirios]

What is the market for this fuel? Acceptable answers are 'no one' and 'NASA'.

atm you're right. But if they produce the fuel then reusable launch vehicles become a lot more viable, at which point you can sell to satellite contractors, and yes, government space agencies. But not just NASA. The ESA would buy this, as would the Indian, Chinese, Russian and Japanese space agencies.

I'm not saying that it's not got challenges, I just think the challenges are more surmountable than you're suggesting, especially now that we've actually seen their business plan.

[HMS Conqueror]

I don't understand what this has to do with reusable launch vehicles, but maybe I missed something. Reusable vehicles use atmospheric breaking to return to earth, so what do they want this fuel for?

Ok so yes you can farm tax rupees as well as tax dollars. That still is missing the point.

EDIT: Didn't see the second bit. The plan is essentially to say "we're not going to do that cool stuff we talked about because it's too hard, but we'll do this instead and hopefully by the time we get that worked out the asteroid mining goal will be more viable".

Which is a pragmatic way to do things, but don't get carried away with the marketing blurb. They are not actually going to add trillions to GDP or mine asteroids for materials to use on earth in the forseeable future. Nor are they going to show that space has huge potential for market-viable private use.

[TimothyC]

What is the market for this fuel? Acceptable answers are 'no one' and 'NASA'.

It's nice that this company is much cooler and more innovative than other NASA contractors, but the fine print falls rather short of adding trillions to GDP and ending resource scarcity forever.

The market is anyone going into space. Every kilo of fuel you don't have to lift out of the Earth's gravity well is another kilo of payload. As for metals, other than the rarest materials, It is my impression that Planetary Resources would prefer to use them in space.

[Chirios]

I don't understand what this has to do with reusable launch vehicles, but maybe I missed something. Reusable vehicles use atmospheric breaking to return to earth, so what do they want this fuel for?

I may have my terminology wrong, but don't people have to send RLV's into space whenever they want to refuel satellites and crap like that to keep them in orbit? If this plan works, they'd only need to carry as much fuel as it takes to get into space, restock from Google's space depot, refuel the satellite/space station or whatever, then go back down to Earth.

Ok so yes you can farm tax rupees as well as tax dollars. That still is missing the point.

EDIT: Didn't see the second bit. The plan is essentially to say "we're not going to do that cool stuff we talked about because it's too hard, but we'll do this instead and hopefully by the time we get that worked out the asteroid mining goal will be more viable".

Which is a pragmatic way to do things, but don't get carried away with the marketing blurb. They are not actually going to add trillions to GDP or mine asteroids for materials to use on earth in the forseeable future. Nor are they going to show that space has huge potential for market-viable private use.

I wasn't planning on. Still cool though.

[MKSheppard]

So from Engadget:

First up is the Arkyd 100 Series, a low earth orbit telescope -- capable of seeing up to 90 million miles away in ideal lighting conditions -- to find asteroids worth prospecting. It's also going to be made available as a private space telescope, initially costing around $3-5 million with the price dropping accordingly should customers proliferate enough to reduce production costs.

So how long until museums have their own private space telescope?

[Zinegata]

What is the market for this fuel? Acceptable answers are 'no one' and 'NASA'.

It's nice that this company is much cooler and more innovative than other NASA contractors, but the fine print falls rather short of adding trillions to GDP and ending resource scarcity forever.

Mining asteroids was never really going to end resource scarcity, because it's simply cheaper to reopen depleted mines on Earth that mine them in space.

But having asteroid mining does mean the possibility that you can start manufacturing stuff in space, rather than having to do everything on Earth and then sending it up at a cost of $20,000 per kilo. That means, for instance, that you can now actually have materials to run a lot of experiments for material science purposes. Which in turn could lead to the development of microgravity products which can only be produced in space and then sent to Earth for profit.

[Guardsman Bass]

I don't understand what this has to do with reusable launch vehicles, but maybe I missed something. Reusable vehicles use atmospheric breaking to return to earth, so what do they want this fuel for?

If you have fuel supplies being made and stored in orbit, then you can re-fuel satellites in deteriorating orbits, and make re-entry a lot easier on the re-entering craft. It would be much easier on re-entering craft to greatly slow down before going into the atmosphere (thus reducing the need for a heat shield), but the costs of launching the fuel to do that are prohibitive.

[Grumman]

2. How do you return the material to earth? The current cost of earth-LEO dV is in the range of the weight of whatever you are moving's price in silver to its price in gold. The alternative to decelerating it all the way with rockets is atmospheric braking, but thermal ablation then destroys most of what you're trying to mine. You also have the problem of where to land it.

Wouldn't that be heavily dependant on how fragile your cargo is? If your cargo is just a big block of rare metal atoms, couldn't the "Rods from God" approach work?

[Zinegata]

2. How do you return the material to earth? The current cost of earth-LEO dV is in the range of the weight of whatever you are moving's price in silver to its price in gold. The alternative to decelerating it all the way with rockets is atmospheric braking, but thermal ablation then destroys most of what you're trying to mine. You also have the problem of where to land it.

Wouldn't that be heavily dependant on how fragile your cargo is? If your cargo is just a big block of rare metal atoms, couldn't the "Rods from God" approach work?

Maybe we can aim to make a Space Elevator?

[Chirios]

I don't understand what this has to do with reusable launch vehicles, but maybe I missed something. Reusable vehicles use atmospheric breaking to return to earth, so what do they want this fuel for?

If you have fuel supplies being made and stored in orbit, then you can re-fuel satellites in deteriorating orbits, and make re-entry a lot easier on the re-entering craft. It would be much easier on re-entering craft to greatly slow down before going into the atmosphere (thus reducing the need for a heat shield), but the costs of launching the fuel to do that are prohibitive.

Thought so.

Maybe we can aim to make a Space Elevator?

Maybe in the future. For now, send up your HLV, refuel, pick up the remains of the asteroid once all the water has been mined and the carbonaceous slag removed, drop back down to Earth in a much more controlled landing, break it down in Earth, profit.