Planetary Resources; grab your pickaxe and look to the sky!

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Oh man oh god oh man oh god OH MAN! It is time for some motherfuckin amazing news!

So in Seattle, Wa. This week a conference took place and a company was bankrolled by some forward thinking billionaires with the goal and dream in mind to expand our resource availability and eventual expansion into space.

Among those names being Peter H. Diamandis (X-prize foundation), David Vaskevitch (former CTO Microsoft), and then some. Even James Cameron is lending his clout to this company.

Enter Planetary Resources.

and now an article on the matter:

Space exploration needs a kick in the pants, and it will get one Tuesday when a group of high-tech billionaires announces plans to mine asteroids, says a scientific adviser to the enterprise.

And there's money to be made, too, adds John S. Lewis, a retired University of Arizona professor of space science who now lives in Anacortes.

"We're talking resources with market values in the trillions," said Lewis, author of "Mining the Sky." "It's not at all surprising that it's billionaires who are steppingup to the plate. They think big and they know a big investment is required to make money."

Two of Lewis' former students are among the driving forces behind the project, and he will join them at Seattle's Museum of Flight on Tuesday for the unveiling of a new company called Planetary Resources.

Former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi, one of several investors,will also be there.

Money men who won't make an appearance include "Titanic" and "Avatar" filmmaker James Cameron, Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.

For decades, Lewis has been a self-described "voice in the wilderness," calling for anew industry to mine the abundant resources of space.

"There's alot of work that has to be done before we start cutting metal," he said. "But these are things that we've been thinking about for a long time."

Books running to a thousand pages or more have been written on processing minerals in space, he said.

Many space veterans are skeptical, and even Lewis admits to significant hurdles,such as finding customers for materials mined in space.

Asteroids are rich in nickel,platinum and other valuable minerals, but because it is so expensive to shuttle things down to the Earth's surface, it will only make economic sense if the resources can be used in space.

One possibility would be to mine materials and use them in space to build solar arrays, which could beam electricity to Earth via microwave relay.

Asteroids are also rich in water, which can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. That opens the possibility of shipping the water from the asteroid to a space station orbiting the Earth — a"downhill" trip that requires much less energy than penetrating the planet's atmosphere — where it could be processed into fuel for satellites and other space vehicles.

Seattle Times: Billionaires bankroll new space company for asteroid mining.

Not gonna deny the fact that it'll be a big expense, but where there's risk there's rewards. And fortune favors the bold. They have a clear goal in mind and intend to follow through with it and I for one want to be in the thick of it. Soon as I get my degree and certs out of the way I won't give up until I'm in league with these guys.

[Flarecobra]

It's pretty obvious what they need to name the intial spacecraft.

[Tev]

I read about this earlier today. It sounds awesome, even though the legal issues with operating in space for profit are monumental. As one reported pointed out, if they brought back an asteroid sized slab of platinum, do you have any idea what it would do to the market? There are a lot of rare metals that prop up whole economies because they are rare on Earth.

It will be interesting to see how things play out as we weigh the common good of moving humanity to the next stage of space expansion against the destabilizing forces of reducing the power of those who hold all the rare metals.

Imagine if we found an asteroid sized diamond. What would the Deberes do?

[Sifright]

Space exploration for mining reasons is mega dumb at this stage like it's so expensive right now there is no way to profit from it. The only semi intelligent thing mentioned in that news blurb is microwave energy from solar sats and thats still dumb.


Edit: that said if a bunch of rich wankers want to waste money and increase infastructure ehhh go for it. Would be better off just building infastructure on earth though for more mundane things like nuclear elec or just renewables.

[Tev]

Originally Posted by Sifright

Space exploration for mining reasons is mega dumb at this stage like it's so expensive right now there is no way to profit from it. The only semi intelligent thing mentioned in that news blurb is microwave energy from solar sats and thats still dumb.


Edit: that said if a bunch of rich wankers want to waste money and increase infastructure ehhh go for it. Would be better off just building infastructure on earth though for more mundane things like nuclear elec or just renewables.

From the article I read, they put $50 billion in seed money into developing ways for us to do things in space. NASA's annual budget is around $18.4 billion (and shrinking). They just paid for two and a half years of privatized NASA and gave them a clear goal making awesome things that would improve our space resource gathering potential. That's pretty awesome.

[shiney]

Originally Posted by Sifright

Space exploration for mining reasons is mega dumb at this stage like it's so expensive right now there is no way to profit from it. The only semi intelligent thing mentioned in that news blurb is microwave energy from solar sats and thats still dumb.


Edit: that said if a bunch of rich wankers want to waste money and increase infastructure ehhh go for it. Would be better off just building infastructure on earth though for more mundane things like nuclear elec or just renewables.

It wouldn't work anyways so let's not even bother! We don't have the technology to make it viable but refuse to fund the research, so let's pretend that everything is just fine!

[tacticslion]

I'd say this is made pretty much of "win". Frankly, it makes sense: taking stuff out of our planet for the purpose of exploring other planets is a one-way guaranteed-reduction-of-resources thing, but has always been important because we need to know what's out there. If we could create and stable, consistent refining system in space that could (via water, rocket fuel, and the like) be more-or-less self-sustainable, then we'd have the basics of what we need for true interplanetary exploration.

Are we there yet? No. Not in the slightest. But the United States of America exists because a few "forward thinking" (and, in fact, incorrect individuals) saw the value in doing something: sailing around the world. Because of that we've now got: cars, cell phones, computers, internet. Those things may well have existed without the U.S., but they were definitely pushed forward because of it. It took a few hundred years, but it was over-all worth it. It just needed some crazy people to push that boundary and look at the possibilities rather than the drawbacks.

(And hopefully we've learned some things since then.)

[stefan]

The most effective use of space resources would be mining the moon and using it to build orbital colonies. If you do it right, you can build a self-supporting culture in an O'neill cylinder.

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by stefan

The most effective use of space resources would be mining the moon and using it to build orbital colonies. If you do it right, you can build a self-supporting culture in an O'neill cylinder.

Pretty much this kind of stuff. And you could make deeper-space O'Neill Cylinder-style colonies (if I recall correctly, anyway - it's been quite a while since I looked at this stuff). These kinds of things would be great stepping-stones to eventual deep-space exploration and eventually colonization. (By "deep", of course, I mean "our solar-system". We ain't-a gettin' outta here for quite some time.)

And why, you ask, would any of this be important? 'Cause we'd be LIVING IN DAGGUM SPACE! We have literally no idea what the limits of possibilities of that is*. None. What can we do there long-term? Who knows? Deep-space satellites not contaminated by our lousy noise? Possible. Space-stops for deep space exploration? Maybe. Permanent satellite structures orbiting other planets so we can map it as thoroughly as our own? Suddenly much cheaper to build and launch (with the proper facilities). It's expensive, dangerous, time-consuming, and slightly crazy, but most things humanity has done that have "revolutionized everything" have been.

* This is, of course, completely different from knowing of many possibilities. We do know of many possibilities. Just not their limits.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Well it's about damn time. Really, I don't even care if there's no profit in it or or costs them all an absolute bomb, if it gets us viable space travel it's worth any cost. If these guys can help get our asses to Mars then I applaud.