When you start measuring "profit" in the trillions, doesn't the measurement become somewhat meaningless? Like, imagine Planetary Resources or SpaceX gets into this and brings back a haul of metals worth approximately 100 trillion. How devastating would that be to the economy? What would it do to the price of the metals involved?
I'm not saying that bringing this quantity of metal into the economy is a bad thing necessarily, but it would have enough of an impact on the market to make these values completely inaccurate.
Such an operation would take decades, and centuries probably to exhaust and return to Earth the entire asteroid. In the process and in response the size of the Earth economy will grow due to the introduction of a vast new supply of industrial materials.
Introduction of extraterrestrial resources will cause these commodity prices to fall. But falling prices will cause industrial use (and world GDP) to rise. How much will prices fall, and how much will demand rise, and therefore how much maximum revenue can be extracted? This is not an easy calculation.
Looks like a simple differential equation to me. And we already have the models. The only real variable would be the rate at which materials are retrieved. And even that wouldn't be very variable, because SpaceX or whoever would use the rate that optimized their profits.
There's no good model out there I know of for the rate of innovation. Massive availability of a resource should spur innovation around its use. It's very difficult to predict the future demand for a resource beyond a timescale of decades.
A good historical parallel for this kind of situation might be aluminum, which was a precious metal for many years. When it suddenly became available in large quantities due to new chemical processes for extracting it, supply skyrocketed and led to whole new industries. I don't think anyone in 1890 could have guessed what the ultimate demand for aluminum would settle at, even though it was clear the price was dropping precipitously.
Exactly. If economic growth was just like microbe growth in a petri dish, sure, a simple equation would suffice. But people choose and act based on their own thoughts, opinions, and goals, and they are always readjusting to new input and information. Economics can tell us reliably that if you add supply, you press the price downward. What economics can't tell you is what crazy and amazing things the humans will do in response to that.
Oh sure, those valuations are BS, that website is promoting something. Price is dynamic, a function of supply-demand. It's why DeBeers stores diamonds in vaults - if they could sell them at current prices they would. Since iron is relatively abundant on earth, I think the cost of iron is in processing. Space iron is far, far more expensive to process than earth iron ore or earth iron salvage. I looked up shipping costs for example on nasa.gov and they don't even list a number, instead they quote CALL ME. You know the prices are steep when they don't list them.
Supposedly they will sell the metals in moderate amounts over a long period of time to decrease the chance of a supply shock. The price will certainly drop as the supply of metals will increase, but it would be less likely to bottom-out if the market is given time to adjust; demand would probably increase as we found more applications for cheaper metals.
"On Sept. 10, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on the Asteroid Act, a refreshingly short and readable five-page bill that would recognize the ownership by companies of resources they have extracted from asteroids and would also prohibit companies from interfering with the operations of competitors. Planetary Resources sent a letter to the committee in support of the bill."
For those who are interesting finding out more I would recommend: Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis. It's an excellent book that discusses in length the composition of NEO, possible retrieval methods and economics of such an endeavour.
Moon mass: 7x10^22 kg
Total asteroid mass: 3x10^21 kg
Earth mass: 6x10^24 kg
Density Earth's crust: 2.7 g/cm^3
Earth area: 5.1x10^8 km^2
Mass Earth's crust to 1km depth: 1.4x10^21
So all asteroids combined and the Earth's crust down to 2km are very close to the same mass.
But like I said, I have no idea about the composition.
Composition would be strikingly different. Elements which are rare in the Earth's crust (and therefore, expensive) are rare because during the formation of the Earth they sank under gravity and now reside near the core of the planet.
Chondritic asteroids, on the other hand, are left over from the primordial solar system and have the original relative abundances of rare earth materials. Hence the interest as a source of industrial resources.
I really like this site. How much do I like this site? Well, before clicking on it, I said to myself, "I wonder where Davida ranks?" (query the list of most valuable). So, yeah, I've thought about this subject a lot, and I really appreciate this beautiful website which presents all this data in an easily readable way.
In the spirit of constructive criticism, I would suggest the following changes which might make the site more useful for people like me who run calculations on asteroid mining for fun:
1) Make the formulas for value and cost explicit somewhere easily found on the site. Maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it.
2) Make it possible to alter the variables to allow exploring different scenarios. For example, the cost in $/(km/s) of delta-v depends upon the technology used. Maybe have different selections (chemical rockets, nuclear rockets, solar sail, cool unknown technology, magic fairy asteroid whales) which have different costs associated with them. This would change the rankings of which asteroids would be more profitable, since high metal asteroids with a high delta V cost are more profitable if more accessible. The opposite effect occurs if there is a technology which lowers mining and processing costs (such as directed solar heating and in-situ smelting). It would be nice to tweak that cost too. Being able to change technology scenarios makes this site much more fun.
3) Show some estimate of ore concentration. Yeah, I know the data isn't exactly definitive. Spectra don't give you good information on internals. But an estimate is being used in there somewhere, it would be interesting to show it, especially if it could be compared with earthling ores.
The interesting thing about adding hundreds of trillions of dollars in raw mineral resources to earth's standing economy is that earthly real estate will become more valuable until we find some place else to use all this stuff.
Seems like there might be an interesting intermediary phase, maybe something like a gilded age, until we figure out how to exploit these resources under a framework of instantiating extra-terrestrial colonies.
You can't estimate the market value of the materials at the time when harvesting them becomes feasible, and you can't estimate the costs with any accuracy either. Other than that, very informative graphic.
This is a really cool site. We should load up the probes with toxic nuclear waste to dispose in space on the way up, then come back down with valuable materials mined from the asteroids.
We won't even put the stuff in a cave in a desert that will be stable for the next 10,000 years with probability of .999999. Rockets? Those things blow up quite regularly and spread their debris over vast tracts of land. Also, radioactive waste is about as dense and heavy a payload as you could possibly imagine.
Just mine the asteroids, they require lower delta V than Mars (yay no gravity well) and there are, as demonstrated by this site, better economic incentives to do so.
I don't know if that is a serious suggestion, but the delta V required to hit the sun is enormous. That is about the most expensive technique imaginable for disposing of anything.
Or forget the wings and heat shield, just make a space-train of cannon-ball sized objects and hard land them in an uninhabited area. The hard part will be de-orbiting them accurately, but have a large enough landing area and that problem goes away.
Suggestions in science fiction include foaming the metal in space and landing it into the ocean, then hualing the "metalberg" back to a drydock where it can be cut apart and hauled off for refining.
Foaming the return mass means it will have a slightly lower terminal velocity, and it will float!
Now to work on a deorbiting system that provides accuracy with low cost … perhaps a solar electric linear accelerator?
If we can go to asteroid, it makes sense to process it locally and ship back what is needed. Assuming that much of what is mined is actually kept in space.
Rockets would be hugely expensive, and would negate the value (unless the asteroid were solid gold or so). Much better would be to apply an ablative heat shield and just let the thing strike the ground (or ocean) at terminal velocity in a controlled area.
Other than possession? The technology required to harvest them is far more advanced than the tech required for an ICBM, so anyone who can I get there, I don't think will be paying tribute.
This is actually a field I've thought a lot about, in no small part because whoever solves this problem stands to profit a lot.
The problem is time horizons. Extraterrestrial mining projects from conception to first delivery is probably a 20-30 year timeframe. That is way, way outside of what could be reasonably financed on the open market.
On the other hand, if you could reasonably get a return on investment in the 5-7 year time frame, then there'd be no trouble getting financing for each step of the project. However that requires having liquidity events before you're able to actually get resources to market, and the only way I see that to be possible is to sell some sort of contract valued by future revenue potential. You see the same problem in remote areas of the Earth where mining efforts take considerable planning, e.g. northern Canada. And we have solutions there: mining claims and a sense of legal ownership of resources that are still in the ground.
Break that mining project into 5 to 7 year chunks with a mechanism for contracts exchanging hands inbetween, and the free market will solve the problem of bootstrapping space settlement.
I'm not saying that bringing this quantity of metal into the economy is a bad thing necessarily, but it would have enough of an impact on the market to make these values completely inaccurate.