This is just mind blowing to me. These are endeavors normally left to nation states. There's something buried in here that I find fascinating.

In the past, when these endeavors were carried out by nation states, all the baggage of bureaucracy was along for the ride. Fast forward to today, and you have individuals with the imagination and the means to dream big. It's possible to undertake something insane -- like mining asteroids -- on your own.

I'm left thinking about the way that Steve Jobs ran Apple. I don't intend to steal credit from all the hard work of the people at Apple, but Steve Jobs ran Apple in a way that stands in contrast to many other companies. The fulcrum of decision making was remarkably focused on a single point: him.

I don't know the end game for capitalism, but a lot of people believe that along the way to its downfall, there is a massive consolidation of wealth. The presumption is that these individuals will all be corrupt fat cats that enslave the masses.

What if it's the opposite? What if the people who end up with the wealth do great things with it? It's kind of like a bunch of micro-sized benevolent dictatorships, but the dictator is naturally selected through capitalistic means: successful individuals gather the wealth required to reach this role in society.

You're cherry picking a handful of nerd billionaires who are getting into, lets face it, a pretty big gamble right now. SpaceX is the only success story of all the commercial space companies and the whole "The rich will find a way to become immortal and sell us the serum" scenario is this weird opposite of classism.

I'd also add that this mentality is why we had kings and dicators in human history. We're just too prone to thinking a few alpha males will Fix Everything and pesky things like division of power, politics, just get in the way of our Ayn Rand heroes. I think you can figure out in the lifecycle of kingdoms and dictatorships that the endgame is never paradise. Its usually a long ongoing nightmare of cronyism and human rights violations.

Weird to see a western person dismiss the incredible priviledge he has and free speech rights and lack of obligations of serfdom/slavery suddenly take up the mantle of 'let the alpha males fix everything you stupid bureaucratic peons.'

Just out of curiosity, do you think these gentle nerds would have thrived in a environment like the one you're applauding? Imagine Bill Joy or Wozniack or Bezos born into a crony capitalistic environment. Something tells me without the nannying of the western enlightened nanny state with its safe streets and cheap public education, would any of these guys have had the class mobility or opportunity to move upwards? Makes me wonder how many geniuses are being pissed away in places where the alpha males rule harshly. The world has probably lost hundreds of north korean and somalian genuises.

1) I'm excited that these billionaires (and many before them) are doing great things with their money.

2) The benevolent dictator tie in was not a wish for benevolent dictatorships, but rather an observation. It's not like I'm dreaming of a future where James Cameron becomes King of America. I kind of like the spot they're in today. Their wealth gives them the opportunity to do amazing things, but we're not at risk of Elon Musk executing a coup.

3) One of my favorite pieces of fiction is the graphic novel Watchmen. I like it because it is such a fantastic critique on the hero archetype. I don't see people like James Cameron or Elon Musk as some sort of infallible hero, but rather I'm amazed that they rise above their flaws to do great things.

My comments were abbreviated, because I don't have time to write a book. I think that my excitement is being interpreted in many different ways, and I'm ok with that, but I want to be clear about what I appreciate, and this portion of your comment really rubbed me the wrong way:

> Weird to see a western person dismiss the incredible priviledge he has and free speech rights and lack of obligations of serfdom/slavery suddenly take up the mantle of 'let the alpha males fix everything you stupid bureaucratic peons.'

That is, categorically, the opposite of the way I feel. As I've already said, I'm not dreaming of King Jobs. I find it exciting/interesting that we're seeing a surge in the number of individuals with the means and the interest in doing great things.

The good thing here is that technically once off planet, you don't have any government to answer too, however I hate to think what regulations the bureaucrats are dreaming up to try and get around this.

What we seem to be seeing is that these "new money" entrepreneurs spend a great portion of their wealth, using their skills at innovation and bulldogging people into doing what they need, to make great changes. It's worthy of note that Rockefeller, who was the worlds first billionaire, donated $550 million through his philanthropy by 1918. He essentially made the University of Chicago. From about 1900 to 1940 his personal wealth was steady at approximately 1% of the US GDP. More notable still, is that from his first pay check he gave 10% of his earnings to his church. His funding of medical research was instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever.

Bill Gates is rather fittingly working in Rockefeller's shoes.

I think its fantastic that these "new money" billionaires are literally chasing their dreams and dragging us along with them.

I'm 24, and at 16 I was thinking that my chance of seeing another planet or even space was solely reliant on finding some LSD. Essentially I put the factual chance of my seeing space to be 1 in a trillion. With SpaceX and announcements like this, I feel like they must have when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I feel like I should be sleeping in the back seat of my car while it flies me to work and that I'll go vacation on Mars and go for a weekend getaway in LEO.

It's amazing to me that in such a short time that this shit has become possible again.

One wonders if the rise of markets, global communication, etc., have rendered the nation state somewhat obsolete.

In theory, we still depend on our governments for things like public works, for ensuring peace, for promoting justice, and protecting personal property. These are things that we believe corporations would be ill-suited for.

And yet, in practice, at least in the United States and in the PIGS of Europe--we see that hey, holy shit, they've dropped the ball in a lot of cases. I'm willing to wager that we wouldn't be too much worse off with a different system.

Note: I take this position not in support of our new corporate overlords, but out of the necessity born from the realities of our government. If our government actually helped the public, actually had a legal system that worked justly and fairly, and actually did Good, I'd shun the amorality of the free market. But it doesn't, so I can't.

I know, blah blah free markets never existed so a truly free market would lead to utopia blah blah. But, markets right now are freer then they have ever been, and we are still seeing the concentration towards aristocracy. More freedom of market would probably swing more towards this, as the current owners of stuff would just demand all output of workers (including any thought they ever had) reducing the ability of new entities to exist to create the churn assumed in free markets. Unless you get rid of IP and large portions of property rights (and in the later case, unfreeing the market by standard definitions). Basically, a system without feedbacks will move to extremes.

I would think the thousands of regulations added every year would reduce the amount of "freedom" in the market.

Are you willing to bet your life?

If our government actually helped the public, actually had a legal system that worked justly and fairly, and actually did Good, I'd shun the amorality of the free market. But it doesn't, so I can't.

For one thing, any government is amoral at best. Laws are only approximations.

For another thing, the US government and the governments of the states I've been able to visit do help the public. They are not perfect. The problem with anything approaching anarchy, or even some sort of pure free market utopia, is that those things are not yet politically stable in the current context. Regardless of how good or bad life in one would be, a nation state or some other large polity will come over and destroy such an entity. Perhaps technology will level the playing field somehow.

Is the legal system perfect? No, but I'll take my chances in Houston over Mogadishu any day. And the extent to which the government tries to prevent the spread of certain communicable diseases, dissuade people from stealing from and raping strangers, maintain infrastructure, I would say they do help people in these ways and myriad others. Granted, they do this rather imperfectly. That's just real life.

I merely mean to point out that the idea that governments are the solely-enabled providers of the Good is being threatened by the advent of enabling technologies and poor precedent set by governments themselves.

Well you have to consider that people who were able to make a great amount of money through capitalistic means usually are not "EVIL" people. Because they have to sell their products/services to others, they need to please their clients/customers on an everyday basis. They have to have a rather good profile in order to keep their business going (and their own organization, for the matter).

You'd rather have to wonder about politicians, who get rich by diverting voters' resources, misusing the state money, and lying about their own responsibilities. And in History, they have been the fat cats enslaving populations and mass-murdering people. We have yet to see any example of this happening in the private sector.

Anyway, rich people are not unique in terms of profile. How you make your own money tells a lot about you and what you are really worth.

What I really want to read in the press is how "100,000 hackers from the online site called [insert Hacker News/reddit, etc] worked cohesively for X years and were instrumental in solving problem Y."

Certainly there must be some problems where a large number of people can solve them together.

I'm with you on the enthusiasm, but consider:

a) the history of previous innovations like railroads and flight. Private actors have always made big contributions, it's just that government was often an early client or monopoly grantor. The big projects that government finances and implements directly tend to be things like defense and infrastructure.

Edit: relatively low tech but large infrastructure - giant damns, highway systems, rural electrification. I've always thought of NASA as a half-defense project. But this is a tendency rather than an iron rule, the pendulum swings back and forth on public/private sector involvement.

b. Hell no, it's not possible to do these things on your own. you need a team (who share some executive power) and a pool of labor, and ideally you stay open enough (like Steve Jobs) to the innovative bubbles that bubble up from any part of your organization. An individual with sufficient capital and vision has the opportunity to overcome the economic inertia of a big project and get things moving, but to look at it as something you do 'on your own' is to fall into an ego trap right out of the gate. Extreme example of this: Muammar Gaddafi.

c. Bureaucracy is a side-product of organization. Government is bureaucratic because it has reasons to persist as an organization. But almost all commercial entities have bureaucracy of their own, proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. Bureaucracy can be annoying or inefficient, but it is not a bad thing in itself: it's just organizational infrastructure and an entirely rational division of labor. Naturally, there's a problem when the interests of individual bureaucrats or bureaux come into conflict with those of the organization as a whole, but that's often the result of an incomplete or inchoate conflict resolution process. In the right circumstances it can be an asset; the software company my wife works for originally threw its product together as an internal job-tracking tool for paper-based archive/records management. Nowadays what used to be its core business is outsourced to subcontractors.

The fulcrum of decision making was remarkably focused on a single point: him.

And yet the company has not undergone a dramatic collapse since his death. This is because he built a strong organizational infrastructure in which he played a central, but replaceable, role.

I don't know the end game for capitalism [...]

I don't believe there is one, any more than there's an end game for math or physics. Capitalism is in my view a phenomenon rather than a philosophy, as is communism (in the non-ideological sense of people doing things together for mutual benefit). As I get older I think a great deal of political conflict is the result of a confusion between means and ends, but that's another story.

Slight digression, but I was interested in your last few sentences. Why do you not think that math or physics have an end game? I think that academic mathematics is dead/worthless, for instance.

Maybe you're talking about the difference between "ideals" and the incarnations of those ideals.

Capitalism is indeed an ideal, but its incarnation (so-called "global capitalism") might disappear as the dominant mode of human interaction. Here's hoping. This has happened in the past, right? E.g. there is no "Feudalism" as such, any more, even if concepts of feudalism are used.

Similarly (going back to Math), "Math" as such will never die - but its incarnation (the mass of all people doing all Math) might have an end game.

I'd actually love a math revolution, since I love math, but it doesn't look like it's going to be easy to re-invigorate it.

That is, I believe, a genius true of of any great leader: the ability to surround yourself with people who are capable of greatness, then having the confidence to let them be great.

The logical conclusion of that is feudalism, and I think with more or less the same consequences. Basically:

• You'll get some good kings and some bad kings

• Some will be into exploration for wealth, prestige and to further an ideology

• Wealth and power will be passed down through families

• A person being a good king is probably a bad predictor of their great grandson being a good king

Democracy and a strong central government aren't an optimal solution to the distribution of power, but they do tend to average out systematic performance over time to produce less ups and downs. Technology and finance seem to be the largest pseudo-king making disciplines these days, but I'll leave musing over their relative distribution of good and bad kingliness as an exercise to the reader.

By extension, you can fix a problem by killing/overthrowing one person.

The truly scary thing about both governments and corporations is that they are remarkably resilient power structures. Consider: would removing/jailing/prosecuting the entire board of directors/C-level officers of a company truly kill it? Could it just be taken over? Would its property, patents, IP, employees, etc. become public property, or just food for another entity?

It's pretty terrifying, actually.

This is a very interesting point. One of the very best things democracy offers is reasonable hand-offs of power. Has any country tried something like "electable kings"? There would be one monarch who gets voted into power, who then has ultimate control (subject to a Constitution or something). Then, upon death, the country holds an election and a new monarch is voted in?

Or, in between, what's the longest any particular head of state is elected for these days? In the US, the president is in charge for 4 years, which seems like too short of a time horizon to implement any sort of long-term plan. Any countries out there where they are elected, say, 10 years at a time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#On_wealth

Taking a devil's advocate approach here, the scary thing is that individuals are now vested with the power of a nation state.

That hadn't happened in human history, and I think it's inevitable we will get such technology in this century. And this is much scarier than swapping president for CEO.

Its called Fascism, and its no nugget.

SpaceX + Xe (Blackwater) == DOOM. We will turn back to government to save us from these crazies, I'm pretty sure of it ..

I think you've made the mistake of reaching a conclusion by cherry picking. You think of a few select cases like Page, Musk etc. and think maybe it's good there's a concentration of wealth, that there are billionaires. But you are ignoring all the other billionaires and "fat cats" who are arguably doing bad or selfish things, who aren't pusing the human race forward, just being parasites. Does the existance of Musk, Cameron, Bezos, etc. efforts somehow more than outweigh the negatives of the other guys? Perhaps. But we can't ignore the other folks, the more parasitic aristocracy, like the Koch brothers, possibly the Rockefellers, the Morgans, etc.

What do you expect the "center" of a food distribution network (Koch Brothers) to look like, besides a big fat cat? A big fat cat isn't too bad, as long as it's sleepy.

These people - Page, Musk, Schmidt, etc. - are about organizing the minds of society, so they are going to be different. Fat heads with big old asteroid-mining ideas :)

Who among their other evil schemes spent $100 million to fund cancer research at MIT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Koch_Institute_for_Int...

Parasitic aristocracy? Do you feel the same way about the folks who give millions of dollars to political causes you support?

Also... Like Gates, the Koch brothers were born into wealth. He's made more wealth by running and owning businesses that make the rest of us less healthy, then he wants to be painted as a philanthropist -- which is something he can buy, anyone can buy, at that level of wealth. And there are tax reduction incentives to do it. And he's one of the biggest behind-the-scenes manipulators of political discourse in the US, which greatly distorts the public debate, and the actions of Congress, away from carrying out the express wishes of the vast majority, and away from doing what's in the best interest of society as a whole, toward things that favor him, and his kind, personally. He is a force for those who say, "Screw people who are less well off than me, with less talents or abilities or family resources than I had. Every man for himself!" So yes he's both parasitic, and part of an aristocracy, and a net lose for society, despite any "positive" thing he may have done. We don't judge Hitler on the whole based on the fact that he kissed some babies at political rallies, or that he funded national exercise programs for German youth. We judge him based on the full spectrum of things he did, including the very bad things he did, that he chose to do, intentionally, and that hurt others, that hurt large numbers of other people -- that dominates his legacy. That's how I evaluate Koch, and how I think you should as well.

Next step, start building the ships themselves in orbit and crew them from the growing population of space acclimated folk.

Here's some links on it

http://dailyreckoning.com/foam-technology/

A better question is that this seems to only make economic sense for relatively rare materials, but the sudden flood of material would lower their market price potentially pushing them too low to be economically viable to support space mining.

Launch costs are poised to make a dramatic drop (by a factor of 10-100) within the next decade or two. Now, you could say that it's silly to make a financial bet on this coming to fruition but such a bet is unnecessary, one can simply do research and prototyping and then make the decision on whether to scale up and go for broke or not based on the development of launch costs.

By the same token, launch costs will also affect the growth in orbital assets and infrastructure, which can both facilitate certain aspects of asteroid mining as well as potentially serve as a market for mined resources. Not everything from such mines need to be delivered to the Earth's surface, for example.

Using robotics and efficient propulsion technologies like solar sails or ion engines make it possible to deliver to Earth or Earth orbit far more mass than the mass of the machinery launched from Earth, which will be the major cost involved.

Consider a few things that might be worthwhile. Precious metals and rare Earths could be worth a considerable amount of money. Iridium alone is worth $15 million per tonne, for example. Gold and Platinum are also worth a lot of money. But other things might also be worthwhile, such as water, methane, and silicon. Not necessarily on Earth, but perhaps in orbit. If there is a substantial population of humans living in orbit then water and oxygen could be a valuable commodity, as would propellant (oxygen, methane, hydrogen, etc.)

Or, consider a small near Earth asteroid that is robotically mined to deliver large quantities of silicon and aluminum to Earth orbit, where they are used to manufacture solar cells, supporting structure, and power systems in geostationary orbit to build space based solar power systems. Then, only the ground components (rectenna fields) need to be built on Earth, and only a small amount of components and materials need to be launched from Earth for each new power station. It could well be a cost effective way to deliver electrical power in the near future, although much of that is dependent on automated mining operations and the costs of operating a manufacturing facility in orbit.

It's certainly a risky endeavor at present, but it's not such a crazy idea as it may seem.

The only ones I can think of would be Luna, Phobos, Deimos and the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars' orbit.

Are these really viable targets? Aside from Luna, they're all pretty far away, or am I missing some obvious asteroids that are known to be within convenient distance of Earth?

And people have been talking for a long time about how eventually launch costs would drop. In theory. But with SpaceX's recent successes, with their stated intentions, with the nature of their leadership, I think the folks behind Planetary Resources thought, "You know. Now might be the time. SpaceX, in particular, looks about to really bring down cost to orbit. Let's get in on that. What's going to be enabled by that? That's right, asteroid mining. Let's fill out the paperwork and start assembling the cash, the team, to get the ball rolling."

I fail to see how mining asteroids to use their resources on Earth could make economic sense in any reasonable time-frame.

What resources are so scarce that it would pay to mine them in space ? My impression is that with the exceptions of food, energy and luxury goods like gold, silver and diamonds the cost of natural resources makes a very small contribution to the cost of goods.

Moreover mining asteroids would require the development of robotics technologies which, if applied on Earth, would substantially reduce the costs of most natural resources from their already low levels.

Helium-3 http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283...

Energy via solar satellites might also be possible, if the mechanism to transmit power from space can be figured out.

It may not matter. Assuming Cameron has enough wealth to support himself and his family for the rest of his life, what else is he going to spend his money on?

He's already made it pretty clear that he's keen on exploration, and that space is an interest. If his net worth is $650m (wikipedia), I would imagine that he'd be quite comfortable spending $500m of that on something that he's passionate about - even if it's not profitable by the time he's dead.

Mining the asteroids is inevitable. Maybe it wont be profitable in 10 years, or 20, or 50, or 100. But he wants to spend some of our Avatar dollars bootstrapping a new industry, I don't have a problem with it.

I honestly don't think that he would expect to be profitable in the near term, but I don't think that's a factor for him.

1) They may not necessarily think they're going to be able to deploy a cost effective business service overnight. They may realize it's going to take a while, and more pieces have to be put in place. But there are things they can start working on now that push in that direction.

2) SpaceX. And to a lesser extent, the other space teams and competitions that have had successes in last few years. Surely one of them, or a combination of a few of them, are going to bring that cost/risk to orbit down significantly. Opening up new business possibilities as potentially profitable.

3) All the recent apparent advances in robotics capabilities, embedded computing and submersibles (where the mission demands are so extreme they are not too unlike spacecraft in many ways). Drones. Pack mules. Exo-wear. Quadcopters. Powerful computers that also happen to be small, lower power draining and super cheap -- cost of risk goes down, variety of potential applications goes up.

4) Increasing sense of impending resource wars on Earth, due to the rise of the BRIC countries, all the key minerals needed by modern electronics/computing/batteries/PV only present in China or Africa or country-that-is-not-the-US. The predicted water shortages. The increasing sense that the way that modern large-scale agriculture is done (high yields via chemicals that are toxic to humans in the long run) and so might need to switch back to lower-yield-per-acre methods. And so on. The strategic takeaway is that if population grows, Earth resources grow more scarce, and especially US-controlled resources grow more scarce, then there may be an increased demand for resources from somewhere off-Earth, or kept entirely out of control of some particular Earth-based nations or companies. Is this an immediate need requiring an overnight solution? No. But if you have billions, you can afford to think about the longer term, and you have the money to risk starting those investments today. Just in case. Also, to kick it up a notch, consider the alternative: do you really think that, say, the US Congress or Presidency is going to take any bold decisive action that's going to positively address these long term concerns? Do you think they're even allowed to, by the rules they have to follow, or by their political patrons? Or do you think they'll stick to addressing more ephemeral, near-term concerns, to quick wins, political point scoring, propaganda, etc.? I know how I'd bet. :)

No, but I'd like to see some hard analysis showing that these concerns are actually valid and, even if they are, that less radical alternatives have been considered before huge amounts of resources are devoted to such radical and expensive ideas.

The Earth's crust is very large, and this wouldn't be the first time that natural resource limitations have been blown out of proportion because people couldn't see relatively near term technological or organizational solutions to them.

Consider these two cases : fossil fuels and Solyndra. In the first case the experts have been saying for decades (at least since the Arab oil embargo of 1973, but maybe before, since my memories don't go back farther) that the planet will soon run out of fossil fuels. Now this is true for some definition of soon but based on what I was hearing 30 years ago I never would have expected US oil production to be growing in 2010.

The Solyndra case is an example of an unsuccessful business decision being based on the assumption that a resource (refined silicon) that is scarce at time t would remain scarce at time t + <a few years>.

Now of course hindsight is 20/20 and I'm not saying I could have predicted the development of fracking 30 years ago or Chinese improvements in silicon processing technology 5 years ago but sometimes keeping in mind some really simple ideas can help to keep perspective. For instance when someone says natural resources are scarce so maybe we should mine asteroids I tend to think, "... but the Earth's crust is really big, hmm...". Or when someone says refined silicon is really expensive so we can make a lot of money using this new technology for making solar cells, I tend to think, "...refined silicon == sand + X, now why is X so expensive and can something be done about it, hmm, ...".

I've actually often wondered why billionaires haven't invested their money in truly world changing ideas (being able to do that has always seemed to me to be the only meaningful motivation for becoming a billionaire) but there are so many technologies that could radically transform the world and human existence in the next 20-50 years that I think mining asteroids can and should wait.

Cool for a couple of reasons:

- Asteroid tracking... Resource companies will track nearly all asteroids within reach and help provide awareness of threats.

- Robots! The technology advancement/innovation for bots and long range communications would be intense.

- Space exploration will be a boon if resources are involved (as we all know every game is about asteroid mining in the future).

- May bring back some sort of life form (It may end up taking over like Cloverfield then Cameron can later make a movie about it and Carmack the game).

Possible problems:

- We get really good at manipulating asteroids routes (some sort of harvesters that bring them closer to us to mine) and it becomes weaponized.

- Replacing terrestrial mines with asteroid mines.

- Bring an asteroid to L5. Mine. When done you have a place to live.

and it becomes weaponized.

Anything moving fast enough is a potential weapon. We need to get used to this idea now.

Especially including the earth-bound minerals, is there a better way to get large heavy objects onto the surface of a planet that a "Kinetic Lance" (Peter F. Hamilton) or "Rod" (Neal Stephenson)?

Which - whoops - puts guys out of work in favor of robots and technicians who operate them. I think that's another HN thread however.

Of course ... you _could_ make tractors and cars in space, but that's somehow mind-boggling to me.

Wrap your cargo in a capsule. Add parachutes.

Then again, those aren't really necessary. Just build the goods to capsules that have aerodynamics and maximum mass so that they'll slow down to a reasonable terminal velocity in atmosphere, and there's no reason you cannot just drop them on some area with a solid enough ground. (And no inhabitants).

Essentially, his imagined industry uses solar energy to melt ores; these are then formed into a metallic foam and shaped into a stable aerodynamic shape (a sort of blunt wedge).

They are then deorbited to land far out to sea.

Because it's metallic foam, it has a high drag-to-weight ratio (hence lower terminal velocity) and it floats.

Some of the ore is lost to ablation during re-entry, but ... so what? There's plenty more where it came from.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

You can get a free app for your iPhone that tells you the next few close approaches.

But seriously, this would be a great development in human exploration. We finally might have a chance of surpassing the achievements of the Apollo program if we establish a viable economic reason for regularly journeying into space.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3859631

(Very excited about this whole thing, btw. Have been hearing rumors around town about a bunch of MSL folks moving up north to work on something very cool...have been dying to find out what that something cool is.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

In these early days, I think we'll probably be more focused on targets of opportunity, but once the technology base exists to be picky, if you could locate a body full of precious metals, say gold and platinum, it could easily dwarf the earthbound supply.

I think the most interesting opportunities lie not with traditional methods of exploiting these materials, but with the methods we will discover once previously rare materials become abundant and cheap.

Of course, devaluing gold to the point of aluminum is going to cause political upheaval and that will have to be dealt with, and while this conjures images of chaos and serious trouble, it doesn't seem like all that big of a deal compared to what will happen when a private entity starts talking about bringing a dinosaur-killer-sized body near the earth.

Maybe it is, but there's no official announcement yet...

Plus, he's a great speaker with a healthy dose of wit:

http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from...

I guess Google's feeling the pinch from Chinese supply blocking.

(somebody had to say it)

But seriously, whatever rare-earths we find there, nobody will complain about open pit mining.

Like the old "Earth first" joke implies (... we'll strip mine the other planets later), it might be a good time to, well, start stripping potentially toxic chemicals from places we aren't trying to live in, since we pulled out much of the easy stuff here. (even if that's the opposite of the joke)

Perhaps lithium is easier to find on the lighter "chondrite" (non nickel/iron) type asteroids?

Those are probably solvable, but not very easy. And it's not unimaginable that we might not want to take some of the materials back to earth, but rather use them to construct things elsewhere.

In other words, maybe Google really will build a moonbase someday. I just hope I live to see it.

Debris is a considerable hazard. NASA tracks about 21,000 items bigger than 10 cm. They estimate there are about 500,000 items between 10 cm and 1 cm. They estimate there are 100 million items smaller than 1 cm.

These items are travelling at about 7 km per second. The average impact speed is about 10 km/s.

(http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/)

Sure we do. Wrap the goods in a capsule. Make sure you aim it in the right direction. Apply energy.

It's getting _off_ the ground that is the problem.

Some of this we might be able to make in space - boot strap a mirror factory and you've made the tools to make the tools.

Throwing bits of asteroid at the planet seems inefficient, to say the least.

How so? You can land the goods anywhere you want on earth. Sending stuff down a space elevator and you still need to ship it from the equator to wherever you need it.

After you apply the brakes, you don't need any more energy - the stuff is going downhill.

Granted, we can't simply drop iron on Cleavland where they can process it. Even if we assume pin-point delivery people are going to be reluctant to be at a potential ground-zero.

However lots of potential users are near water. The Great Lakes would make a great catcher's mitt for a few tons of air-dropped iron.

Not without an environmental impact study first.

Wrap the goods in a capsule. Attach a parachute.

Now you can land it anywhere you want, lawyers permitting.

It might be inefficient in the sense that you lose much or even most of your materials during re-entry/collection, but (for all we know) it could still much more economical than mining here on earth. If you can bring gold back to earth at a price of $1k/kg, it's not going to matter that half (or even 90%) was destroyed in the process.

I assume here that you'd look around for asteroids that were of a Goldilocks size: not too small so that a large fraction of the material survives re-entry, but not too large so that it creates a serious risk of destruction.

And if we have parachutes then we can wrap an ablative capsule around the rocks.

Add a guidance system to make the lawyers and citizens happy.

This might not be so important for tons of raw metal. Could be a good tech to have around when you want your orbital factories to compete with terrestrial concerns.

or

Send them up as freight.

There are individual asteroids out there with more platinum-group elements than has been extracted from the Earth in all of human history.

There is some evidence that most of the precious metal deposits on earth came from collisions with such asteroids.

I'd welcome the evidence about precious metals coming from collisions, that meshes with some of my understanding of the early solar system, but would be glad to know more.

I wonder what the timeframe is for starting something? Space X has gone from start to regular orbital missions in 10 years and $800 million. Would it be so far-fetched to think of a 20 year timeframe for asteroid mining?

Say hello to the Belters, I guess.

Once you establish materials in space, power plants in space, robots in space, it is a lot easier to move things further out.

The end game to me is having separation between heavy materials in space and on earth and only transporting the lightest and most valuable between the two. (humans/gold/diamonds) etc.

PS: An ION drive tug boats to move stuff from LEO to geosynchronous orbit is IMO the most needed infrastructure to make space cheaper.

To your point, water may be the best thing to mine but I wouldn't invest my time there specifically. I would get whatever material I could as easily as possible since I would not know what future missions/propulsion systems would be.

Further, if you found an abundance of something with even a low energy/weight ratio or no known way to use it for energy it is entirely possible that someone on earth will figure it out, buy it from you and use it to travel.

The cool thing is that whatever you get could be traded on some type of commodities/futures market with delivery in space which means you could theoretically sell it right after you mine it even if no one takes control or uses the material for 20 years.

While the author assumes they will mine asteroids, I think it is just as likely they will build something to pick up and consolidate space junk. That will probably be the most profitable venture and has the dual property that it will prevent damage to other vehicles once pulled from orbit.

Is this workable, HN?

Great way for the mega-rich to make a mark, Paul Allen supported a lot of space projects too.