Author Topic: Planetary Resources  (Read 373019 times)

Offline Lar

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #980 on: 10/18/2018 02:07 pm »
The 1967 OST would not support a claim in space based on Cubesats sitting on an asteroid. In fact, the OST does not support any claims at all, any more than theoperators of a ship can claim the water under their ship.
True, but my understanding is that, like a ship that can use and consume the water under it, the OST allows for resource extraction. One doesn't necessarily need to make ownership claims of the object itself in order to own the resources (kind of like how one can have mineral rights to a property without owning the property itself).

An exclusive economic zone, free of interference by other parties, of reasonable size around whatever operations are ongoing... may not be property or ownership, but it is not too far away from it. OST allows this, even encourages it.

Just taking a picture doesn't do it though, you have to actually be doing some kind of exploitation or have some kind of physical presence that's active (not abandoned)
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Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #981 on: 10/18/2018 08:23 pm »
Correct.

Under the 1967 OST, if you have a facility on some asteroid, you have some aspects of property rights.

This doesn’t help a company prospecting for ore via remote sensing.


Offline Asteroza

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #982 on: 10/19/2018 04:34 am »
Active presence would suggest a cubesat with a solar powered interactive radar transponder and a harpoon for surface anchoring might fit the minimum definitions for a claim then.

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #983 on: 10/19/2018 06:49 am »
When providing an economic benefit requires two things and one is much, much harder than the other, it doesn't make sense to do the easy thing before anyone has any realistic plan underway to do the harder thing.

Figuring out which asteroids have the resources someone is looking for is the easy thing.  Extracting the resources and bringing them somewhere where they can be put to use is the hard thing.

Once someone has a realistic, funded plan to develop a system that can make use of resources extracted from asteroids, then it will make sense to prospect.  Not before.  Any government scheme to encourage early prospecting would just be rewarding globally-inefficient allocation of resources and discouraging investment in the actual resource extraction.

Offline high road

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #984 on: 10/19/2018 07:49 am »
When providing an economic benefit requires two things and one is much, much harder than the other, it doesn't make sense to do the easy thing before anyone has any realistic plan underway to do the harder thing.

Figuring out which asteroids have the resources someone is looking for is the easy thing.  Extracting the resources and bringing them somewhere where they can be put to use is the hard thing.

Once someone has a realistic, funded plan to develop a system that can make use of resources extracted from asteroids, then it will make sense to prospect.  Not before.  Any government scheme to encourage early prospecting would just be rewarding globally-inefficient allocation of resources and discouraging investment in the actual resource extraction.

On the other hand, figuring out which asteroids have the right amounts and concentrations of useful stuff, also tells you how hard it would be to extract commercially viable amounts. The fact that we don't know what the requirements are, is a large contributor to why extracting the resources is the hard thing. Like shale oil, tar sands,  etc, tons of research and prospecting was done, long before extraction became commercially viable. Whether you want the government to support that, is indeed a different matter.

Taking samples from asteroids might also reveal substances we haven't even thought of yet, and might be worth bringing back because we only find them on asteroids.

And there's plenty of scientific exploration left to do where asteroid mining is not the main goal, but could benefit from the increasing knowledge about the composition and structure of asteroids.

All I'm saying is that IMO, there's plenty of exploration left for governments to do, before looking to the commercial sector to start investing.

Offline Bob Shaw

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #985 on: 10/19/2018 07:55 am »
Regarding shale oil, it was exploited in the 19th Century using old-fashioned mining technology. You don’t need to extract every last drop of such a resource so long as there’s a market for the output. A case in point are the ISRU plans central to the SpaceX Mars exploration plans - the technology is small, slow and expensive but is simply there to do one job. Asteroid ‘mining’ will surely adopt a similar philosophy, at least into the medium term.
« Last Edit: 12/01/2018 11:38 pm by Bob Shaw »

Offline AdrianW

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #986 on: 10/19/2018 10:04 am »
Taking samples from asteroids might also reveal substances we haven't even thought of yet, and might be worth bringing back because we only find them on asteroids.

I mostly agree with the rest of your post, but I doubt we'll ever find new, unknown substances on asteroids, mostly because asteroids sometimes crash into Earth and we would have probably found those substances by now.
« Last Edit: 10/19/2018 10:05 am by AdrianW »

Offline docmordrid

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #987 on: 10/19/2018 11:24 am »
Taking samples from asteroids might also reveal substances we haven't even thought of yet, and might be worth bringing back because we only find them on asteroids.

IMO,  mostly agree with the rest of your post, but I doubt we'll ever find new, unknown substances on asteroids, mostly because asteroids sometimes crash into Earth and we would have probably found those substances by now.

IMO, the rather significant list of "meteorite minerals" indicates said.list is likely incomplete. More may fall on the 3rd rock and be discovered, but others will wait for a visitor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteorite_minerals
« Last Edit: 10/19/2018 11:25 am by docmordrid »
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Offline edzieba

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #988 on: 10/19/2018 11:59 am »
Active presence would suggest a cubesat with a solar powered interactive radar transponder and a harpoon for surface anchoring might fit the minimum definitions for a claim then.
Or replicate the successful Hayabusa2 architecture with deployable 'rovers', but dike out all the rover contents (all those pesky sensors and hopping actuators) to replace with an RF transponder and more solar cells + batteries for longevity. If you can make them small enough, you could even have your bus (slowly!) visit multiple bodies to 'stake claims'.

Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #989 on: 10/20/2018 12:03 am »
Let’s say you were starting up a new company to prospect for ores on asteroids. How could you make revenue in the near term?

If discoveries of ores on asteroids could be protected, and such claims were transferable similar to patents, then we might see an industry of prospecting firms.

Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #990 on: 10/20/2018 12:04 am »
Actually, there is a public benefit from knowing where mineral resources are among the asteroids.

Offline high road

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #991 on: 10/20/2018 11:28 am »
Let’s say you were starting up a new company to prospect for ores on asteroids. How could you make revenue in the near term?

If discoveries of ores on asteroids could be protected, and such claims were transferable similar to patents, then we might see an industry of prospecting firms.

The undesirable effect of this would be that the required investments for actually extracting the minerals would go up, as you have to pay the prospecting firms who can find and claim valuable locations far faster than extraction activities can be set up.

Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #992 on: 10/20/2018 01:16 pm »
Given that prospecting firms operate in the Real World, I would that your cursory analysis is a bit off.

Our civilization's technological base is often segmented so that a given task is split functionally among several companies. In the case of mining, or oil development, there are prospecting firms that are often separate from the extracting firms.

Planetary Resources hoped to do both, but unless they can generate investment Real Soon Now, it's going to be difficult

Offline meekGee

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #993 on: 10/20/2018 08:14 pm »
I have friends who work in the terrestrial prospecting business. They sell data. There's no "mining patents" involved.

Planetary Resources isn't dead yet... they're trimming the fat after a Series A. That's normal.

Hopefully they'll be going out and collecting data soon, and they'll use that confidential catalogue to raise the next round. Yes, for a long while their assets will be primarily intellectual property.

Back to PR:

Was there any word about data collected from Arkyd 6?  (was there any from Arkyd 3?)

Any updates post the financial announcements?
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Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #994 on: 10/20/2018 08:24 pm »
Taking samples from asteroids might also reveal substances we haven't even thought of yet, and might be worth bringing back because we only find them on asteroids.

IMO,  mostly agree with the rest of your post, but I doubt we'll ever find new, unknown substances on asteroids, mostly because asteroids sometimes crash into Earth and we would have probably found those substances by now.

IMO, the rather significant list of "meteorite minerals" indicates said.list is likely incomplete. More may fall on the 3rd rock and be discovered, but others will wait for a visitor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteorite_minerals

We have an enormous number of meteorites on Earth, and it's far easier to analyze them than it is to analyze asteroids remotely.

If you really think there are potentially useful undiscovered meteorite minerals, it's far, far more economical to find them by doing more analysis of meteorites on Earth than to send probes out to asteroids.

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #995 on: 10/20/2018 08:28 pm »
Actually, there is a public benefit from knowing where mineral resources are among the asteroids.

There's a benefit to building airports, too.  But not before the airplane was invented.  Building airports before 1903 would not have been a good use of resources.  Better to wait for the airplane to be invented and be ready to use the airport.

It's inefficient to use resources to find the mineral resources of asteroids significantly before that information can be put to use.

Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #996 on: 10/20/2018 11:58 pm »
Ok, there are some people here who have no interest in companies planning to prospect for mineral resources among the asteroids. For those who think the time for such companies has come, my suggestion is a registry for claims of discoveries of ore bodies, based on Dr. Zubrin’s Mining Patents concept. The registry would give a company discovering valuable minerals the equivalent of a copyright of the location. Anyone else infringing on the intellectual property granted the company would be sanctioned by the US government.

Edit/Lar: There is a thread on mining patents that Danderman started, it's in Space Policy but it's an excellent read:  https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39504
« Last Edit: 10/22/2018 01:29 pm by Lar »

Offline ThereIWas3

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #997 on: 10/21/2018 12:21 am »
The bits of asteroids that make it to the ground are probably not representative of everything that is out there.  The lighter fractions have evaporated.

Offline meekGee

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #998 on: 10/21/2018 01:29 am »
Ok, there are some people here who have no interest in companies planning to prospect for mineral resources among the asteroids. For those who think the time for such companies has come, my suggestion is a registry for claims of discoveries of ore bodies, based on Dr. Zubrin’s Mining Patents concept. The registry would give a company discovering valuable minerals the equivalent of a copyright of the location. Anyone else infringing on the intellectual property granted the company would be sanctioned by the US government.
Some of us are, but think that the capability to do so seriously begins with having real launch and in-space capabilities.

PR had a very large gap between what they said they were going to do and what they could realistically do.

Asteroid mining will happen, but you need a large increase in in-space activities before it starts making sense...

This is not a chicken and egg situation.  More like chicken and chicken sandwich...

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Offline Danderman

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Re: Planetary Resources
« Reply #999 on: 10/21/2018 02:25 am »
Surveying every meteorite on Earth is not informative of where ore bodies are located in space.

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