Planetary Resources

[WiresMN]

I thought PR was ALSO planning on (with series 300 or perhaps beyond) actually doing resource extraction, some of the pix they've shown were capture/retrieval or on location refining.

They are planning an 100, 200, and 300 series. I don't think that the 300 series will be mining. If I recall it is just a series that will get more accurate data. Mining will start after the 300 series.

But that is the plans as of today. There is plenty of time to change their minds on what they will do.

[as58]

The question I asked was "from what distance" can they do spectroscopy at. Sorry guys.

No problem.  C'est la vie.  But I wonder if her answer was accidentally to the intended context.  She may have assumed you meant interferometry because spectroscopy limited to a certain distance range in space doesn't make sense to me.  Maybe some telescope expert could chime in? 

You need to be close enough to the asteroid to get high enough flux to do spectroscopy with good enough S/N. Of course, the distance depends on the properties of the asteroid and the aperture (and other specifications) of the telescope.

We've been through this before, but I still haven't seen anything to indicate that Planetary Resources is even thinking of doing interferometry.

[Robert Thompson]

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2013/02/incoming-wild-m.html
Incoming: Wild Meteorite Crash in Russia (Video)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-meteorite/1921991/
Meteor shower in central Russia injures hundreds

http://kaira.sgo.fi/2013/02/are-2012-da14-and-chelyabinsk-meteor.html
Are 2012 DA14 and the Chelyabinsk meteor related?

[JohnFornaro]

You can't straight line extrapolate down from $10M to $10.  The few millionaires I know would hold on to their $10M at those chances. 

The few billionaires I know ...

Oh yeah?  The few trillionaires infinitiaires I know would beg to differ with you.  I win.

I offer only the anecdotal evidence of my limited experience in this ethereal world of more than one comma in the checking account.  Whether these guys have two or three commas in their checking account, and happen to intersect the circle of our immediate acquaintance is not an issue at all, and doesn't prove a thing.  The "expected value calculations" are certainly there in principle, but what those actual values are is not shared with the blogoshpere.

PRI has not shared any "expected value calculations", therefore you can't straight line extrapolate down from $10M to $10, unless you extrapolate your speculation upwards by the same order of magnitude.

[JohnFornaro]

A:  "It depends..."  Your transcript just cuts off.

Shouldn't be cut off. Did it not upload correctly? Don't open it in notepad if you're on windows btw. I saved this from a mac and the line endings won't show up properly in notepad.

M = Me
A = Audience
P = Presenter

....

M: How far away do you think with the arykd-100s can you look at the composition of the asteroid? How far away do you need to get? [Sorry asked wrong question]

P: It depends upon the asteroid, how big it is. You can see there's a big difference in size [referring to a slide]. So that plot that had the death star one [showed death star in relation to various asteroid sizes], big asteroid you can see it. There was a little dot in the corner and that was the JAXA mission went and explored, so it really depends on the size, the magnitude, but you've gotta get up pretty close i

Hey:  I think there's some problem with your attachment.  It still cuts off after "pretty close i".

[R7]

The initial plans to sell NEO observing affordable telescopes just got free divine marketing boost?

[mlindner]

A:  "It depends..."  Your transcript just cuts off.

Shouldn't be cut off. Did it not upload correctly? Don't open it in notepad if you're on windows btw. I saved this from a mac and the line endings won't show up properly in notepad.

M = Me
A = Audience
P = Presenter

....

M: How far away do you think with the arykd-100s can you look at the composition of the asteroid? How far away do you need to get? [Sorry asked wrong question]

P: It depends upon the asteroid, how big it is. You can see there's a big difference in size [referring to a slide]. So that plot that had the death star one [showed death star in relation to various asteroid sizes], big asteroid you can see it. There was a little dot in the corner and that was the JAXA mission went and explored, so it really depends on the size, the magnitude, but you've gotta get up pretty close i

Hey:  I think there's some problem with your attachment.  It still cuts off after "pretty close i".

Someone else mentioned that and I re-downloaded it to check before and it shows up fine here. Don't open it in notepad is the only thing I can suggest.

[Robotbeat]

The initial plans to sell NEO observing affordable telescopes just got free divine marketing boost?

+1

It's as if the explosion was designed to be as powerful as possible without actually killing anyone. I've heard mention that it was much bigger than North Korea's recent nuclear test.

[JohnFornaro]

Hey:  I think there's some problem with your attachment.  It still cuts off after "pretty close i".

Someone else mentioned that and I re-downloaded it to check before and it shows up fine here. Don't open it in notepad is the only thing I can suggest.

I made sure to re-download; tried WordPad, OpenOffice.  Still cuts off.  Oh well.

[mlindner]

Hey:  I think there's some problem with your attachment.  It still cuts off after "pretty close i".

Someone else mentioned that and I re-downloaded it to check before and it shows up fine here. Don't open it in notepad is the only thing I can suggest.

I made sure to re-download; tried WordPad, OpenOffice.  Still cuts off.  Oh well.

I just rechecked. The file displays fine after downloading it. It's the forum's fault I believe. It reformats all the line endings and removes them for text files.

Edit: I tried uploading a .rtf file and it refuses it. Guess I'm going to give up. I'll report the post to moderator and let them deal with fixing it.

Edit2: Here is a pastebin for the time being. http://pastebin.com/8Q1DxELr

[JohnFornaro]

Thanks for all that effort there.  Looks like only the last sentence was lost in the paste.  I subsequently pasted it into Notepad, and repost here for convenience.  Back in a bit...

[JohnFornaro]

Thanks a bunch. 

Not much of value in those particular answers.

Glad you kept the forty bux.

I'm sticking with my original sentiments, having already read your transcript, and figuring out that so little got lost in the interwebs.

Up the thread a bit, RobotBeat seemed to me to have a good observation:

...if you need to actually buy all the equipment needed to test and then integrate such optics. You need an optical bench, air filtration, optical elements, sensors, oscilloscopes, etc... It adds up pretty quick.

The chatter was that they could launch an article with "non-trivial" optics for about $1M.  The non-triviality would be the ability to do optical spectrometry.  In that field, $1M doesn't seem to purchase what would be necessary.

Go4Mars applies a bit of "expected value calculation" on the investment, postulating a $10M investment and a suggested $5B return, with a 20% chance of achieving that return:

If I think there's a 20% chance of that happening in a decade, I'd make some assumption about inflation, and see how it compares to other opportunities I have on hand.  If 10 million today nets me a 20% chance of $5 billion (ish) in 10 years, it may be a gamble I'd take.  Obviously there are a lot more factors that would weigh in, and the chance of success is extremely subjective.  But that's the main idea.

To bring that down to average joe levels:  If $10 today nets me a 20% chance of $5k (ish) in 10 years, well, that's two Starbucks coffee's I'd forgo.

He makes a mistake of mathematically scaling it down to Starbux, but that is a mistake because the amount is trivial.  While he acknowledges that there are "a lot of other factors", he forgets some common investment strategies for $10M over 10 years.  For example, the $10M real estate deal in Miami, probably has an 80% chance of returning $20M in 10 years.  Heck, a mutual fund returning 7.2% nets $20M in a decade.

Then we got into a juvenile soundtrack about how many billionaires you know, where you lost.  PRI simply doesn't present a good investment opportunity, based on what's publicly out there.

They must believe that they have an "uber-special sauce" which allows these cube sats to achieve what they imply that they can achieve.

Working my way back to the transcript, for which I forgot to say "Thank You":

Answers distilled from the transcript.

1) "So the first thing we want to do is find out more about them. We honestly don't know enough..."  They're "working on a couple of ideas" for microgravity manufacture, but they don't have enough of a rough idea of how this would be done to risk spending public credibility on discussing it.

2)  Q: How far away do you think with the arykd-100s can you look at the composition of the asteroid? How far away do you need to get?  (Which is the question I would have asked, BTW)

A:  "It depends..."  Your transcript just cuts off.

Not much was cut off of question 2.  Allow me:

M: How far away do you think with the arykd-100s can you look at the composition of the asteroid? How far away do you need to get? [Sorry asked wrong question]
 
P: It depends upon the asteroid, how big it is. You can see there's a big difference in size [referring to a slide]. So that plot that had the death star one [showed death star in relation to various asteroid sizes], big asteroid you can see it. There was a little dot in the corner and that was the JAXA mission went and explored, so it really depends on the size, the magnitude, but you've gotta get up pretty close in order to find out [it's composition]. Within the tens to thousands of kilometers.

You asked the right question.  They need to get that Arkyd-100 within 10's to 1,000's of km from the asteroid, in order to figure out its composition.

Hold on to your forty bux.

The initial plans to sell NEO observing affordable telescopes just got free divine marketing boost?

You could also speculate that it was a conspiracy.  Somebody's up there throwing rocks already? In order to drum up capital?

It's not a conspiracy until they start targeting individual posters.  That's why my armchair swivels.  I'm always presenting a moving target...

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

I wonder how much per asteroid found by PR would be worth to the US government in order to have full access to the asteroid's collected data?

$10K, $100K, $1M?

At $100K/asteroid and 100 asteroids found per year that's only $10M. That would be within the new spending increase that the House Science, Space and Technology Committee could propose ($20M original budget to a new budget of $40M). Using an SAA NASA would pay only for actual data collected on each asteroid when it is actually collected.

The second question is how many new asteroid discoveries per year PR thinks they can find? This will set the price on how much the data for each asteroid is worth. Plus a sliding scale based on size being that larger ones are worth more than smaller ones.

[Robotbeat]

...

Up the thread a bit, RobotBeat seemed to me to have a good observation:

...if you need to actually buy all the equipment needed to test and then integrate such optics. You need an optical bench, air filtration, optical elements, sensors, oscilloscopes, etc... It adds up pretty quick.

The chatter was that they could launch an article with "non-trivial" optics for about $1M.  The non-triviality would be the ability to do optical spectrometry.  In that field, $1M doesn't seem to purchase what would be necessary.

by non-trivial optics, I think they just meant not just like a cellphone camera. Didn't Falconsat or something fix up a high-end hobbyist telescope? Optical spectroscopy doesn't have to mean a huge spectrometer cable of splitting hyperfine spectra. It could be as simple as placing a diffraction grating in the beam path.

[plank]

Singularityhub interview with Peter Diamandis.  Nothing really new but a clarifying overview.

[Danderman]

Scientists aiming to make space mining a reality in the next 10 years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-video/9903381/Scientists-aiming-to-make-space-mining-a-reality-in-the-next-10-years.html

Space and mining researchers from around the world are gathering at the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney for the inaugural Off Earth Mining Forum.

They are looking at developing machines that can harvest materials from lunar soil while being remotely controlled from earth.

Experts in space exploration, engineering, robotics, drilling and a space lawyer shared ideas about how existing technologies can be applied to develop remote-controlled mining in space.

At present, large-scale space mining is the stuff of science fiction movies.

But Gordon Roesler, Senior Project Engineer at ACSER, insists it is not only safe, but could have positive environmental consequences for life on earth.

[Robert Thompson]

Nice catch.

http://www.acser.unsw.edu.au/oemf/OEMF%20Program%20-%20First%20Release.pdf

Wow?

[QuantumG]

http://www.acser.unsw.edu.au/oemf/presentations.html
or
http://www.acser.unsw.edu.au/oemf/Presentations/

[go4mars]

Is there a market to have Arkyds go along as a secondary with various payloads just for watching what the payloads do?  If they can be made for $2M, it might be worth watching:

A probe that is looking at an asteroid

A satellite that is doing stuff

A view of dragon getting berthed to ISS from 200+ meters away.

etc.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

http://www.acser.unsw.edu.au/oemf/presentations.html
or
http://www.acser.unsw.edu.au/oemf/Presentations/

I found the presentations very informative and encouraging that "off-earth mining" is progressing in a very pratical manner.