QuoteRemember, space is already a $300 billion a year market and growing. Yeah, which mostly consists of broadcasting reruns of Duck Dynasty...A real feasibility study that clearly explains how to make even $10B/year from space mining has never been completed.
Remember, space is already a $300 billion a year market and growing.
QuoteRemember, space is already a $300 billion a year market and growing. Yeah, which mostly consists of broadcasting reruns of Duck Dynasty...
A real feasibility study that clearly explains how to make even $10B/year from space mining has never been completed.
I really do wonder why there is not much more talk about Phobos. For interplanetary activities it is right where it is needed. It should contain lots of volatiles, hopefully including carbon. Probably enough gravity to ease handling of liquids yet low enough to make escape a non issue.There should have been a flurry of probes descending on Phobos.
A simple formalism is presented to assess how many asteroids contain ore, i.e. commercially profitable material, and not merely a high concentration of a resource. I apply this formalism to two resource cases: platinum group metals (PGMs) and water. Assuming for now that only Ni-Fe asteroids are of interest for PGMs, then 1% of NEOs are rich in PGMs. The dearth of ultra-low delta-v (<4.5 km s-1) NEOs larger than 100 m diameter reduces the ore-bearing fraction to only ~1 in 2000 NEOs. As 100 m diameter NEOs are needed to have a value >= US$1 B and the population of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 100 m diameter is ~20,000 (Mainzer et al. 2011) the total population of PGM ore-bearing NEOs is roughly 10. I stress that this is a conservative and highly uncertain value. For example, an order of magnitude increase in PGM ore-bearing NEOs occurs if delta-v can as large as 5.7 km s-1. Water ore for utilization in space is likely to be found in ~1/1100 NEOs. NEOs as small as 18 m diameter can be water-ore-bodies because of the high richness of water (~20%) expected in ~25% of carbonaceous asteroids, bringing the number of water-ore-bearing NEOs to ~9000 out of the 10 million NEOs of this size. These small NEOs are, however, hard to find with present surveys. There will be ~18 water-ore-bearing NEOs >100 m diameter. These estimates are at present highly imprecise and sensitive to small changes, especially in the maximum delta-v allowed. Nonetheless the low values found here mean that much improved determinations of each of the terms of the formalism are urgently needed. If better estimates still find small numbers of ore-bearing NEOs then thorough surveys for NEA discovery and, especially, characterization are needed. Strategies for the two classes are likely to be different.
The number of ore-bearing asteroids could well be small and remote telescopic techniques are inadequate to identify such asteroids confidently. Finding an asteroid that can be profitably mined requires proximate observations from assay probes. Here we use a simple statistical approach to estimate the number of assay probes, Nassay, needed to find at least one ore-bearing asteroid at a high confidence (90%, 95%, 99%). We present results for a wide range of values of the probability of an asteroid being rich in the resource of interest, Prich. We find that Nassay depends strongly on Prich, for likely values of Prich (<0.5). For a plausible value of Prich~0.1 then to obtain 90% confidence that at least one ore-bearing asteroid is found, Nassay = 22, and for 99% confidence Nassay = 44. A factor two increase in Prich roughly halves Nassay, while even for Prich~0.5, Nassay (90%) = 4. Hence any improvement in asteroid characterization prior to sending probes to its proximity would be an effective way to cost-effectively search for valuable resources among the asteroids. Some possibilities for doing so are briefly discussed.
Actually, that was me who posted that. I suppose it depends on what the economic break-even point is for different PGM concentrations, they might be considering only the lowest-hanging fruit in this case.
Quote from: Mongo62 on 12/17/2013 12:28 pmActually, that was me who posted that. I suppose it depends on what the economic break-even point is for different PGM concentrations, they might be considering only the lowest-hanging fruit in this case.Yeah. And as far as I know, Planetary Resources hasn't said how they plan to extract/process/refine the metals. Without that knowledge, I don't see how you can say what the needed concentration to be profitable is. So it seems to me saying "1 in 2000" or any other number at this stage is kind of meaningless. Admittedly, they clearly state their assumptions -- I just don't see why they are any more valid than any other set...
The problem with PGMs as I see it, is that the ores aren't that particularly rich. I mean, what are we really looking at for an iron-nickel asteroid: probably on the order of 50 ppm average?
http://spaceref.biz/2013/10/space-mining-entrepreneur-discussion.html
Anyone know who/what process is reducing the production cost of titanium by 2 orders of magnitude? First I've heard of that!
Recently, researchers at the Materials Science & Metallurgy department of the Cambridge university, UK have reported a novel process for production of metals and alloys from their solid oxides directly by molten salt electrolysis. The process called ‘FFC (Fray-Farthing-Chen) Cambridge process’ was discovered in 1997 by observing that it was possible to reduce solid oxide films on titanium foil by making the foil cathode in a bath of molten calcium chloride. Subsequently, it was demonstrated that it was possible to reduce solid titanium oxide pellets. The feasibility of electro deoxidation of many metal oxides was established in laboratory experiments and the process was globally patented in 1998. The process is reportedly more suitable for electro reduction of the high-melting transition metal oxides and actinides. It is claimed that titanium metal can be produced cost-effectively and in a more environmentally friendly way by the FFC process. The high demand for titanium metal and its high cost of production by the current Kroll process has therefore generated a lot of interest in the new process worldwide. The process is being discussed as one with immense potential to change the entire scenario of extractive metallurgy.
Well, bad news for space mining fans: A new Harvard study, reported on by the BBC, suggests that the number of near-Earth objects with commercially-viable mineral content may have been over-estimated by a factor of 100! It's still all basically inspired guesswork but, IMHO, published studies like this will make it harder for PR to find venture capital and other forms of investment.
