Planetary Resources

[Vultur]

I dunno, but I hope the $40 I paid them to have my picture sent to orbit didn't just go up in smoke!   

If you're talking about the Kickstarter, that is a different spacecraft. The one on this flight was the Arkyd A3 testbed (without the actual telescope); the Kickstarter was for an actual Arkyd 100 telescope.

[simonbp]

And I know the plan all along had been to fly several Arkyd 3's to incrementally test various systems. So they have more.

[Llian Rhydderch]

Chris Lewicki (@interplanetary) said this on Twitter: 

Cheer up everybody - A3 was just a robot! We are making more. #LiveToFlyAnotherDay #ARKYD @PlanetaryRsrcs

[AdrianW]

Tweet by Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis):

"[...] Our amazing team, has our A6 launch in T-10 months. [...]"

[Nilof]

On a side note, planetary resources gave their website a facelift this week:

http://www.planetaryresources.com/

It has a lot of info on it that it didn't have before. Definitely worth checking out.

EDIT: one really interesting change is that they mention a number of explicit candidate asteroids. Most of them in the 100m class.

[yg1968]

Live to fly another day:
http://www.planetaryresources.com/2014/10/live-to-fly-another-day/

[Nilof]

Planetary resources just released a Youtube video announcing their new website one month after they changed the design. They added some stuff since last month. Here's the video:

[Nilof]

...and here's a 2014 recap video that PR released a couple hours ago:

[Nilof]

...And here's yet another new video by PR:

[Impaler]

I'm always flabbergasted when people talk about getting Platinum and other rare metals from asteroids and returning them to the Earth for sale as their business model.  Not because I think this is economically unfeasible but simply that.

Asteroid material is worth MORE in it's pristine state then the value of it's constituent elements as bulk commodities!  I used to live in Tucson Arizona where their is a yearly show of gems, minerals and of course meteorites and thouse things sell for upwards of $100 a gram, orders of magnitude more then the platinum value in even the richest conceivable asteroid.  Any material brought to Earth should be sold into the HUGE and well established specimen market, the fact that the material was collected by spacecraft rather then being picked up off the ground probably makes them MORE valuable too so destroying that uniqueness by refining an asteroid down to mere metal would be throwing money down the drain.

Only when you have completely saturated the specimen market and chunks of asteroid are selling in novelty shops for a dollar a pound would you even think about selling them as ore.  And that won't happen until your bringing tons and possibly hundreds of tons of material per year back to Earth.  Anyone interested in asteroids should be building their business case around specimen sales for the conceivable future and worry about selling raw materials in a generation or three when that becomes practical. 

If these Planetary Resource folks are not completely crazy they know this and just talk about 'mining' because it fits into people's buck-rogers fantasies and generates 'buzz' but I'm afraid they may have drunk their own kool-aid.  They seem to be really over-invested in imaging technology to characterize the composition of asteroids in minute detail, something you really do not need to do for specimen collection.  What the should be building is a Hyabusa like craft designed to scoop up as much material as possible and return it to earth in a simple ballistic reentry capsule.  Perhaps they intend to just sell Earth-imaging services as a stop-gap profitable activity until the case actually closes for even the basic specimen collecting activity.

And lastly, why isn't the company called EXO-planetary Resource.  Cause the name Planetary Resources implies that the exact opposite of what they intend to do, collect resources from outside the planet Earth.

[Cinder]

It's the nature of marketing.  Extraterrestrial things made more familiar sells better than something people can't relate to except in the abstract.  It makes those asteroids into real estate kind of like the Moon was made more real with bootprints and flags on it.

Ultimately the whole solar system is no different from the ground under our feet today.  Planetary Resources triggers that visual.

[AdrianW]

Asteroid material is worth MORE in it's pristine state then the value of it's constituent elements as bulk commodities!

Only as long as you only return small quantities. That market would be saturated soon, and then the price per mass will decrease quickly. They're envisioning (or dreaming of?) a hundreds of billion dollar market, not a tens of millions dollar one.

so destroying that uniqueness by refining an asteroid down to mere metal would be throwing money down the drain

One of their medium term goals is using the mined resources (water, gases, later also metals) in space as consumables and building materials. The payoff will be later, but much larger than if they're selling souvenirs.

They seem to be really over-invested in imaging technology to characterize the composition of asteroids in minute detail, something you really do not need to do for specimen collection.

Their optics and imaging technology is their revenue generator until they can actually make money from asteroids, so it's objectively extremely important for them. They'll also use it for optical communication across space.

What the should be building is a Hyabusa like craft designed to scoop up as much material as possible and return it to earth in a simple ballistic reentry capsule.

No, they shouldn't, because that's a dead-end.

[Beittil]

Looks like they are not only moving on to the next iteration with the A6 demonstrator later in the year, but also they rebuilt the A3 and it will fly on SpX-6!

Jeff Foust ‏@jeff_foust  1h1 hour ago
Brown: next SpaceX CRS flight, SpX-6, will carry 8 CubeSat deployers, including 14 Planet Labs sats and Arkyd-3 reflight. #NRISSWorkshop

[AdrianW]

I just noticed some photos and a "roadmap" on PR's website:
Facilities
Roadmap

[Impaler]

Only as long as you only return small quantities. That market would be saturated soon, and then the price per mass will decrease quickly. They're envisioning (or dreaming of?) a hundreds of billion dollar market, not a tens of millions dollar one.

Small quantities are all that could possibly be returned for decades into the future, even under very optimistic estimates for reduction in launch and spacecraft costs your looking at costs in the range of $10k to $100k per kg of collected material.  The only way that material can be sold profitably is as a specimens.  And the specimen market is already HUGE and is growing by leaps and bounds, the waves of new meteorites from North Africa are only fueling more demand and prices continue to rise.  Remember like De Beers diamond mines, they can release the material to the market at what ever rate they wish so they would be able to easily avoid crashing the market.

One of their medium term goals is using the mined resources (water, gases, later also metals) in space as consumables and building materials. The payoff will be later, but much larger than if they're selling souvenirs.

Sale of in-space propellents/resources is a highly speculative market, it basically dose not exist in ANY form yet so their is no viable business plan around it.  At best it is a potential market that might develop and be serviced someday, the profitability of that market, completely unknowable.  The souvenir specimen market exists TODAY and is FIRM, meteorites, Apollo moon rock, Mars rock (rocks blasted off Mars that fall as meteorites on Earth) all already sell for high prices.  If you can figure out a collection cost lower then the current market value you have a business case that closes with a predictable gross profit margin.  Their is absolutely no reason to bypass the souvenir market on the way to 'bigger' pay-offs later.

Their optics and imaging technology is their revenue generator until they can actually make money from asteroids, so it's objectively extremely important for them. They'll also use it for optical communication across space.

I speculated as much that sale of optics (a well established industry) will be their bread-and-butter.  But this just means Planetary Resource is an optics company with perpetually unfulfilled dreams of being an Asteroid mining company and all of their investors are essentially being duped.   They don't have a viable transition plan from optical-prospecting to mining if they think they will jump directly into platinum group metals as the revenue side of their mining, the scale is simply too big of a jump.

No, they shouldn't, because that's a dead-end.

That's ridiculous, first off the Specimen market can and will continue to demand a steady influx of material so if they were to satisfy that yearly demand they could continue that business indefinitely, yes the market has a CAP in how much revenue could ultimately be made.  Serving this market would get their foot in the door and allow them to actually get operational experience in doing THE CORE ACTIVITY of an Asteroid mining company, actually getting Asteroid material back to Earth and selling it.  They would inevitably learn from doing this and lower their costs of operation and costs per kg of material collected.  They will get the bugs worked out of their systems when they are still small and mistakes are affordable. 

Only then do they scale up and start to look at larger volumes and lower sale price per unit.  This is how REAL gold strikes would actually happen.  First people would pan for nuggets, then they would set up sluices and get flakes, then they would dig the shafts into the mother-load in the side of the mountain.  You start with low volume high value extraction and move down the quantity/quality pyramid to the high volume low value resource.  And this is exactly how the quintessentially successful new-space company did it, SpaceX built the small Falcon-1 (and had it blow up on them 3 times) rather then trying to make the biggest possible rocket for the 'big' payoff, the Falcon-1 was a dead-end from a marketability point of view but it was absolutely indispensable as a learning tool.

Paper on ore value of Asteroids:  http://www.nss.org/settlement/asteroids/RoleOfNearEarthAsteroidsInLongTermPlatinumSupply.pdf

[Danderman]

This thread is not about theoretical possibilities of mining the asteroids, or asteroids vs the Moon, it is about updates for Planetary Resources.

There are separate threads about mining asteroids, please post there.

[AdrianW]

Small quantities are all that could possibly be returned for decades into the future, even under very optimistic estimates for reduction in launch and spacecraft costs your looking at costs in the range of $10k to $100k per kg of collected material.

They are not going to ever return material to Earth the conventional way (i.e., in a capsule), for this very reason. For in-orbit use of volatiles and metals, it's not even needed; for on-ground use of metals, they'll use different methods (in one of their presentations they talked about extremely low-density balls of platinum which they drop onto a desert).
That's why it's a dead-end. Their real business plan and roadmap do not profit from the ability to return small samples, there are no synergies.

Also remember that the destination for any mined material is Earth and its vicinity. It is absolutely impractical and economically infeasible to bring asteroids of a decent size to Earth orbit (for rare metals, we're still talking about parts per million, so a thousand tonnes asteroid still yields only a couple of kilograms of platinum). Any mining will be done on the orbit of the asteroid, only refined material will be brought back.

Sale of in-space propellents/resources is a highly speculative market, it basically dose not exist in ANY form yet so their is no viable business plan around it.  At best it is a potential market that might develop and be serviced someday, the profitability of that market, completely unknowable.  The souvenir specimen market exists TODAY and is FIRM, meteorites, Apollo moon rock, Mars rock (rocks blasted off Mars that fall as meteorites on Earth) all already sell for high prices.

That's the thinking of every company in the history of humanity that failed to create a new market (Kodak ~1990: "Why should we invest in digital cameras? Analog photography is a huge market today, and it's growing!").
And as I showed above, the detour over sample-return does not further Planetary Resources' goal.

They don't have a viable transition plan from optical-prospecting to mining if they think they will jump directly into platinum group metals as the revenue side of their mining

They do not think that.

There are separate threads about mining asteroids, please post there.

I disagree: This discussion is about the business model of Planetary resources, so this thread is the most appropriate one.

[Impaler]

I agree that the discussion is relevant because it is about the business model for Planetary Resource (though I would make the same argument for any prospective Asteroid mining company), but will hold off from replying until folks decide if this.

Linked a paper in my last post that analyzes the ore value of asteroids, will sit it when/if I reply.

[sghill]

Be on the lookout for Planetary Resources to announce asteroid identification and capture technology developments and updates, but don’t hold your breath on refining or metals return capabilities.   Here’s why:

Granted, Planetary Resources is looking at all the minerals and gases trapped in a near Earth asteroid, but looking at the Platinum market only can give us a window into their business model.  Here are some tidbits I pulled from the 2000 paper Impaler linked earlier combined with a Nov. 2014 report on Platinum supplies and demand from Forbes:

2000 mine supply= 5.1 million oz.
2013 mine supply= 5.1 million oz.

2000 global demand was ~5.5 million oz.
2014 global demand was ~8.5 million oz., and is expected to hit 10 million oz in 2015- fueled by auto and electronic demand driven by China’s emerging middle class which makes demand relatively inelastic at this time.

2000 price was ~$500/ oz.
2014 price was ~$1400/ oz.

Roughly 4 million tons of material can be extracted per meter of regolith from a 1-kilometer sphere. Assuming complete extraction from the top 1 meter, this implies roughly $5.6 Billion in revenue from an extracted mass of 130 tons of platinum at 2014 prices.  Obviously Planetary Resources will monetize any other valuables from each cubic meter of mined asteroid, so let’s make that an even $6 billion.

Keep in mind that Planetary Resources doesn’t have to return any of those metals to Earth, nor do they need to have the ability to return them (yet), nor do they really want to until Earth supplies become scarce.  Taking a page from DeBeers, they instead have to estimate the cost on controlling, refining, and shipping the metal- the most important part is actually controlling an asteroid.  They can let outer space act as their vault and trade on the value of the metal because prices are set by demand, actual supply, and future known supplies.

So where does that leave Planetary Resources?  They can make money off their prospecting telescopes, but they can make a vast ocean of money on the metals futures market by actually controlling an asteroid- which means be on the lookout for them to develop this sort of technology. 

They can further make piles of money by actually refining the asteroid as the demand figures above show- and at some point they’ll have to develop that technology in order to keep their claim from being worthless- but they really don’t have any early incentive to do so.  It’s completely secondary to controlling the thing- just like owning an oil field and drilling for oil are two different money making activities. 

They can make a third mountain of money by returning some of those metals to Earth as demand calls for it- and they’ll need to develop THAT technology in conjunction with refining, but it's tertiary because they can always sell their ownership of the space bullion and let the new owners worry about getting it home. 

In fact, I doubt Planetary Resources as an entity will EVER refine or return an ounce to Earth.  It doesn't make good business sense.  A different company will serve as the refiner and yet another will contract as the shipper- just like in any mining activity.  Think Halliburton.

The remainder they will sock away to control influence world prices and and trade on its value just like DeBeers does with its mines and the world's diamond supply or -to a much smaller extent- OPEC with its oil.

Finally, they can make money off the captured gasses for planetary exploration,as has been discussed on other threads, but I think that’s a dead end for them.  Access to space costs are falling, and to take advantage of this very niche, very specific market, they need to actually mine the asteroid, and do it in a way where the valuable gases don’t escape, plus put the gas containers on an intercept where they can be transferred to an outgoing spaceship.  I don’t see the relative profit in actually doing this high-expense mining when compared to the vast profits in low-expense trading in metals futures back on Earth.

[AdrianW]

There are two flaws in your logic:

1) A claimed asteroid has any value at all only when there's a potential buyer. There's no market for asteroid mining rights, because right now there's only one known asteroid mining company on Earth (one serious company – *cough*DSI*cough*), so PR cannot sell the rights to anyone but themselves.

2) Asteroids that are good candidates for mining are not exactly rare – unlike good oil fields – and PR cannot possibly stake a claim on all of them. So what's stopping a potential mining company from simply choosing the next-best one? => No market for asteroid rights.

they need to actually mine the asteroid, and do it in a way where the valuable gases don’t escape

See here. Mining volatiles is most likely a lot simpler than mining metals.