Planetary Resources

[Robotbeat]

Impaler, please estimate the current annual revenue of the meteorite selling market. My guess is it's around $10 million per year, but acknowledge I could be off. This is far more relevant than the per-gram price (assuming the per-gram price is above a certain threshold, say $1-10/gram).

This is a critical number.

And a note: no doubt the earliest customers on Earth for asteroid samples will be the collector and scientific community. This will be quite helpful for getting an early revenue stream and testing out the whole technological ecosystem. But that market is easy to saturate. Eventually the platinum group metals market will saturate as well (PGMs are less than $10 billion per year), but at that point you'd have significantly expanded the space economy beyond Earth vicinity (and this would not be dependent at that point on government funding--which accounts for the VAST majority of scientific research funding--even if indirectly through universities) and we'd be in a very different state of things regarding industrial space development.

[Impaler]

I said earlier that I don't have a number for the total market size by my estimate is multiple millions.  I have sent out an inquiry with some Meteorite dealing site to try to get some numbers.


If one agrees that specimen sales come before bulk metal sales then you agree with my central point.  I never said that the specimen market wouldn't be maxed out at some point, only that retrieval technology is so poor that saturation is not going to happen for a LONG time.  Thus anyone who is serious about utilizing Asteroids should plan to go THROUGH a stage of selling specimens before they sell metals, to do otherwise is to imagine that one will run without going through crawling or walking.


AdrianW: 

Good faith should be demonstrated by not making assertions from nothing but personal-incredulity.  You have repeatedly claimed that it can not be done despite clearly having no knowledge of the market places size or value. 

As your links show $100 gram was not even the high end of the market, yet you listed the lowest prices found (the low grade highly eroded stuff picked up off the ground in North Africa) and try to claim this is typical.

You can not seriously believe that 16.5 kg is the totality of the material at the high price point?  Their have been THOUSANDS of retrieved meteorites totaling hundreds of tons.  Asserting that 1 ton would crash the market is simply absurd.   Indeed we need only examine this one example to see how my estimate is reasonable.   The total sales price for the D'Orbigny meteorite would be 6.6 million at $400/g which is is ONE meteorite, I'm asking 100 million from one retrieved Asteroid, this is 15x more, not an astronomical sum and a flooding of the market.

Closing the business case on specimen Asteroid sales is not easy, revenue of ~10 million per year is indeed what I would conservatively estimate can be gotten from Asteroid retrieval missions and that such missions (I'd sell 100kg at $100/g per year for 10 years).  A company could just manage make a small profit in the foreseeable future with reasonable reductions in costs of launch and space-vehicles.

The question is dose the company DO theses missions, which validate their technology and give experience or do they do NOTHING but look at Asteroids through telescopes for 40 years, which is what I foresee for PR given their current fixation on Platinum.

[ChrisWilson68]

As your links show $100 gram was not even the high end of the market, yet you listed the lowest prices found (the low grade highly eroded stuff picked up off the ground in North Africa) and try to claim this is typical.

The idea that the low-end prices are typical seems reasonable to me.  It's the way most collectible markets work -- the vast majority of items sell for low prices and only a few of the most sought-after, rare items command the highest prices.

You can not seriously believe that 16.5 kg is the totality of the material at the high price point?

Why not?  High price points are for things that are very rare.

Their have been THOUSANDS of retrieved meteorites totaling hundreds of tons.

That's irrelevant.  It doesn't affect the rarity of the highest-priced samples.

Indeed we need only examine this one example to see how my estimate is reasonable.   The total sales price for the D'Orbigny meteorite would be 6.6 million at $400/g which is is ONE meteorite, I'm asking 100 million from one retrieved Asteroid, this is 15x more, not an astronomical sum and a flooding of the market.

I don't see how that shows your estimate is reasonable.  You're simply claiming you believe this example.

Closing the business case on specimen Asteroid sales is not easy, revenue of ~10 million per year is indeed what I would conservatively estimate can be gotten from Asteroid retrieval missions and that such missions (I'd sell 100kg at $100/g per year for 10 years).  A company could just manage make a small profit in the foreseeable future with reasonable reductions in costs of launch and space-vehicles.

I can't see that.  $10 million per year is far too little to justify retrieval of an asteroid.

[Robotbeat]

I said earlier that I don't have a number for the total market size by my estimate is multiple millions.  I have sent out an inquiry with some Meteorite dealing site to try to get some numbers....

Multiple billions? A year? For new finds?

Seems very unlikely. I would put a cap of about $100 million per year on it (although I think it's much closer to $10 million per year). I asked Naveen Jain (who has one of the largest collections in the world) on Twitter. We'll see if he responds.

[Robotbeat]

I also emailed Michael Casper, who sells a lot of meteorites. Both those guys should have a much better idea of the total market size than I do.

[Impaler]

I said earlier that I don't have a number for the total market size by my estimate is multiple millions.  I have sent out an inquiry with some Meteorite dealing site to try to get some numbers....

Multiple billions? A year? For new finds?

Seems very unlikely. I would put a cap of about $100 million per year on it (although I think it's much closer to $10 million per year). I asked Naveen Jain (who has one of the largest collections in the world) on Twitter. We'll see if he responds.

You seem to have misread my post, I said Millions, not Billion, as in multiple millions of dollars is the size of the market place, inline with your own estimates.

I continue to be flabbergasted by people who claim that specimen retrieval is 'no worth it' yet are dead-set on mining platinum group metals and nothing else will do.  If you want to say that Asteroids will never be worth exploiting fine, their are huge technical barriers that make that a defensible and logically consistent position to have.  But to claim that that ONLY metal mining is viable and specimens are worthless or a waste of time is simply untenable, I've shown clearly that a business case closes for specimens at orders of magnitude higher cost of obtaining material then it dose for PGMs.

[go4mars]

Let's all concede that under certain scenarios there could be more purchasers for BOTH raw materials and refined. 

[Robotbeat]

I said earlier that I don't have a number for the total market size by my estimate is multiple millions.  I have sent out an inquiry with some Meteorite dealing site to try to get some numbers....

Multiple billions? A year? For new finds?

Seems very unlikely. I would put a cap of about $100 million per year on it (although I think it's much closer to $10 million per year). I asked Naveen Jain (who has one of the largest collections in the world) on Twitter. We'll see if he responds.

You seem to have misread my post, I said Millions, not Billion, as in multiple millions of dollars is the size of the market place, inline with your own estimates.
...

Ah, yes! You're right. Sorry about that.

Yes there's a small market for samples, but it's not enough by itself to pay for the whole effort (not saying you disagree). It'd be a nice early bonus market, but it's only about a thousandth of the PGM market. The propellant market is somewhere between non-existent and several billion per year.

[Robotbeat]

I also emailed Michael Casper, who sells a lot of meteorites. Both those guys should have a much better idea of the total market size than I do.

BTW, Michael Casper said the worldwide market is $5-10 million per year. So I guess we're all in violent agreement here.

[Robotbeat]

Anything going on with planetary resources?

Nothing in the last week, we were discussing this:
http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteriods/#market-for-metals

[KelvinZero]

A bit random, but I quite like the idea of owning a bit of space rock shaved so thin you can see the light through it, perhaps set in glass to preserve and magnify it, so I could be satisfied with very little mass. It's serial number and an image could be available online along with full history. Something collected in space would be much more interest than something fallen to earth.

You might need to figure out how to sell it as man-bling. Perhaps a watch face, knife handle, or examples like that?

btw, that link claims:
The present day space economy spends $ Billions on rocket fuel each year to propel spacecraft into their final orbits and to keep those spacecraft safely in their positions.

I guess it would be less misleading to say cheap propellant in LEO could save billions of dollars? It is not the fuel costing so much but all the hardware being burnt up to get each ton of propellant into LEO?

[RonM]

...Again, whatever value asteroid-mined resources are going to have will depend on their practicality for conversion into finished products close to the point of acquisition, not the export of the material to Earth.

I disagree. That presupposes there's ALREADY a huge reason for stuff going on in space.

We need prime reasons to be in space. Expansion into space desperately needs new markets. Telecommunications is a huge one (trillion dollar annual revenue potential, if you can compete!), but that's very near-Earth and doesn't need much greater launch capacity than we already have.

Resource extraction WOULD be a significant new market for space. And if there's any possible way to export stuff to Earth for a profit, we should look into it because otherwise space is just a self-licking ice cream cone.

I mean, this isn't that compelling: "Why mine asteroids?" "So we can build stuff and provide propellant." "Why are we building stuff and using propellant in space?" "So we can mine asteroids!"

And the space tourism market hasn't really appeared. It'd be nice to truly start utilizing the vast resources in space, since it'd provide the engine of organic economic growth that is truly needed to expand into space.


... and mining PGMs isn't likely to be an enormous business (because the demand is fairly small, so it's easy to saturate the market), but it may be larger than the launch services market. Gold is significantly larger (the demand here being largely because humans are obsessed with gold rather than industrial uses), but still smaller than telecomms. But still, PGMs would genuinely be a new market in space that could help drive demand for the rest of the space economy. Once we have enough markets in space, we WILL start seeing demand for machinery and propellant in space as we become more self-sufficient in space, but if we rely solely on self-licking-ice-cream-coneness, then it's not nearly as persuasive as utilizing real resources.

PGM extraction could offset some of the costs of asteroid mining. Even gold maybe worth shipping back to Earth with PGMs to reduce costs. Add that to the profitable extraction of water and the rest of the materials (carbon, iron, etc.) could become cheap enough to encourage space construction.

If most of the structure of a communications satellite could be made in orbit, even out of low grade steel, then only the electronics need to be launched from Earth.

Assuming an initial orbital industry where complex processing is not available, what can be done with carbon, iron, nickle, etc. in orbit? Where could Planetary Resources take this?

[llanitedave]

Assuming an initial orbital industry where complex processing is not available, what can be done with carbon, iron, nickle, etc. in orbit? Where could Planetary Resources take this?

Or how about research that would enable complex processing in space?  You don't even have to go all the way out to an asteroid at first.  Just bring up a selection of material into orbit that simulates what you would find in an asteroid's regolith.

[Impaler]

I said earlier that I don't have a number for the total market size by my estimate is multiple millions.  I have sent out an inquiry with some Meteorite dealing site to try to get some numbers....

Multiple billions? A year? For new finds?

Seems very unlikely. I would put a cap of about $100 million per year on it (although I think it's much closer to $10 million per year). I asked Naveen Jain (who has one of the largest collections in the world) on Twitter. We'll see if he responds.

You seem to have misread my post, I said Millions, not Billion, as in multiple millions of dollars is the size of the market place, inline with your own estimates.
...

Ah, yes! You're right. Sorry about that.

Yes there's a small market for samples, but it's not enough by itself to pay for the whole effort (not saying you disagree). It'd be a nice early bonus market, but it's only about a thousandth of the PGM market. The propellant market is somewhere between non-existent and several billion per year.

I'm satisfied with the 10 million market size, the agreement seems quite broad, note though it is a rapidly growing market with a hard upper limit on material available by conventional means, so over time the advantages of supplying it will only grow as the market size and prices rise.

I don't this notion that if I cant make revenue of billions then it is not worth it?  Describing the only near-term viable activity that an Asteroid company could do as a mere 'early bonus market' is inaccurate because it suggests it is option and I feel it is mandatory, terms like 'foot-in-the-door', 'launching pad' or 'pathfinder' are more appropriate.  Or to use a nice meme it is "step 2 in your underpants gnome business model", without it your plans are incomplete.

You are not perhaps you under the assumption that specimen collection has to provide all the capitol necessary to do PGM extraction are you?  That is clearly not necessary because a mining company would seek new investors for that phase when they are capable of doing it, and having actually demonstrated a profitable mission in the past would be a huge boon in attracting said investors.

All that matters is if each Asteroid grabbing mission can cover it's own costs and turn a profit.  I'm allocating ~100 million for mission cost and expect to generate ~10 million in revenue per year over 10 years.  That is a TINY sum of money compared to what extraction of PGM would cost to start, but is probably more then what Planetary Resources is spending now.  Remember this is a company that is basically burning money like an internet start-up right now developing 'tech' that they say will contribute to getting PGM 'someday', ALL their present missions are money sinks, I'm describing a way they can make thouse tech development missions self-financing. 

[RonM]

Assuming an initial orbital industry where complex processing is not available, what can be done with carbon, iron, nickle, etc. in orbit? Where could Planetary Resources take this?

Or how about research that would enable complex processing in space?  You don't even have to go all the way out to an asteroid at first.  Just bring up a selection of material into orbit that simulates what you would find in an asteroid's regolith.

Yes, research would be important to develop complex processing in space, but the cost to deploy that technology right from the start might be too expensive. Then again, additive manufacturing could keep costs down.

Developing the raw stock for printers might not be that difficult. Today we need sophisticated alloys and construction techniques to keep the mass down because of launch costs. With inexpensive propellent from asteroid mining, materials that are more massive wouldn't be an issue as long as they were made in space instead of launched from Earth. Not having to survive launch from Earth also means the structures don't have to be as strong, reducing the material needed. Perhaps the properties of nickel-iron straight from asteroids without additional processing or the leftovers from extracting PGMs would be sufficient.

[ChrisWilson68]

All that matters is if each Asteroid grabbing mission can cover it's own costs and turn a profit.  I'm allocating ~100 million for mission cost and expect to generate ~10 million in revenue per year over 10 years.

That doesn't meet your requirement of covering its own costs, let alone turning a profit.  Future money is worth less than current money.  You have to take that into account in an ROI calculation.  You also have to take into account risk.  If there's only a 50% chance the mission will succeed, it only justifies half the investment it otherwise would.

That is a TINY sum of money compared to what extraction of PGM would cost to start, but is probably more then what Planetary Resources is spending now.  Remember this is a company that is basically burning money like an internet start-up right now developing 'tech' that they say will contribute to getting PGM 'someday', ALL their present missions are money sinks, I'm describing a way they can make thouse tech development missions self-financing.

They're only self-financing if you were already going to do all the same work anyway.  I don't think that's the case here.  Some of it would be the same (getting to the asteroid, bringing something back) but the technology to bring back an intact asteroid, or cut out intact pieces and bring them back, is not the same as the technology to extract metals or highly-enriched ores and bring those back to Earth.  For example, one of the proposals to get metals back to Earth is to make a large, thin ball out of it and just let that fall to Earth.  Obviously, you'd need a different method to bring back intact asteroid material.

EDIT: Also, $100 million is way too low to develop any interesting technology for metal extraction.

[Nilof]

Meteorites demonstrably make their way down to Earth rather often. Nudging asteroids into orbits that intersect earth is a viable business model... Feel free to quote me on that.

More specifically, demonstrating reliable accuracy of "dumb" payloads to a targeted region on Earth would be necessary for later PGM retrieval. You might as well make some money from specimens out of the process.

With that said, I think the main opportunity for profit would be providing fuel for the next series of moon landings. Make fuel in lunar orbit. Team up with a company that makes rockets to build a reusable lunar lander that can use said fuel. Then sell lunar landings at a fixed price to anyone who happens to have a rocket capable of sending people to cis-lunar space but no obvious plan for what to do with that capability...

Is that a risky business model? Certainly. But it isn't more risky than Bigelow's "build space station modules and hope that someone will want them" plan. Demand for the two should be roughly comparable.

[Impaler]

That doesn't meet your requirement of covering its own costs, let alone turning a profit.  Future money is worth less than current money.  You have to take that into account in an ROI calculation.  You also have to take into account risk.  If there's only a 50% chance the mission will succeed, it only justifies half the investment it otherwise would.

First I always said the case was marginal and I don't even think it is possible TODAY to close the business case, just that it will close before PGM mining and the closing could be near-term.  Obviously not accounting for Cost of Capitol or showing any profit or calculating risk was merely for rough numbers in which orders-of-magnitude are what are being looked at, so this is both pedantic on your part and a double-standard when nothing remotely comparable has been shown for the PGM mining business case.

They're only self-financing if you were already going to do all the same work anyway.  I don't think that's the case here.  Some of it would be the same (getting to the asteroid, bringing something back) but the technology to bring back an intact asteroid, or cut out intact pieces and bring them back, is not the same as the technology to extract metals or highly-enriched ores and bring those back to Earth.  For example, one of the proposals to get metals back to Earth is to make a large, thin ball out of it and just let that fall to Earth.  Obviously, you'd need a different method to bring back intact asteroid material.

EDIT: Also, $100 million is way too low to develop any interesting technology for metal extraction.

Doing an asteroid retrieval requires a set of technologies, everyone one of which is is SUBSET of the more elaborate and complex mining operation.  Simply because it dose not use/validate EVERY technology in the latter dose not make it useless, it makes it a technology demonstrating and risk-retiring activity.  Their would still be a need to develop actual mining in-situ on Asteroids.  The 100 million is thus not for the purpose of developing the mining and refining steps, that is the whole point it is a much smaller sum that retires other risks while still allowing the minimum revenue generating mission.

And as for the proposal about metal-space-balls, I find it ridiculously implausable.  An object is not going to be able to travel through deep space on a heliocentric trajectory from the Asteroid to Earth without guidance and if by some miracle you could hit the Earth you would have no clue where it would land.  At best this sphere could be dropped from LEO but if it was not given a deliberate reentry burn it wold just have a random orbital decay and would have a high likelihood of simply being lost.  And if your already in LEO you might as well be retrieving the Platinum via what ever robust cheap access to LEO we obviously have as a prerequisite to doing the mining anyways.

As you either need both guidance and propulsion to get material back to Earth from an Asteroid I see no reason not to go with something like a conventional heat-shield and a SEP vehicle to push it towards Earth until were close enough to release and have it land in a defined area for retrieval.  This is how the Hyabusa samples were returned, I just see the reentry capsule being up-sized.  The vehicle would be mere satellite size and it would need more propulsion to carry a 1 ton asteroid around.

[didacticus]

I think it's important not to consider this issue in terms of "$100M for the first capture, limited capability to extract resources, few customers for expensive fuel" vs. "$5-7M launches, competitors who can do capture for $25M". There's a lot of time and a lot of steps between those, and the equation is going to change over that time - not overnight. Also, even if you have $25M and the technology to do it, you can't launch and rope an asteroid the next day - it takes months/years to reach an asteroid, by which time PR already has one, two, or a dozen lined up to cater to whatever market you're thinking of entering. And remember, if competitors can do it for $25M, so can PR and they probably would be the first to do it so cheaply!

[Vultur]

PGM extraction could offset some of the costs of asteroid mining. Even gold maybe worth shipping back to Earth with PGMs to reduce costs.

Isn't gold at least as expensive/valuable as platinum now?