Planetary Resources

[Robotbeat]

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?

Of the same order.

But more importantly, the market for gold is MUCH larger than the market for all the platinum-group metals combined (which are only slightly larger than just platinum by itself). Humans like shiny gold for some reason, like to lock it up in vaults.

[Robotbeat]

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?

But for different reasons.  Gold has less of its value in industrial use demand and more of its value in wealth-storage-alternative demand.  e.g., there's not enough platinum for the things we like to use it for, whereas gold gets turned into ingots and sits in vaults.

A huge new supply of gold (say doubling the supply) may cause its price to fall to rock-bottom. People buy gold for its rarity. Take that away, and its value will drop. Maybe we can use it to pave our roads?

[nSpace]

Prices in US$ per troy oz
Gold: 1 209
Platinum: 1 187
Palladium: 820
Rhodium: 1180
Iridium: 580
Ruthenium: 56
Osmium: 400 

Ballpark yearly world production in tonnes:
Gold: 2800
Platinum: 250
Palladium:  300
Rhodium: 30
Iridium: 10
Ruthenium: 35
Osmium: <1

The world usage of new gold mined is about 50% for jewelry, 40% for investments, and 10% for industrial applications.

[Robotbeat]

Huh, that's more Palladium than I thought. (Not surprised about the gold being 90% intangibles.)

[Warren Platts]

A huge new supply of gold (say doubling the supply) may cause its price to fall to rock-bottom. People buy gold for its rarity. Take that away, and its value will drop. Maybe we can use it to pave our roads?

Doubling the supply of gold would be difficult considering the total supply of "above ground" gold is around 160,000 mT (currently worth ~6-7 trillion USD). This is something like 95% of all the gold that's ever been mined. This is all part of the gold market: e.g., when the price goes up, people start taking their jewelry in to get it melted down for cash. (I'm sitting on a small stash of gold fillings left over from my Dad's dental business that I'm going to send in when I get around to it.) Most gold used in electronics applications eventually gets recycled.

Thus, the gold market is quite different from most commodities markets like oil, as it never really gets consumed. To put it in other words, the gold price is mainly driven by demand that moves with unpredictable political cycles, because it's basically impossible to oversupply the market with newly mined gold.

Consider that 160,000 tonnes is A LOT of gold. Consider for comparison that the total amount of known, below-ground, unmined gold is only about 45,000 mT, at least according to one website.

So we're heading into a "peak gold" situation shortly, if we're not already there. High-quality, new gold deposits simply don't exist anymore, at least not on Planet Earth.

Meanwhile, with all the QE going on all over the world, there may come a time in the not too distant future when people get disgusted with debased fiat currencies, and gold will return to its rightful place as the global reserve currency of last resort--that would likely cause a price increase in gold's intrinsic value over and above the rampant inflation we see everywhere.

Whereas the market for newly mined gold is on the order of $100 billion per year. Thus, a space mining project grossing $10-20B/year would scarcely scratch the market, but would be enough to support a robust commercial space program IMHO.

Heck, you wouldn't even have to bring the gold back to Earth. Simply make individual ingots to the exacting standards of the LBMA (not a trivial refining process, to be sure), and set up a vault in space, either in orbit or on the Moon. Then the bars would trade on the international gold market just like any other vault. As a matter of course, gold bars do not move around much: if someone from France buys gold stored in a New York City vault, for example, they are mostly content to leave the gold where it is, as transporting gold is expensive and dangerous, and the buyer has to pay the delivery costs.

Indeed, the lengths that vault owners are willing to go in order to keep their precious metals secure are hard to believe. Consider that in London and New York City, there are perhaps a dozen or more bullion vaults between them, and NOBODY knows where they are--except of course the people who work there (and maybe NSA and GCHQ, but years of dogged, amateur internet sleuthing has turned up zilch--try it yourself: trust me, none of you have sufficient google fu). Thus, a vault in space would probably be viewed as a good thing by traders IMHO because what could be more secure than a vault at a Lagrange point or the freakin' Moon?!? If somebody needs a little gold to make some fillings or IC's, they don't need to get it from space.

Here's a fun, (and brief 4:55) inside look at the vault that supposedly holds most of the SPDR GLD ETF gold bars. (Note the bar that Bob actually holds up to the camera doesn't belong to GLD!  )

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000043030

[Robotbeat]

I meant doubling the annual production of gold, not immediately doubling the world's stocks. Sorry for the ambiguity. Either way, it would likely lead to a big decline in the value of gold.

[Robotbeat]

And yes, the annual gold mining market is about $100 billion, which is an order of magnitude greater than the PGM market, but still smaller than the existing space services market (which is about twice that). And telecommunications overall is at least an order of magnitude higher revenue than that, at $1-2 trillion per year.

(Incidentally, that's why a MegaConstellation is a big deal. It can, /if successful/, access one of the largest markets you can think of. Only the--quite questionable technically and economically--space-based solar power market could conceivably match the size of telecomms, at least until we're at this point in space development: )

[Warren Platts]

I meant doubling the annual production of gold, not immediately doubling the world's stocks. Sorry for the ambiguity. Either way, it would likely lead to a big decline in the value of gold.

But see, that is my point: I was surprised to see that 2014 production was slightly higher than 2013, but still we are likely headed into a peak gold situation, such that gold produced in space will merely fill in for the declining production here on Earth. But even so, total gold mined last year was 1.7% of the total gold market, so if you doubled that somehow, you've only increased the above-ground supply by another 1.7%. This is not like the oil market: if you somehow doubled your annual production, you also double the above ground supply. As long as the increase to the above ground gold stock does not increase faster than the rate of growth of world's economy, it's hard to see how increasing mining production is going to bearish for gold prices.

The mega-constellation idea is intriguing. If you manufactured them in space from asteroidal materials, you wouldn't have to launch them, and they'd already be in high orbits. I've often wondered what a 100,000 unit, full-spectrum Brilliant Pebbles system would be worth to a either the US or Chinese MIC.

But what we need is that first killer app that can close a business case for the very first manufacturing project. Gold could be that killer app IMHO; once you've mastered manufacturing gold bars in space to 99.95% purity, it's a small step to satellite manufacturing.

[Robotbeat]

If you have smallish satellites (but much bigger than cubesats), you can build your megaconstellation with only slightly better than current launch rates. Not a huge challenge at all if you have even partial reusability. I don't think asteroid mining comes into that conversation.

I was merely bringing it up to provide contrast. The existing space services market is already much bigger than even the gold mining market and a mega-constellation could access an order of magnitude larger market than that. So in the grand scheme of things, asteroid mining is likely to still be a small part of the overall space economy (as will be space tourism or even colonization, at least until we get hundreds of thousands of people /per year/ going into space, larger even than Musk's 80,000/year) which will, in the near-to-mid-term even super optimistic scenarios, likely remain dominated by telecommunications.

Planetary Resources talks about a trillion-dollar (annual revenue) market, but none exists for asteroid mining. Not for water, not for PGMs, not for even gold. Maybe someday, but it will depend on the global economy (and thus demand for these metals) expanding ten-fold.

[LouScheffer]

Indeed, the lengths that vault owners are willing to go in order to keep their precious metals secure are hard to believe. Consider that in London and New York City, there are perhaps a dozen or more bullion vaults between them, and NOBODY knows where they are--except of course the people who work there (and maybe NSA and GCHQ, but years of dogged, amateur internet sleuthing has turned up zilch--try it yourself: trust me, none of you have sufficient google fu).

Strange.  I tried googling ' "gold vault" new york city' and found this.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-02/why-jpmorgans-gold-vault-largest-world-located-next-new-york-fed
which claims:

And since both of these applications also contained an official list of licensed "depositories and weighmasters" we finally can compile a full, official list of where the largest commercial gold vaults in New York are located:

Followed by a list of addresses and the computer codes that refer to them.  So it seems at least some amateurs have tracked this down...

[Warren Platts]

Indeed, the lengths that vault owners are willing to go in order to keep their precious metals secure are hard to believe. Consider that in London and New York City, there are perhaps a dozen or more bullion vaults between them, and NOBODY knows where they are--except of course the people who work there (and maybe NSA and GCHQ, but years of dogged, amateur internet sleuthing has turned up zilch--try it yourself: trust me, none of you have sufficient google fu).

Strange.  I tried googling ' "gold vault" new york city' and found this.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-02/why-jpmorgans-gold-vault-largest-world-located-next-new-york-fed
which claims:

And since both of these applications also contained an official list of licensed "depositories and weighmasters" we finally can compile a full, official list of where the largest commercial gold vaults in New York are located:

Followed by a list of addresses and the computer codes that refer to them.  So it seems at least some amateurs have tracked this down...

Good job! You found the entrance to the rabbit hole...  Now see if you can find HBSC vault where the SPDR GLD bars are held where Bob Pisani visited! I knew about the one at Chase Plaza that's supposedly connected by a tunnel the New York Fed's vault. However, none of these locations have been independently confirmed as far as I know by their respective, supposed owners. These exceptions prove the rule that the locations of these vaults are generally closely guarded secrets; albeit secrets that occasionally get exposed by gold bug paparazzies.

Thus, to bring this back on topic, it could be the case that gold traders might actually support an orbital gold vault filled with London Good Delivery ingots manufactured by an asteroid mining company. This idea is not original to me: there was a recent Space Review article that discussed the same concept.

[Warren Platts]

If you have smallish satellites (but much bigger than cubesats), you can build your megaconstellation with only slightly better than current launch rates. Not a huge challenge at all if you have even partial reusability. I don't think asteroid mining comes into that conversation.

Perhaps. But this does not amount to a qualitative quantum leap in space capabilities that a real, in-space mining/manufacturing project would represent. What it is is an attempt to cut out the current middlemen in communications satellite business. It's just more of the same: more bandwidth, more channels, more movies, more obesity, more orbital debris. But hey, I'm all for it! Heart-of-Darkness, 3rd World places like Wyoming would benefit a lot for sure! 

I was merely bringing it up to provide contrast. The existing space services market is already much bigger than even the gold mining market and a mega-constellation could access an order of magnitude larger market than that. So in the grand scheme of things, asteroid mining is likely to still be a small part of the overall space economy

Please define "space services market". My understanding is that the vast majority of this "revenue" is people's TV and internet subscriptions. Most of this revenue is not going to the satellite providers themselves: it's going to the people who actually provide the content, like the actors and producers that make the Netflix movies. If Facebook and Google finance this megaconstellation, it is nonetheless a little misleading to say that all of Facebook and Google's revenue are part of the space services market just because they pipe their content through satellites. That's like counting the revenue that a dentist makes installing gold fillings with gold that was mined 10 years ago as part of the gold mining industry market. We might as well say that the gold mining industry is $60 trillion USD per year because that's how much gold is traded annually. 

Planetary Resources talks about a trillion-dollar (annual revenue) market, but none exists for asteroid mining. Not for water, not for PGMs, not for even gold.

I agree. And they say it with a straight face too.

Maybe someday, but it will depend on the global economy (and thus demand for these metals) expanding ten-fold.

Well, $100B/year or even $10B/year is nothing to sneeze at. The main thing is get the ball rolling, and revenues at that level could possibly get that ball rolling. Then once capabilities are established, the space ecosystem can start bootstrapping itself up. The plan all along is to use most of space mined material in space--I mean very few people are talking about importing steel from space--although fresh steel from a nickel-iron asteroid would be of the highest quality. Don't know if a SBSP system would ever work, but if it could, the the world's energy market is $6 trillion per year, and is growing fast. Capture a portion of that, and you could make a trillion a year easy.

[A_M_Swallow]

Even if the space ISRU market grows exponentially there are several years before sales covers operational costs. These long money burn times have to be factored in.

[Borklund]

New video, complete with Arkyd renders (not previously seen?)

[Eer]

Site also says counting down 6 days to next launch for them - we don't have anything on our calendar around April 6-7.  Any idea what their launcher is?

[Robotbeat]

Site also says counting down 6 days to next launch for them - we don't have anything on our calendar around April 6-7.  Any idea what their launcher is?

I think it's Dragon, they just haven't updated.

[Skyrocket]

Site also says counting down 6 days to next launch for them - we don't have anything on our calendar around April 6-7.  Any idea what their launcher is?

I think it's Dragon, they just haven't updated.

It is the Dragon CRS-6 mission. Their A3R cubesat will be on board to be deployed from the ISS..

[Eer]

Great. Thx...I'd hoped that was the case.

[sanman]

Update to Kickstarter supporters: Arkyd 3 Reflight on SpaceX CRS-6, April 13

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arkydforeveryone/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0/

[AdrianW]

Now we can finally end any speculation whether Planetary Resources might bring an asteroid closer to Earth orbit for resource extraction: Safe and efficient asteroid mining.