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from the gonna-take-a-trip-on-my-favorite-rocket-ship dept.
The asteroid-mining industry has taken a step closer to becoming an actual thing, with the successful deployment of Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft from the International Space Station Wednesday night. The A3R's three-month mission will be used to test and validate some basic technologies that the company hopes to incorporate in future spacecraft that will prospect near-Earth asteroids for potentially valuable resources.
"Our philosophy is to test often, and if possible, to test in space," says Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki. "The A3R is the most sophisticated, yet cost-effective, test demonstration spacecraft ever built."
The small craft was sent to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 resupply mission in April. On Wednesday (July 15), it was sent out the Kibo airlock to begin checking out its avionics, control systems and software, among other systems. It will be followed up by the Arkyd-6 (A6), another demonstrator set to launch later this year. The larger A6 will check out next-generation attitude control, power and communication systems, as well as the sensors that will be used to detect resources with good potential for mining.
When I was a kid I found a science fiction novel on the shelves in a cabin in Glacier National Park entitled, "Assignment in Space with Rip Foster," in which the heroes try to steer an asteroid of pure thorium back to Earth orbit. The cover of the book was hokey, but the story was one of the better "science" science fiction stories I've read, in the sense that there were no magical technologies to make everything easy to accomplish; there was just plain old rocketry and physics. But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Disagree) by deimtee on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:40AM
But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?
If you think you can't make a profit while intentionally crashing a market, then you haven't been paying attention.
But even without doing anything that dodgy, you could sell most of the estimated production of the mission on the futures market before you even launch.
As you successfully accomplish each step, the futures price will fall, making your contracts more valuable. By the time you land the resource, the price will have dropped to its new equilibrium.
Extra usage at the new lower price may help support the price, but you won't care much as you will have locked in the sell price.
Also holding an asset like the futures contracts which is steadily rising in value is very stabilising for a company.. Bankers, etc. see those sorts of things as more solid than 5000 tonnes of platinum out near Mars.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:13AM
You're assuming a high-confidence operation - which early asteroid mining endeavors will not be. Even if investors were stupid enough to buy futures at current resource prices (they wouldn't, they'd buy at the projected, post-market-crash, value-upon-delivery prices), they still wouldn't pay the full price. They'd pay price * expected chance of success (probably low until you have a proven track record). Investment, especially speculation, is a form of gambling after all, and as such you have to factor in the odds of losing to the value of the "lottery ticket". Which is why no professional gambler will play lotteries except in very specific circumstances - normally the game is heavily biased toward the house, play long enough and you're pretty much guaranteed to lose.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:18PM
I may be misremembering, but I thought I had read about multi-year futures contracts. Looking around on google, I can't find any futures contracts for more than one year.
Doesn't really change the situation, just means that you may have to go with private supply contracts.
I am assuming that who-ever launches one of these mining operations is competent. They will plan it all out before any hardware is committed, including the finance side.
I am also assuming that anyone who can do this can also credibly go to the major platinum consumers and offer supply contracts at fixed prices, with delivery well into the future.
If the mission does fail, it will likely fail catastrophically, at which point they will likely declare bankruptcy. If it doesn't fail then they will sell the platinum at the contract prices.
Comparing it to a lottery is wrong. Lotteries are zero-sum, this will either produce a significant increase in total wealth (success - more platinum) or a decrease (rocket blows up - wasted resources)
(The crack about making a profit while crashing a market was a reference to those bankers/wall streeters who made billions on failing loans via credit default swaps.)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.