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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) 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.