James Cameron, Google founders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot, Jr. are just a few of the big names backing a brand new space exploration company called Planetary Resources, that next Tuesday will "unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity."
According to the press release:
[Planetary Resources] will overlay two critical sectors — space exploration and natural resources — to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources'.
To us, that sounds an awful lot like asteroid-mining. If that winds up being the case, then this is very big news.
The project will be unveiled on Tuesday, April 24th at Seattle's Museum of Flight by X Prize founder and outspoken asteroid-mining supporter Peter Diamandis. Joining him will be former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki and planetary scientist (and former NASA astronaut) Tom Jones. Stay tuned, folks — April 24th could very well go down in history as the day we officially set out to tap the infinite resources of the Universe (unless, of course, James Cameron really is going to film Avatar 3 on the Moon). [Technology Review]
DISCUSSION
Well, we know how much it costs to get to the asteroid belt because we just did it - the Dawn spacecraft is currently in orbit around Vesta, and it cost ~$500M. It won't return to the Earth, but it could if the xenon tanks for its ion thrusters were a bit larger. Say that we beefed the tanks, and added something that could grab, say, one ton of an asteroid to bring it back, and that this only doubled the cost the mission.
That would amount to one billion dollars per ton. Iron ore currently sells for about $150/ton, according to this, about 7 million times less. Asteroid mining is uneconomic by 7 orders of magnitude. Even pure gold is only about $50M/ton.
And that's not even getting into the issue of dropping large rocks from orbit. They really look like ballistic missiles. Who would tolerate that?