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"It is estimated that a kilometer-size nickel-iron asteroid contains 7 billion tons of iron, 1 billion tons of nickel, and enough cobalt to supply the entire world for 3000 years. the total value at today's prices would be about 5 trillion dollars!".

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OK, so we have 8+ billion tons of material worth 5 trillion dollars. If you can refine it and ship it to earth for 68 cents per pound, you can break even. You have to do better than that to make a profit. Does that really sound feasible to you? I think it costs more than that to transport something by airplane.

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Well, I think iron is selling for something like two dollars a pound right now, so I don't know where the 68 cent figure came from. In any case, I was not attempting to judge whether it would be economically feasible to mine and send the stuff earthward. With the abundance of solar energy in space to do smelting, it might make more sense to do the refining on-site and ship the finished product off in smaller reentry packages, or just use them to build space structures for colonies or bases. However, Kowal does make some good points in his book on how it might be done, so it would be best to take a look at his book. Clear skies to you.

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David W. Knisely
Hyde Memorial Observatory
http://www.hydeobservatory.info
Prairie Astronomy Club
http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org

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Still, these are ultimately limited by what the "customers" (TV viewers, magazine readers, etc) want and are willing to pay for. I'm guessing the interest in a manned Mars landing are roughtly comparable to the Olympic games - the '08 Beijing game will have about $20 billion in revenue. About half of that is from TV broadcast rights, and much of the rest from merchandising and corporate sponsorship.

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I don't think $20 billion is anywhere close to getting you to Mars.

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I agree that 20 billion dollars is probably not enough to pay for a trip to mars. I do think that you could raise more money for that than the 2008 Olympic games will raise, but how much more I couldn't say.

But I do think you would come MUCH closer to financing a trip to mars this way than by trying to pay for it by bringing home a load of ore, no matter how valuable the ore might be.

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Dirt Cheap Astronomy
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Rick may have been thinking of the princess Dejah Thoris. John Carter had the transportation problem sorted out, too. (Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars novels of ~ 90? years ago)

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Better her, or the Abbott & Costello Martians, than the guy in the rubber suit from "It - the terror from beyond space" a movie with the quote 'another name for Mars is DEATH'.

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let us allow private enterprise, without spending a penny of public taxpayer funds, do the job.

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Well, I think iron is selling for something like two dollars a pound right now, so I don't know where the 68 cent figure came from.

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let us allow private enterprise, without spending a penny of public taxpayer funds, do the job.

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Is there anything stopping them them from doing that now? (Besides lack of money/interest, that is)

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Nope. Which is rather my point.

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12.5 inch Portaball + Osypowski platform
LX10
Oberwerk BT100 45° binocular
Orion binoviewer + ScopeStuff extender (so it focuses at f/4.9)

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let us allow private enterprise, without spending a penny of public taxpayer funds, do the job.

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Is there anything stopping them them from doing that now? (Besides lack of money/interest, that is)

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Nope. Which is rather my point.

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Well, I think that's one of the things a government should be doing on our behalf. Corporations today don't look beyond the next quarterly report. Companies with the kind of long-term vision needed for this sort of endeavor are few and far between (just look at GM). No, not everyone wants their money spent on manned space travel. Nor does everyone want their tax dollars spent on war in the middle east. Personally, I'll take the space travel.
The job being done by a government also brings the possibility that the trip might be made for reasons other than profit and exploitation. Maybe we can learn something. To quote an old movie, when asked what they expected to find on the moon, the space travellers said "we'll find out when we get there; we'll tell you when we get back".

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- Rick
14" LX200GPS
Dyslexics Untie!

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Let's start from scratch; Is there an asteroid out there that is a candidate for taking in terms of valuable resources?

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Well, I can imagine a situation where a large chunk of ordinary ice might be handy.
Hubert

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Hubert
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www.smoggybottom.org

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I find it interesting that while we toss about the term "terraforming" with such impending certainty, many question whether we've affected our atmosphere at all in the 170 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

If it takes 800 million machines (the number of cars on the planet) to help raise the temperature of the Earth a couple of degrees (or tenths of degrees), what kind of effort is going to be required to change an entire planet from uninhabitable to habitable? - j

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I do think that, when it comes to terraforming, terraforming Earth should be our first priority. Other than that, there's no need for planet-wide terraforming of another body when one can build self-contained habitats.

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"Since the process of science generates more mysteries than it solves, we can never learn everything, we'll simply generate new ignorance at the speed of knowledge."



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Given the many informed arguments here on the potential commercial payoffs of Mars/asteroid resource extraction and exploitation, I have a modest proposal: let us allow private enterprise, without spending a penny of public taxpayer funds, do the job. The company, or consortium of companies, that successfully works out how to bring all that iron and nickel back to earth (raw or smelted), or platinum, or whatever, will deserve its profits and its shareholders can partake of them.

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Eventually, that should, and probably will, come to pass. However, this is an extremely long-term investment we're looking at, the kind of R&D that's beyond the capability of any private entity. I can understand the reluctance to have taxpayers foot the bill for the basic research, when the eventual profits are going to go into corporate pockets. There are ways to make sure society and civilization as a whole gets that investment returned -- while the details may be edging into the verboten realm of politics, such things do need to be discussed and hashed out just as surely as does the technology.

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"Since the process of science generates more mysteries than it solves, we can never learn everything, we'll simply generate new ignorance at the speed of knowledge."



"S.O.E." (Sauron's Other Eye), with 16" Royce conical mirror: A permanent work in progress.
10" Homebuilt dob, old Coulter mirror

Under Construction: The "Eye of Sauron" Observatory!

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let us allow private enterprise, without spending a penny of public taxpayer funds, do the job.

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Is there anything stopping them them from doing that now? (Besides lack of money/interest, that is)

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Nope. Which is rather my point.

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I think private enterprise could do it, but not in the next 10 or 20 years. If it was done privately I would think the first step would be for someone to build a space station that would be used as both a "Hotel in the Sky" for rich tourists and a place for universities and companies to do research and development.

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Dirt Cheap Astronomy
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Maybe we can learn something.

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By the time we ever get around to sending people to Mars, we will pretty much have learned the answers to all of Mar's big questions. I'd expect at least 10 evermore sophisticated robotic probes making it to Mars before we get there.

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"It is estimated that a kilometer-size nickel-iron asteroid contains 7 billion tons of iron, 1 billion tons of nickel, and enough cobalt to supply the entire world for 3000 years. the total value at today's prices would be about 5 trillion dollars!".

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OK, so we have 8+ billion tons of material worth 5 trillion dollars. If you can refine it and ship it to earth for 68 cents per pound, you can break even. You have to do better than that to make a profit. Does that really sound feasible to you? I think it costs more than that to transport something by airplane.

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Well, I think iron is selling for something like two dollars a pound right now, so I don't know where the 68 cent figure came from. In any case, I was not attempting to judge whether it would be economically feasible to mine and send the stuff earthward. With the abundance of solar energy in space to do smelting, it might make more sense to do the refining on-site and ship the finished product off in smaller reentry packages, or just use them to build space structures for colonies or bases. However, Kowal does make some good points in his book on how it might be done, so it would be best to take a look at his book. Clear skies to you.

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A ton of hot-rolled steel is worth about $1200. now. That's about .60/lb. If a billion tons (brought in from outside the earth) of it were dumped on the market, the price would plummet to a small fraction of that. Same with nickel. The value of the enterprise then drops enormously.
When you try to imagine the costs of building a smelter and refinery in space, a project such as this in the next 100 years fades into the ridiculous.
The cost of putting such an operation in space would be more than the cited 6 trillion dollar (fuzzy math) value.

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David

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