Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it

Excellent article about how some fairly adventurous billionaires plan on taking a series of small steps towards being able to mine asteroids.

While several sites and newspapers were crowing about how they planned to make their money from mining platinum or gold, I thought this part was far, far more interesting.

Water is very heavy and incompressible, so it’s very difficult to launch from Earth into space (Lewicki quoted a current price of roughly $20,000 per liter to get water into space). But water should be abundant on some asteroids, locked up in minerals or even as ice, and in theory it shouldn’t be difficult to collect it and create a depot. Future astronauts can then use these supplies to enable longer stays in space — the depots could be put in Earthbound trajectories for astronauts, or could be placed in strategic orbits for future crewed missions to asteroids. Lewicki didn’t say specifically, but these supplies could be sold to NASA — Planetary Resources would make quite a bit money while saving NASA quite a bit. Win-win.

there may not be a lot of water on the moon, but push an asteroid into a moon orbit and suddenly it's less of a problem.

That's awesome!

Having spent most of my career with a company that mined iron ore, I've been reading this story with interest.  While it certainly is exciting there are a few things to clarify.

Unless the precious metals exist in extremely high concentrations not seen on Earth, the extraction of these minerals will take enormous amounts of energy and alot of chemicals.  Precious metals are precious simply because they are so hard to concentrate from the mined raw ore.  This takes huge amounts of energy which is why iron, gold, aluminum, and zinc operations are so large and energy intensive, and tend to be pollutive.

One article I read talked about mining zinc and iron on these asterrhoids and sending it back to Earth.  This is absurd.  Zinc and iron are abundant on Earth, and in the case of iron ore, roughly two billion tons of the stuff are mined each year.  We transport concentrated ore pellets in cargo ships that go all the way up to 400,000 tons a pop.  Whatever iron could be extracted from an asteroid would be not even a drop in a bucket.  Furthermore the extraction or iron from ore takes large amounts of energy, oxygen and carbon to coax the iron metal out of the ore.  Even the weakest, least economical iron ore fields on Earth would be vastly more economical than a space based mine.

As to mining large amounts of platinum and gold... For the moment let's say this is practical.  If asterrhoid mining opens up a significant volume of production, the price of these metals will plunge because there will be a glut in the market.  So these entrepreneurs had better not plan TOO big; they should produce just enough material to, how shall we put it, "wet their beaks".  :P

Back in the heyday of magnetic tape recording, my father got involved in a project that made ferric oxide powder as a byproduct.  His team counted on making big bucks from the stuff.  As luck would have it, when their facility went into production, it created such a glut in the market they could barely give the stuff away.  ;D

If I had any money to invest...

I sure as hell wouldn't invest it in an asteroid mining company.

This sounds like a job for Big Daddy Government!
:)

Iron?  Platinum?  Iron's cheap on earth.  Even platinum is cheap on earth.  So screw earth.  There's no money to be made in sending commodities to earth.  Earth's got plenty of commodities.  But space doesn't.

Right now, it costs at least $10,000/kg to get something to low earth orbit, the real money is in the water.  A 500-tonne rock composed of 10% ice, accompanied by a big-ass solar panel producing electricity for electrolysis, is 50 tonnes of water.  Whether you drink the H2O or split it into 2 parts of H2 and 1 part O2 for rocket fuel or both, 50,000 kg (about 13000 gallons) of water is half a billion dollars.  If you live in a home with a 1000-gallon septic tank, yes, the water in that 1000-gallon septic tank would be worth $30-40,000,000 if you could magically teleport this to orbit.  The cost of purifying it would be relatively miniscule in comparison to the cost of getting it up there in the first place.

If it costs less than ten bucks a gram (gold itself, at $1600/oz, is only $60/g), resources in orbit are worth thousands of times their value on earth.  Unless iron, nickel, or whatever else they can get out of this 500-tonne rock, starts trading over $266/oz, there's a buck to be made here.  If you can figure out a way to build something out of friggin' concrete in space, there's a buck to be made here.

^ That's why guys who can afford to lose $100 million on asteroid spice mines are investing.  One of them is Ross Perot, Jr. 

Well, it would cost big bucks just send the robots up there to scratch around for the good stuff.  I dunno how much about an asteroid's composition we can say for certain from Earth.  Furthermore, unlike the moon, there are a whole lot of asteroids...so how do we decide where to go first?
???

^ That's why guys who can afford to lose $100 million on asteroid spice mines are investing.  One of them is Ross Perot, Jr. 


They might be able to afford it, but you can bet that if their investment flops, they'll all have a galactic case of 'roid rage.  ;D

They might be able to afford it, but you can bet that if their investment flops, they'll all have a galactic case of 'roid rage.  ;D


How much does it cost to get Prep-H to Uranus?
:P

^ That's why guys who can afford to lose $100 million on asteroid spice mines are investing.  One of them is Ross Perot, Jr. 

Well, it would cost big bucks just send the robots up there to scratch around for the good stuff.  I dunno how much about an asteroid's composition we can say for certain from Earth.  Furthermore, unlike the moon, there are a whole lot of asteroids...so how do we decide where to go first?
???


Honestly, we don't know much.  We can start to guess as to what it's made of (carbonaceous/reallydark, stony/prettydim, and metallic/kindabright) based on what color it is.  We may have to go out to Jupiter's Trojan groups (about 60 degrees ahead/behind the planet) to find much in the way of ice/organics.  The only way to find out what they're made of is to send a few robots and start looking.  Closer to home, we've already started on that.  Dawn leaves Vesta in a few months to head further out to Ceres. 

I'm not saying these guys are gonna make money.  I'm suggesting that if you've got tens of billions in the bank, getting some friends together to throw a few billion down on a gamble that might make your descendants the water equivalent of what the Rockefellers were to oil... just might be a decent bet.  What else are they gonna spend it on?  And if they fail, it's only their own money they've lost, and the only side effect is that a few thousand engineers have learned a few things about robotic space reconaissance and mining platforms.

Is it possible that some of these asteroids might contain new elements that either have not yet been discovered or do not exist on Earth?

Is it possible that some of these asteroids might contain new elements that either have not yet been discovered or do not exist on Earth?


Possibly, although many of the rarer elements are extremely unstable and decay into lower-atomic-weight elements...

Is it possible that some of these asteroids might contain new elements that either have not yet been discovered or do not exist on Earth?


Nope.  LyricBoy already said why.  Anything in the dust-and-gas cloud out of which our solar system condensed some four and a half billion years ago has had 4.5 billion years to decay into the ones we know and love.  The real value is in the common elements that are quite literally dirt-cheap on Earth, but which cost tens of thousands of dollars per pound to lift to orbit.

Nope.  LyricBoy already said why.  Anything in the dust-and-gas cloud out of which our solar system condensed some four and a half billion years ago has had 4.5 billion years to decay into the ones we know and love.  The real value is in the common elements that are quite literally dirt-cheap on Earth, but which cost tens of thousands of dollars per pound to lift to orbit.


If the universe is infinite, couldn't there be some chemical elements we have not discovered.  I mean, at the risk of sounding dumb...

???

If the universe is infinite, couldn't there be some chemical elements we have not discovered.  I mean, at the risk of sounding dumb... ???


Short answer: "Sure, but good luck proving it, because they probably don't last long enough to detect"

Medium answer: "Maybe, but we'd need to produce them in the lab first, so that we could how long they last, and if they last long enough, what sorts of things we'd want to observe in the spectra of supernova remnants, and by the way, observing something like that close-up is a problem for our descendants a few hundred thousand years from now."

Long answer: Heavy Nerd Content Ahead!

cVcM6pK1RMU

So let's fire up Vangelis, Nucleogenesis, (1976) while I skim through the basics of stellar nucleosynthesis, supernova nucleosynthesis, and why we don't see anything heavier than uranium (mostly!) in nature.

There are probably a few, but they probably only exist for a few (nano/milli)seconds in our atom-smashers.  We've been poking at a theoretical island of stability for a while, and while we're good at throwing protons onto something until it falls apart it's tricky to do the same thing with neutrons, so we don't really know what the supposed island looks like.  (The better we get at building atoms like this, the more we understand about which of our supposed models is the better description of reality.  Right now, all we have is educated guesses.  We can't even guess as to what their half-lives are until we get better at building atoms.)

Maybe a few pounds of heavier-than-fermium stuff gets created in supernova explosions, and it's all decayed a few hours/days/weeks later.  Good luck finding the decay signature of a few tons of something like fermium-257 (element 100, half life of Fm-257 101 days) against a supernova that outshone an entire galaxy.  Maybe the environment of a supernova explosion is unsuitable for the (theoretically) desirable extra neutrons to get stuck to the nuclei.  The insides of exploding stars are another thing that we can only make educated guesses about. 

Before the star explodes, we build up everything up to iron.  After a star works its way up to iron (element 26), cramming more protons and neutrons into the nucleus requires energy, so fusion stops working.  All the nickel, copper, zinc, probably came from iron that captured an alpha or two.  I don't wanna think about the kind of crazy things that had to happen to make gold, platinum, the rare earths that make your monitor glow, the tin in the first tin cans, the tungsten in the incandescent light bulbs, and finally the uranium and heavier-than-uranium stuff that decayed to produce what's left.  But that's basically what happens when a really massive star blows up.  It's kinda hard to go there and observe (suitable spaceships require things of physics that we presently believe impossible), so all we can do is sit in our quiet backwater of a solar system, make the best guesses we can, and build fancy glasses to see if the universe happens to conform to our guesses, or if it has more surprises in store for us.

Everything over lead (82) is unstable.  Some of these elements have long half lives.  (Bismuth-209, billions of times the present age of the universe, U-238 - 4.5 billion years, about the age of the solar system.  Since the earth formed, half the uranium present in Earth's crust has decayed.  Thorium-232, about the age of the universe.  Half the Th-232 from the first supernova has decayed, but more gets created every time a star blows up.)  Most of the radon seeping into peoples' basements comes from decay of Earth's uranium and thorium, as an intermediate step towards lead.  Almost all of the helium in your party balloons is alpha particles from these decay processes.)

Once upon a time, about 1.7 billion years ago, the natural abundance of U-238 in the Earth's crust was such that if you had a big enough concentration of it, and just the right amount of rainwater seeped through it, a natural fission reactor will fire up.  Some clever primates who poked at the leftover ashes with very fancy sticks, deduced that it ran for a few hundred thousand years at about 100 kW of power.  For this very brief period of time, plutonium occurred naturally on Earth - if the very first multicellular organisms had been capable of modern chemistry, they would have been very intrigued at the existence of an element that existed nowhere other than this little place that their descendants would come to call "Oklo".

But that's as far as Earth probably got.  The fact that we don't see elements in the "island of stability" on Earth doesn't mean they don't or can't exist -- but it's a very strong hint that if they exist, they don't last very long.  So to answer your initial question: an element with a half life of a few years (or even a few million years) might have interesting and/or useful chemical properties, but because it can only be created (as far as we know) in supernovae, and because it takes a few hundred million years to form a planetary system out of the debris scattered from a supernova explosion, no lifeform will ever get to use it, because it's really unlikely that anything will evolve sentience in the timeframes required.  Any civilization capable of building probes that could visit a supernova remnant to sample it... already has technology so far advanced beyond our own that they probably don't need to go there to prove whether elements in the island of stability exist.  They're probably good enough at physics that they synthesize atoms in the island of stability in their equivalent of kindergarten :)

And just for the hell of it (of course I checked, and at least I'm warning y'all upfront this time), stellar nucleosynthesis, explained by you-know-what.  It goes down a little better with the Vangelis as background music.

Short answer: "Sure, but good luck proving it, because they probably don't last long enough to detect"

Medium answer: "Maybe, but we'd need to produce them in the lab first, so that we could how long they last, and if they last long enough, what sorts of things we'd want to observe in the spectra of supernova remnants, and by the way, observing something like that close-up is a problem for our descendants a few hundred thousand years from now."

Long answer: Heavy Nerd Content Ahead!

cVcM6pK1RMU

So let's fire up Vangelis, Nucleogenesis, (1976) while I skim through the basics of stellar nucleosynthesis, supernova nucleosynthesis, and why we don't see anything heavier than uranium (mostly!) in nature.

There are probably a few, but they probably only exist for a few (nano/milli)seconds in our atom-smashers.  We've been poking at a theoretical island of stability for a while, and while we're good at throwing protons onto something until it falls apart it's tricky to do the same thing with neutrons, so we don't really know what the supposed island looks like.  (The better we get at building atoms like this, the more we understand about which of our supposed models is the better description of reality.  Right now, all we have is educated guesses.  We can't even guess as to what their half-lives are until we get better at building atoms.)

Maybe a few pounds of heavier-than-fermium stuff gets created in supernova explosions, and it's all decayed a few hours/days/weeks later.  Good luck finding the decay signature of a few tons of something like fermium-257 (element 100, half life of Fm-257 101 days) against a supernova that outshone an entire galaxy.  Maybe the environment of a supernova explosion is unsuitable for the (theoretically) desirable extra neutrons to get stuck to the nuclei.  The insides of exploding stars are another thing that we can only make educated guesses about. 

Before the star explodes, we build up everything up to iron.  After a star works its way up to iron (element 26), cramming more protons and neutrons into the nucleus requires energy, so fusion stops working.  All the nickel, copper, zinc, probably came from iron that captured an alpha or two.  I don't wanna think about the kind of crazy things that had to happen to make gold, platinum, the rare earths that make your monitor glow, the tin in the first tin cans, the tungsten in the incandescent light bulbs, and finally the uranium and heavier-than-uranium stuff that decayed to produce what's left.  But that's basically what happens when a really massive star blows up.  It's kinda hard to go there and observe (suitable spaceships require things of physics that we presently believe impossible), so all we can do is sit in our quiet backwater of a solar system, make the best guesses we can, and build fancy glasses to see if the universe happens to conform to our guesses, or if it has more surprises in store for us.

Everything over lead (82) is unstable.  Some of these elements have long half lives.  (Bismuth-209, billions of times the present age of the universe, U-238 - 4.5 billion years, about the age of the solar system.  Since the earth formed, half the uranium present in Earth's crust has decayed.  Thorium-232, about the age of the universe.  Half the Th-232 from the first supernova has decayed, but more gets created every time a star blows up.)  Most of the radon seeping into peoples' basements comes from decay of Earth's uranium and thorium, as an intermediate step towards lead.  Almost all of the helium in your party balloons is alpha particles from these decay processes.)

Once upon a time, about 1.7 billion years ago, the natural abundance of U-238 in the Earth's crust was such that if you had a big enough concentration of it, and just the right amount of rainwater seeped through it, a natural fission reactor will fire up.  Some clever primates who poked at the leftover ashes with very fancy sticks, deduced that it ran for a few hundred thousand years at about 100 kW of power.  For this very brief period of time, plutonium occurred naturally on Earth - if the very first multicellular organisms had been capable of modern chemistry, they would have been very intrigued at the existence of an element that existed nowhere other than this little place that their descendants would come to call "Oklo".

But that's as far as Earth probably got.  The fact that we don't see elements in the "island of stability" on Earth doesn't mean they don't or can't exist -- but it's a very strong hint that if they exist, they don't last very long.  So to answer your initial question: an element with a half life of a few years (or even a few million years) might have interesting and/or useful chemical properties, but because it can only be created (as far as we know) in supernovae, and because it takes a few hundred million years to form a planetary system out of the debris scattered from a supernova explosion, no lifeform will ever get to use it, because it's really unlikely that anything will evolve sentience in the timeframes required.  Any civilization capable of building probes that could visit a supernova remnant to sample it... already has technology so far advanced beyond our own that they probably don't need to go there to prove whether elements in the island of stability exist.  They're probably good enough at physics that they synthesize atoms in the island of stability in their equivalent of kindergarten :)

And just for the hell of it (of course I checked, and at least I'm warning y'all upfront this time), stellar nucleosynthesis, explained by you-know-what.  It goes down a little better with the Vangelis as background music.


http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s78/AL-B_photos/gallery_29_2_61814.gif

Francium:

Natural

Francium-223 is the result of the alpha decay of actinium-227 and can be found in trace amounts in uranium and thorium minerals. In a given sample of uranium, there is estimated to be only one francium atom for every 1 × 1018 uranium atoms. It is also calculated that there is at most 30 g of francium in the earth's crust at any time.
Synthesized
A complex experimental setup featuring a horizontal glass tube placed between two copper coils.
Neutral francium atoms can be trapped in the MOT using a magnetic field and laser beams.
A round ball of red light surrounded by a green glow A small white spot in the middle surrounded by a red circle. There is a yellow ring outside the red circle, a green circle beyond the yellow ring and a blue circle surrounding all the other circles.
Image of light emitted by a sample of 200,000 francium atoms in a magneto-optical trap

Heat image of 300,000 francium atoms in a magneto-optical trap

Francium can be synthesized in the nuclear reaction:

    197Au + 18O → 210Fr + 5 n

In other words, these are piddly-sh*t elements, not building blocks of the universe. 

The Human Body chemical makeup:

Oxygen 65%
Carbon 18.5
Hydrogen 9.5

Oxygen, Carbon, and Hydrogen is 93% of us.

Question?  How many human beings would you have to mine in order to terraform the Martian atmosphere. 

???