Luxembourg Conquers the Universe!

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, fredinno said:

1. Mining asteroids is pointless if you can't convince lawmakers to let you get the stuff back down, and deorbiting an asteroid is the worst way to do that. If you think they'll let that happen, you have too much hope. Even RTGs get people rallied up.

2. Trying to build your own spaceship in orbit is kind of a bad idea, and would likely make asteroid mining uneconomical. The only politically and financially acceptable option would be making a "Shuttle" to bring stuff to and from orbit- derived off the space shutttle, and using a SLS-derived rocket to get up into space. The Space Shuttle could carry 15T back to Earth, btw. 

On a more realistic, near-term outlook, you'd use a X-37A, modified for returning partially-processed rock from space (X-37B is a military vehicle).You'd likely only be able to carry 1-2T back to Earth in that thing, but thankfully, X-37B is 5 T in mass, so you can use a much smaller rocket to launch it. But that's probably enough for during the first decade or so of operation. 

Potentially, you could use a capsule, like Dragon, but you'd have to crush everything into a fine powder to fit inside- which may still be cheaper to use.

3. Again, deorbiting is political suicide.

4. It's actually palladium, which is very similar to platinum. And I'm fairly certain it wouldn't crack water.

You will not deorbit an asteroid, you will deorbit metal bars, you use an simple pod with an heat shield and an drodge parachute the expensive part will be the service module for deorbit, it will do an hard landing but not an meteorite impact, think huge practice bomb with filler not explosives. 
You will probably not deorbit it over the US so US opinion is irrelevant.
Main issue is accuracy, soyuz might miss 60 km, however this will not be much more dangerous than an soyuz landing, both will kill you on hit, might damage you if 20 meter away and scare you at 100. 

[lajoswinkler]

On 2/4/2016 at 2:59 AM, Gaarst said:

Luxembourg is a tax haven. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of companies about to move some serious cash around made it their HQ.

Not for long. Laws are being changed to stomp on these silly things in Luxembourg, Monaco and other tiny countries in hope to curb corruption.

[Stargate525]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Its illegal to use confidential information to buy stocks. Say you work in an company who have economical problems but get an huge contract, You can not use this information to buy stocks in company. 

And short-selling futures based on your company's confidential information regarding sales of previous metals doesn't qualify as that?

[fredinno]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

You will not deorbit an asteroid, you will deorbit metal bars, you use an simple pod with an heat shield and an drodge parachute the expensive part will be the service module for deorbit, it will do an hard landing but not an meteorite impact, think huge practice bomb with filler not explosives. 
You will probably not deorbit it over the US so US opinion is irrelevant.
Main issue is accuracy, soyuz might miss 60 km, however this will not be much more dangerous than an soyuz landing, both will kill you on hit, might damage you if 20 meter away and scare you at 100. 

Sending (reusable) capsules will likely be worth it, but building them in situ is too expensive for a company going into the industry to do. Do you have any idea how much mass you'd need to carry, and how much more you'd need to be able to do?

 

A simple service module with only a small bus for control and communications, along with a set of batteries and a SRB deorbit package, should be good enough though.

Soyuz accuracy, though, allows you to land in a circle of unused desert, so not a huge deal. But a hard landing is still a bad idea if you want to reuse the capsule. I'd be thinking a CST-100 sized capsule, but without any airbags (but with all of its chutes) for a semi-hard landing- cargo isn't as precious as humans.

However, making metal bars actually requires quite a bit of equipment. I'd imagine you'd first want to send just ore to prove the concept, then build a space station in LEO to process it once you get the funding. Modified Cygnuses attached to ion drive space tugs would carry the ore to the manned space station, then the processing is done in LEO, where it's cheaper to carry mass. Then use the capsules to do the final deorbit to Earth, or use a X-37B derived shuttle. Seems like this could work, but you'd need a lot of infrastructure. Which is why it's not happening in the near future.

[DBowman]

3 hours ago, Stargate525 said:

And short-selling futures based on your company's confidential information regarding sales of previous metals doesn't qualify as that?

Executives must often act in the market based on confidential information, only some of that would be insider trading. I guess they'd be able to sell their own shares for example, but telling someone else to sell would be insider trading. You'd need to read the laws.

There was a case in Australia where an environmental activist released a bunch of bogus negative information about a company that caused it's share price to tank, that was illegal - but not because he'd tied to make a profit.

Tech companies are constantly talking up future products that may well never happen in order to manipulate customers buying decisions, for example to defer buy now from company A because company B has something great being release 'real soon now'. 'vaporware' is a term of art. No one seems to get prosecuted for that.

Re the 'dump and pump' funding plan for asteroid mining. I guess if he had no intention of ever mining asteroids then he'd have the 'intent to defraud', but it might be hard to prove. As it is his plan looks kind of like an fear based capital raising. In a normal IPO someone gives up equity in exchange for money from people who think the new business has sufficient chance of working, here hes extracting money from peoples fear that it just might work.

Edited February 5, 2016 by DBowman