Private Company On The Moon?

[ecat]

Mining what? There's not one single naturally occurring material on Earth that you wouldn't go stone broke mining in space and returning to Earth. And selling it to who? By the time you've got enough space infrastructure generating enough economic activity to start thinking about buying stuff mined in space... your notional space miners are competing against cheap transport from the surface. (Because without cheap transport, you'll never have that extensive infrastructure in the first place.)

No, the problem is, people don't do the math and don't think about the economics. They just repeat cargo cult phrases.

It may be worth taking a quick look at this resources stock check produced by the BBC about a year ago.

http://silvervigilante.com/bbcs-global-resources-stock-check-portrays-world-on-the-edge/

The information may be out of date, new reserves may have been discovered, new technologies may use different resources, but does this matter? If antimony is still used in batteries and drugs then 7 years, 8 years, 16 years makes no real difference as all these estimates mean 'real soon'. And indium, silver, copper...

Our resources are finite and we are using them faster than ever. We need a plan B, and we need to implement it while the resources still exist. My nightmare scenario would be watching our very last drop of oil used in the production of a Lady Gaga CD.

[m1xte]

Russia can't design them anymore either. They are using old designs. To their credit, they can still build them, which isn't as trivial as it might sound even given the designs.

And yes, planned economy worked great for some of the initial leaps that Soviets have made. And yes, US also killed their space program, albeit, in different ways. None of this contradicts the fact that Soviet program has been effectively stagnant, well, since the Soyuz. And that's long before the money dried out.

Russia is putting its recourses to design anti ship missile technology to blow US fleet out of the water.

It is like the US star wars program but this one is real.

US navy's conventional strike power against Russia, China and India is rapidly reaching zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_missile

Sort the list by speed and see who is developing and who is not.

[Kryten]

Russia can't design them anymore either.

Then explain Angara.

[Fractal_UK]

Mining what? There's not one single naturally occurring material on Earth that you wouldn't go stone broke mining in space and returning to Earth. And selling it to who? By the time you've got enough space infrastructure generating enough economic activity to start thinking about buying stuff mined in space... your notional space miners are competing against cheap transport from the surface. (Because without cheap transport, you'll never have that extensive infrastructure in the first place.)

No, the problem is, people don't do the math and don't think about the economics. They just repeat cargo cult phrases.

There are certain extremely rare elements that would, in some respects, be profitable to return to Earth since they have such incredibly low abudance on Earth that asteroid mining would be the only way to obtain them in reasonable quantities. The problem with this approach is that if you found enough to be useful, the price would likely crash due to the sudden influx of large quantities product to the market.

You're forgetting as well that once you've mined something, you don't neccessarily need to bring it back to Earth before it can be turned into something else. It would be quite possible and indeed advantageous in many ways to perform the manufacturing process in space with the materials that you have recovered from an asteroid. The environment lets you control the manufacturing process in ways that aren't possible on Earth.

[jwenting]

Then explain Angara.

and a new generation of heavy ICBMs every 5 years or so, each of which is capable of putting stuff into LEO if using different guidance packages.

[jwenting]

You're forgetting as well that once you've mined something, you don't neccessarily need to bring it back to Earth before it can be turned into something else. It would be quite possible and indeed advantageous in many ways to perform the manufacturing process in space with the materials that you have recovered from an asteroid. The environment lets you control the manufacturing process in ways that aren't possible on Earth.

correct. Space based manufacturing.

Why built those satellites on earth and blast them into space at $3000+ per pound when you can build them in orbit from raw materials mined in the asteroid belt?

You may still want to build components on earth, but if you can built 90% in orbit you save $30.000.000 in launch cost alone on a 10.000 pound satellite that way.

Even if your becomes more costly to build by $1000 per pound (unlikely, as your clean room becomes much easier to build, as do a lot of things that are easier to construct in zero gravity), you're still a lot cheaper off.

[DerekL1963]

There are certain extremely rare elements that would, in some respects, be profitable to return to Earth since they have such incredibly low abudance on Earth that asteroid mining would be the only way to obtain them in reasonable quantities. The problem with this approach is that if you found enough to be useful, the price would likely crash due to the sudden influx of large quantities product to the market.

In other words, they're not profitable to mine and you're just waffling.

You're forgetting as well that once you've mined something, you don't neccessarily need to bring it back to Earth before it can be turned into something else. It would be quite possible and indeed advantageous in many ways to perform the manufacturing process in space with the materials that you have recovered from an asteroid. The environment lets you control the manufacturing process in ways that aren't possible on Earth.

No, I didn't forget it - because it's well covered by both of my previous statements. Or I'll just say it now, there is no processed material you wouldn't go stone broke hauling back to Earth. The "what happens if it stays on orbit" part is already adequately covered.

And ecat, folks have been publishing those charts since the 1960's - we've been supposed to have run out of all kinds of materials a dozen times or more since I was a kid in the 70's.

[Borklund]

There's too much nonsense in this thread to refute post-by-post so I'm going to post a write-up aimed generally at everyone in this thread:

- Virgin Galactic has claimed that the first customer flight is 18 months away for about 6 years now. They have yet to fly anyone but two test pilots to space and back and there is no indication of that changing any time soon, let alone them "taking over space exploration" in place of NASA or anyone else. They're going to offer short suborbital flights for a few rich people, nothing more.

- SpaceX has ambitious goals (that are far into the future, if they ever come to fruition). So far they have successfully flown 6 rockets with payloads to orbit in the space of 5 years. This is not exactly the mindshattering accomplishment of epic proportions that people make it out to be. Elon Musk may talk a big game but SpaceX has yet to come close to Mars, let alone their competitors in their bread-and-butter operations.

- NASA isn't dead, hasn't given up. The pace of development is dictated and constrained by a number of factors, the most important of them being that this isn't the Apollo era with massive budgets and a national focus on NASA and what it is doing for the nation. Orion is looking good, as is SLS, and they will fly next year and in 2017/8 respectively. Mars is still two plus decades away, an asteroid mission may come in the early 2020's on EM-3 or 4. There's not going to be a mission to the Moon's surfacein the next decade, where are you people getting this from? There is no work on a lander (except for small trade and concept studies) or mission ops for the Moon's surface. You need a new piece of hardware to land on the Moon, which there is currently no money for. When there is money for it, and it gets spent, it will still take many years before any metal is welded, let alone the lander flying somewhere on a mission.

- Roskosmos are working with the comatose Russian space industry in developing new spacecraft and launch vehicles to take Russia to the Moon and beyond with hardware that wasn't invented when Kruschev was still around. Russia plans to go the Moon and I believe they are serious about it, based on what I've read and conversations with Russians who have an insight into their space industry.

- China is slowly but surely advancing their space program. Later this year they will perform the first soft landing on the Moon and operate the first spacecraft on the surface of the Moon since the 70s. Beyond that is a bigger space station, more Moon and Mars missions and eventually a moon landing. It may take decades but they will surely beat both Russia and NASA on a return there, unless there's a drastic change in the coming years.

- A flag and footprints mission to the Moon by NASA is utterly pointless. They've already done it, and the only sensible reason to return would be for proper science, which nobody is interested in. Not the politicians, not NASA, not the public at large.

- In-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) tech has yet to be proven anywhere else but on Earth. To suggest that asteroid mining will save the day and bring in billions of dollars is laughable, because of the neglible or even negative return on investment. It is infinitely cheaper to start a new platinum mine on Earth than it would be to design and build spacecraft, send them to an asteroid, set up a mining operation and then somehow get platinum (or whatever else) back to the Earth's surface. The same applies to prop depots because NASA and US lawmakers are more interested in ultra-large pork rockets that sustain the existing workforce than changing the paradigm of space exploration. Even a water depot is questionable, seeing as it would probably take a decade or more and several or tens of billions of dollars to get the first water tank ready for its first use, and then they'd have to sell the water for under $10,000 per kg. It is therefore highly unlikely that private asteroid mining operations will commence in the decade to come. Reusable launch vehicles and/or prop depots sent up from Earth make more sense but even then they aren't completely necessary.

- Space based manufacturing is a joke. It's not been done even on a microscopic scale and there's nobody working on it. It won't happen in a very long time, if ever. Do you have any idea how complicated it is to build a spacecraft on Earth, and you propose we do it in space with resources that have been taken from asteroids which also hasn't happened yet (outside of a few kilograms).

I urge you all to read up on these subjects from more in-depth sources than Wikipedia before you post.

Edited August 10, 2013 by Borklund

[Jackissimus]

I urge you all to read up on these subjects from more in-depth sources than Wikipedia before you post.

Mind sharing your sources?

[Fractal_UK]

No, I didn't forget it - because it's well covered by both of my previous statements. Or I'll just say it now, there is no processed material you wouldn't go stone broke hauling back to Earth. The "what happens if it stays on orbit" part is already adequately covered.

And ecat, folks have been publishing those charts since the 1960's - we've been supposed to have run out of all kinds of materials a dozen times or more since I was a kid in the 70's.

Say it all you want, it doesn't make it true. At some point you'll hit economies of scale where a combination mining and manufacturing in space is actually worthwhile - you'll hit this critical value sooner for goods that are going to stay in space and that you don't need to bring back but sufficiently large scale mining and manufacturing throughout the solar system will do it eventually regardless. It requires substantial initial investmen and it requires the development of techologies that we don't currently possess but there is no reason to believe that any of those technologies are impossible or even, in some cases, all that amazingly complex.

In short, don't expect it soon but it'd be crazy to expect it never.

[OtherDalfite]

Mind sharing your sources?

The knowledge that no asteroid mining/space manufacturing has been done yet is commonplace. There have been no hard plans for the two, and the supposed miracle element Helium-3 has had nearly no research done. The human race hasn't begun using fusion reactors, which is the only thing Helium 3 is viable for, and we hardly know anything about it. The only thing we know about it is that it might be able to be used for fusion, and that it exists on the Moon.

For sources, check the NASA archives. Not really sure of any hard fact evidence other than that.

[Diche Bach]

However, the cause of the Soviet outcome wasn't so much a flaw in their approach as it was the entire Soviet economy and civil society literally breaking down. I don't think that's very likely to happen in China – although then again, that's what everyone said about the Soviet Union right up until it actually broke down, so who knows.

I predict that within the next 15 years, China will be either 'winning' or paralyzed by something akin to a civil war. I also predicted the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war at least 3 years ago; not the dates nor specifics, but that such things were inevitable in these nations and would happen within the next 10 to 15 years.

[Valley]

The Chinese will very likely be the next to land on the Moon after, I believe, they plan on making a space station. It will be many years before a private company gets a manned lander onto the Moon and I doubt they will get anything out of it but 'Hey, we can do it!' PR. Profits from space industry, tourist, or resource collecting, will still, very likely, take a few more decades to show up.

[Galacticruler]

I think China might be the first to think about mars actually, the moon is a "been there, done that." kind of thing...Mars however has not been landed on with a manned flight.

[Drunkrobot]

Historically, governments have funded the initial "daring first step" in the exploration and exploitation of other parts of the world, since only they had the resources to spare for said first step. The Moon is likely to be the same, or even requiring the cooperative efforts of governments, businesses, and universities to make the initial investment. Cooperation means specialisation, and less duplication (Canada doesn't need to build a Moon rocket to employ it's expertise on space robots.), which means less money is spent. As infrastructure is built, systems become standardised, and costs go down, smaller groups can "do their stuff" on Lunar surface.

[ecat]

And ecat, folks have been publishing those charts since the 1960's - we've been supposed to have run out of all kinds of materials a dozen times or more since I was a kid in the 70's.

So, are you saying the reserves of all these materials are infinite?

We need a plan 'B'.

We need plan 'B' working before the resources start to run out - whenever that may be.

Given the reserves are most certainly not infinite, when do you think we should start work on our plan 'B'?

Edited August 10, 2013 by ecat

[Valley]

So, are you saying the reserves of all these materials are infinite?

We need a plan 'B'.

We need plan 'B' working before the resources start to run out - whenever that may be.

Given the reserves are most certainly not infinite, when do you think we should start work on our plan 'B'?

But we are always working on plan B. We went from human power to animal power. Than animals, who powered our mills and pumps, were replaced by windmills and water wheels. Wood and bones were replaced by coal to heat homes and cook meat and boil water. Oil soon entered the world stage, creating fuels, building materials, and so on. Did we run out of trees before switching to coal? Did we run out of horses before we switched to cars and trucks? Our resources are not infinite - we just jump from one to another as our science allows us to advance from one technology to another. We face problems, we solve them, we create new ones, we solve them. Sooner or later we're hit a glass ceiling and die out.

There are a hundred plan B's being created. The USA has their idea of the perfect plan B. So does NASA and the UN and so did the USSR and the Third Reich.

How well we do in the future will depend on which plan B we end up with. I hope we have the good luck to pick a good one.

I hope we get to the Moon - if nothing else but to learn from it and use the knowledge for Mars and the Belt and beyond.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

Carl Sagan

[DerekL1963]

Say it all you want, it doesn't make it true. At some point you'll hit economies of scale where a combination mining and manufacturing in space is actually worthwhile - you'll hit this critical value sooner for goods that are going to stay in space and that you don't need to bring back

Which brings you right up against the chicken-and-egg issue in my earlier reply. How are you going to hit those economies of scale when you're going broke (in the beginning, repeatedly) competing with cheap transport and existing mining capacity from earth? "Economy of scale" isn't (as it is often used in these discussions) a magic spell or a cargo cult phrase that can be invoked to bring any desired outcome into being. It's a real phenomena with necessary pre conditions.

but sufficiently large scale mining and manufacturing throughout the solar system will do it eventually regardless. It requires substantial initial investmen and it requires the development of techologies that we don't currently possess but there is no reason to believe that any of those technologies are impossible or even, in some cases, all that amazingly complex.

Eventually, yes - but first you have to get past the "and here magic happens" step.

[Valley]

Eventually, yes - but first you have to get past the "and here magic happens" step.

Agreed. Future space industries will have to find something to DO with anything they mine and manufacture. Find a asteroid of diamonds? Get to back to Earth and you just made diamonds worthless and you are broke. They will need to find a service or product that either people will WANT or will help them develop their space programs. Gold? Well, good for circuits that could be produced in space to help make robotics and CPUs and equipment needed in space. Water at the southern polar regions of the Moon? Good for a science center and maybe test low-gravity farming. I think the big money maker will be tourism.

Who will pay to get into space? Scientists, tourists, cults, explorers, get-rich-quick con artists - why not? That is how the New World was discovered (from the European point of view anyway).

Businesses will have to generate a demand for going into space. Talk about asteroid mining is nice...but all on paper now. He3? Maybe in another century when we can produce enough on Earth to even test how fusion works on a grand scale. Solar power beamed from orbital stations? Decade old dreams.

So let us focus on the services and those people who are willing to give money for a dream of going to the Moon or Mars. Okay, a reality television show seems weird but it is one way to help collect some of the money. SOME. Heavy industry and stuff like that will come later. I am not saying it will not happen. I am a fan of the movies 'Moon Zero Two' and 'Outland' - even have the novels that were based on the movies. But it will be a slow, century long process, in which our great grand-children may join in. But mostly likely they will just watch the ships take off over the...whatever they use as the internet-news channels in that time period....when not inputting the numbers at their work-pod during their half-hour break working for 'The Machine'.

[Diche Bach]

The analogy of the 15th century "Age of Discovery" with the current "Dawn of Space Exploration" is superficially appealing. Certainly in many ways, getting on a carrack, galleon or fluyt and heading off a new life in the New World probably did feel about as isolated, and remote as traveling to Mars is likely to feel when people start making that journey. The first stages of each nations efforts to get their piece of the pie were largely state subsidized, but as time went on much of it was private industry. Great fortunes were made, many died, many were lost. It was a costly risky, highly unusual and demanding endeavor. There were known and expected resources that each Crown expected to be able to take advantage of and this was the primary motivation. As time went on, some of these expected resources did not pan out, but many others did. By the mid 1600s, vast quantities of myriad resources were transiting back from the New World to Europe and had a massive impact on European life. Some historians have actually argued that many developments associated with the Rennaissance might have been much more muted if not for the influx of wealth and exotic foods, products, and people form the New World.

Many of these features are arguably analogous with the latent "Age of Space Exploration" that we are in the first century of. But there are a few critical differneces that have to be kept in mind, lest the analogy be applied irrational.

First and most notably is that it is impossible to live in space without either regular resupplying or advanced technology and plenty of starting building materials. This means that the actual number of people 'moving' to live and work out there for any appreciable period is going to be quite slow.

More later I'm actually falling asleep at the keyboard

[ecat]

But we are always working on plan B. We went from human power to animal power. Than animals, who powered our mills and pumps, were replaced by windmills and water wheels. Wood and bones were replaced by coal to heat homes and cook meat and boil water. Oil soon entered the world stage, creating fuels, building materials, and so on. Did we run out of trees before switching to coal? Did we run out of horses before we switched to cars and trucks? Our resources are not infinite - we just jump from one to another as our science allows us to advance from one technology to another. We face problems, we solve them, we create new ones, we solve them. Sooner or later we're hit a glass ceiling and die out.

There are a hundred plan B's being created. The USA has their idea of the perfect plan B. So does NASA and the UN and so did the USSR and the Third Reich.

How well we do in the future will depend on which plan B we end up with. I hope we have the good luck to pick a good one.

I hope we get to the Moon - if nothing else but to learn from it and use the knowledge for Mars and the Belt and beyond.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

Carl Sagan

Interesting take on things.

Animals are a renewable resource, their number can be increased in a short time frame. Horses and humans are of course animals so renewable, as are trees, wind and water. For most of our history we have lived off renewable resources with the occasional dispute over local reserves. The world wide industrial scale exploitation of non-renewable resources is a relatively recent phenomenon and the realisation that these resources are truly finite and that some may dry up within a human lifetime is an idea that didn't strike home until sometime in the past 50 or so years. So, no. Up until maybe 50 years ago we did not have a plan 'B' with respect to when these resources run out and there is no where left to get them from because no one considered such a situation could exist.

There are no hundred plan 'B''s, there are only two. The first is to stop the exploitation and I'm fairly sure very few people consider this viable or desirable. The second is to find and exploit non-terrestrial reserves. Sure there are some who propose restrictive practices, export bans, trade deals and the invasion of other countries as solutions but all these practices do is perpetuate the current plan 'A'. While this can gain popularity and ensure a comfortable retirement for some it is at best a short term and selfish plan.

[hubertus09]

You can not privatise something that is not owned by anyone. If anything the universe owns us. I do not think any planet can be claimed by any country whatsoever because no one has have had the pleasure of introducing this topic to the government although this topic has been commonly talked about behind the scenes or so I word it. In addition to this, we do not have a world-council type of thing (UN does not count because not all countries participate) So coming back to the topic, people can already try launching their own rockets and landing them places. However they will need permission from the government in order to launch the rocket in the first place. As always there will be health and safety so unless you can prove your designs are safe (if it is a manned mission). Don't forget the billions of dollars you are going to have to spend performing tests and building a rocket in the first place. Many companies have already launched satellites and there is nothing stopping them from sending rovers and space probes to other planets or moons.

[magnemoe]

Interesting take on things.

Animals are a renewable resource, their number can be increased in a short time frame. Horses and humans are of course animals so renewable, as are trees, wind and water. For most of our history we have lived off renewable resources with the occasional dispute over local reserves. The world wide industrial scale exploitation of non-renewable resources is a relatively recent phenomenon and the realisation that these resources are truly finite and that some may dry up within a human lifetime is an idea that didn't strike home until sometime in the past 50 or so years. So, no. Up until maybe 50 years ago we did not have a plan 'B' with respect to when these resources run out and there is no where left to get them from because no one considered such a situation could exist.

There are no hundred plan 'B''s, there are only two. The first is to stop the exploitation and I'm fairly sure very few people consider this viable or desirable. The second is to find and exploit non-terrestrial reserves. Sure there are some who propose restrictive practices, export bans, trade deals and the invasion of other countries as solutions but all these practices do is perpetuate the current plan 'A'. While this can gain popularity and ensure a comfortable retirement for some it is at best a short term and selfish plan.

Problem with renewables is that they are only renewable as long as you don't take out to much, often easy to do, anything from game animals to farmland and forest, upside is that it usually restore itself over time but not always. However this is pretty natural, balance of nature is often that an rapid increase in prey population gives an rapid increase in predator number followed by an crash in prey population followed by predators and the prey population start to build up again.

The plan B with minerals is usually that you open an new mine then the old start to run dry, the new mine is usually a bit more expensive than the old one but mining has become cheaper because of better technology and practice. This has worked pretty well for some thousand years.

Main purpose of mining moon or asteroids in near time is to get fuel for LEO-moon and LEO-GEO, second is simple building materials for orbital use, long term is platinum and rare earths to take back.

[ecat]

The plan B with minerals is usually that you open an new mine then the old start to run dry, the new mine is usually a bit more expensive than the old one but mining has become cheaper because of better technology and practice. This has worked pretty well for some thousand years.

<sigh>

If it is what we have been doing for some thousand years then I would call it a continuation of our current and so far only plan, plan 'A'. Plan 'B' is the answer to the question: what do we do when there is nothing left to mine?

[Fractal_UK]

<sigh>

If it is what we have been doing for some thousand years then I would call it a continuation of our current and so far only plan, plan 'A'. Plan 'B' is the answer to the question: what do we do when there is nothing left to mine?

It's slightly less clear cut than that, there will never really come a stage at which we can say we've used up the last of X resource here on Earth, there will always be a little bit more to be found. The problem is that over time these resource supplies become increasingly smaller and more marginal, profit goes down because it takes increasing amounts of effort to find increasingly small quantities of that resource.

We can get by with the resources on Earth, we simply have to accept a slow and inexorable decline in exchange. Personally though, that isn't what I have in mind for the future of humanity.

Which brings you right up against the chicken-and-egg issue in my earlier reply. How are you going to hit those economies of scale when you're going broke (in the beginning, repeatedly) competing with cheap transport and existing mining capacity from earth? "Economy of scale" isn't (as it is often used in these discussions) a magic spell or a cargo cult phrase that can be invoked to bring any desired outcome into being. It's a real phenomena with necessary pre conditions.

Eventually, yes - but first you have to get past the "and here magic happens" step.

This is no more of a serious problem than it has been for countless new technologies throughout history. Why would asteroid mining be special in that it has to be done profitably from the start? It just doesn't. It will be done first to prove that it can be done, then it will be done for a specific application where it has some advantage due to special circumstances, then it will be done for specialised industrial purposes where quality of the final product is more important that price and only after all of these steps will begin to see more widespread adoption. There is no magic step, there is an inevitable long sequence of development that goes into producing any mature technology.