[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Sun May 20 02:39:03 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Eric Messick
<eric at m056832107.syzygy.com> wrote:
> Keith writes:
> The media was questioning their economic sanity, saying that it
> wouldn't even be worth it to de-orbit gold, so clearly they're
> thinking along the lines of mass resources in orbit.

Seriously? It would not pay to de-orbit gold??? That seems crazy.
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation.

Spot price of gold today is: $1592.10

Gold is measured in Troy ounces. However, the typical "pound" is not a
troy measurement (it is technically called an Avoirdupois pound -- a
typical American pound). There are ~14.583 Troy ounces in one American
(Avoirdupois) pound.

So to find the current value of of one pound of gold, simply multiply
14.583 times the current price of gold (look at goldprice.com for a
current valuation).

So today a pound of gold is $23,217.59... or $51,078.70 per kilo...

A price I've often heard is that it costs $10,000 per pound to get
something up into LEO... The price to bring something DOWN must be
less than that!

So this is pure silliness on the part of whoever is dishing this
information. Aside from that, I would pay to own gold in LEO... seems
pretty secure... better than a bank vault. :-)

-Kelly



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