[extropy-chat] FWD [Skeptic] Re: defending the Vision for Space Exploration

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> More than that. A ferrous asteroid delivered to LEO
> 1 km in dia would
> be worth several trillion dollars.

Umm, no, it'd be worth $0 until it gets to the Earth's
surface.  Remember, the funding models we're
discussing assume *NO* space industry, since the
investment payoff ends well before significant space
industry can be started - and thus, well before you
can have any customers for iron in space.

However, if you select the right asteroid, just the
precious metals should be worth several trillion
dollars upon delivery to the Earth's surface.  So you
can still pay off the investors...and then use the
rest of the asteroid to jumpstart space industry,
creating a market for the asteroid you own.  The only
snag is that you can't use those profits to pay for
moving the asteroid in the first place; you have to
stick with mining the highest-value pieces for that
phase.

> Precious metals would be present in such asteroids,
> but only in such
> quantities to be of interest to smugglers working on
> mining/refining
> them in orbit.

One would select an asteroid with a relatively high
amount of precious metals (as revealed by observation
and, probably, confirmed up close by a prospector
probe before the asteroid-moving equipment is
launched).  One wouldn't grab just any asteroid -
target selection is of critical importance in this
sceme.

> Venous metals deposits are not typical of asteroids,
> as metal and other
> mineral veins found on earth are generally an
> artifact of hydrothermal
> leaching processes. Asteroids instead accrete
> material based on the
> orbits they are in, with higher volatility materials
> accreting at
> greater distance from the sun.

Asteroids are also occasionally blasted into chunks by
collisions with other asteroids or comets; if they are
differentiated at all, their cores - which become new
asteroids - have more of the metal.  A very few
asteroids formed that way have very high content of
all kinds of metals (including precious); those are
the ones you'd want to target.