Comment by nullfinch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullfinch | Hacker News Reader

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Has everybody forgotten that it's REALLY expensive to get into space? Per the BBC,

They struggle to see how it could be cost-effective, even with platinum and gold worth nearly £35 per gram ($1,600 an ounce). An upcoming Nasa mission to return just 60g (two ounces) of material from an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1bn.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347)

So a back of the envelope calculation: Assuming that it costs as much to haul gold from orbit to Earth, and the Space X Falcon can haul 6.4+ tons per flight, we could bring down $167,116,800 of gold per flight. Since each launch costs $80M+, we're down to $80M of profit. However, this assumes we're just plucking gold out of orbit, not hauling asteroids to orbit, harvesting and processing the gold, and dealing with all of the logistics of this operation - which are bound to be very expensive. It's ambitious to be sure, but we're very far away from platinum as the new aluminum.

Price of gold per ounce: http://goo.gl/htL7b Falcon launch costs: http://goo.gl/SWZlw

> Assuming that it costs as much to haul gold from orbit to Earth

It doesn't. Coming down is way cheaper than going up.

But that may not even be particularly relevant, as there's a good chance that a lot of the material may be sold in space. After all, we want to launch more stuff into space, and that's expensive, so why bring it down if you're just going to shoot it back up again?

Of course, not all of it's going to be sold in space. A tonne of aluminum or a tonne of water would be very valuable in orbit, but, at least for now, a tonne of platinum is going to do much more good down here on the ground in catalytic converters and electronics than it would up there being used in... I dunno what. But the stuff that stays in orbit could still be a pretty hefty chunk of the bottom line.

Or that those mined from astroids become ships. I.e., industrial complexes built in space, for large scale manufacturing of more ships, with the intend of eventually conquering/colonizing a planet.

After a certain amount of equipment has been launched, they will no longer have any need to get more stuff into space, as everything they need will already be there. All they have to do is make sure they can reach that tipping point where they can construct the bulk of their miners in space (Building the hulls out of asteroid metals, and then just launching the smaller, complex, electronic etc parts from earth).

Break even for these people wont come from the first asteroid they mine - and I doubt they are expecting it to.

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