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Luxembourg is going to mine asteroids for minerals
Luxembourg is planning to go into space to mine minerals from asteroids — and it will get help from Google founder Larry Page.
Luxemburger Wort, one of the country’s newspapers, reported that Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg’s deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, said the government would work with one of the world’s largest satellite operators — SES, which he helped set up a decade ago — and two US companies to help make it happen.
The two US private companies are Planetary Resources, which was founded by Page of Google, and Deep Space Industries, which is working on sending tourists into space. But it has taken over two years to get these private companies on board, as Luxembourg’s Schneider first started working on the project in secret after visiting NASA’s research centre in August 2013.
Last November, US President Barack Obama signed legislation that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.
The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 says that any materials American individuals or companies find on an asteroid or the moon is theirs to keep and do with as they please.
While the Space Act breaks with the concept that space should be shared by everyone for scientific research and exploration, it establishes the rights of investors to profit from their efforts, at least under US law.
AP Photo/Seth WenigGoogle founder Larry Page’s Planetary Resources is helping the Luxembourg government with space mining.
“I am convinced there is great scientific and economic potential in Luxembourg’s vision,” Jean-Jacques Dordain, the director-general of the European Space Agency, told the Financial Times in another report. “We know how to get to asteroids, how to drill into them and how to get samples back to Earth.”
But while the technology seems to be there and ready to be used for space mining, the cost of the project requires Luxembourg to seek out rich, private investors.
For example, it is estimated to cost NASA $1 billion just to bring back 60 grams of asteroid mineral from the OSIRIS-REx mission.
Dordain told the FT he reckoned that the Luxembourg project would cost “tens of billions of dollars” but that the payoff could be enormous. “At the end,” he said, “there could be a market worth trillions.”
Asteroids might not look like much on the outside, but they’re packed full of rare and precious materials.
Underneath the surface of some asteroids is a treasure trove of a type of mineral, called platinum, that is rare on Earth but extremely lucrative — 1,000 cubic centimeters of platinum is worth close to $1 million.
One of these platinum-loaded asteroids flew by Earth on July 19.
And this particular one, called asteroid 2011 UW-158, is thought to harbor $300 billion to $5.4 trillion worth of platinum and other precious metals and materials. Astronomers can estimate this by studying the object’s size as well as its general composition with instruments called spectrometers that measure the intensity of light from an object.
Asteroid mining could be an extremely useful business for agencies like NASA, which hopes to capture an asteroid and bring it in orbit around the moon soon enough for future astronauts to visit it and collect samples by as early as 2025.
NASA says the materials frozen in asteroids could “be used in developing the space structures and in generating the rocket fuel that will be required to explore and colonize our solar system in the twenty-first century.”
21 Comments on "Luxembourg is going to mine asteroids for minerals"
ghung on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 8:45 am
Not sure it’s wise to mess with the orbits of asteroids. Then, again, what could go wrong? Betting these assholes never think about that.
paulo1 on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 9:01 am
April Fools!!!!
Wow, what and investment opportunity!!!
chilyb on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 9:20 am
platinum is an element or a metal, not a mineral.
ghung on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 9:35 am
Platinum is all three.
J-Gav on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 9:58 am
Better still, why don’t we just package up all that worthless speculative paper in our banks and hedge funds and send that out to the stars with a big ‘For Sale’ sign on it? (at face value of course). Maybe we can get some space goons to fall for it …
Bob Owens on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 11:38 am
Barring the discovery of an unlimited power source we can safely say that space mining will never happen. Even if they are able to bring back tons of platinum, the price of the metal would plunge on Earth to the price of table salt, bankrupting the entire idea. If we had an unlimited power supply we could much easier mine the Earth for the metals we needed. Put this idea right up there with an orbiting solar power station beaming back microwave power to Earth.
rockman on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 11:49 am
Paulo – I’ll assume it’s just someone getting a head start of the humor. First, there is no existing technology for mining asteroids. Second, I gather folks who buy this story have no concept of the distances to the asteroid belt.
The seed to the joke might have been a new TV show I’ve been watching: The Expanse. Which actually involves mining asteroids centuries into the future. One of the really big resources they mine is…wait for it…wait for it…WATER!!! Which is in very big demand in places such as the independent colony on Mars. And yes: there are folks killing over it, bad ass Martian marines defending it and, of course, a revolt by the unionized asteroid miners.
Really.
Apneaman on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 12:14 pm
Meanwhile the mining industry on earth is tanking due to lack of demand/growth.
Go Speed Racer on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 12:29 pm
Investor scam. Since TV preacher in an RV is getting stale, now this is the new plan for separating Grandpa from his life savings. He don’t need it anyway.
ghung on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 12:40 pm
Yeah, Rock, I’m enjoying The Expanse. Good scifi yarn so far.
rockman on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 1:20 pm
Ghung – And now I just found out it won’t be back on until 2017. If this conversation has someone interested here the web site:
http://www.syfy.com/theexpanse/about
The cool thing about the show is if you have a good handle on astronomy they are very good at keeping the facts straight. And besides: bad ass space marines that don’t believe in surrendering or giving quarter…don’t get better than that. LOL.
“Hundreds of years in the future, humans have colonized the solar system. The U.N. controls Earth. Mars is an independent military power. The planets rely on the resources of the Asteroid Belt, where air and water are more precious than gold. For decades, tensions have been rising between these three places. Earth, Mars and the Belt are now on the brink of war. And all it will take is a single spark.”
GregT on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 1:44 pm
“US President Barack Obama signed legislation that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.”
It should be somewhat difficult to deny the usefulness of this new legislation. At least worthy of a second Nobel Prize. Thanks Barack!
Anonymous on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 1:59 pm
Luxembourg is going to mine asteroids for minerals
No its isnt- not ever.
Even the worlds leading space powers, Russia.the EU, China, could not pull that off, even if they were inclined to try.(Which they are sensible enough not to of course).
But BS articles like this are always good for a free lol I suppose….
penury on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 2:38 pm
On a day when the FED admits that there will be no interest rate hikes, in fact they are seriously considering negative rates, implicitly hinting at more QE, and the Dow goes up 450 points I will believe anything(almost)
rockman on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 3:36 pm
penury – In that case you might want to buy a lot on the moon. Seriously. Years ago I heard that despite treaties about no commercial activities on the moon they didn’t think they needed a treaty to prevent someone from just owning land on the moon. As the story goes (urban legend, perhaps) some guy filed claims and was selling lots (title included) on the moon. When I have the time I’ll dig into it some more.
peakyeast on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 4:09 pm
I have a much better idea.
Just start selling the rights to the interior of “deep” earth (50+km) – or rather the theoretical quantities therein of various substances.
That way we dont have to dig it out and refine it, but it can be cashed in right here and now. At least for the sake of platinum and gold which are not used in great quantities.
Newfie on Wed, 3rd Feb 2016 5:07 pm
ROtFLMAO
i1 on Thu, 4th Feb 2016 5:57 am
I’m mining pension funds for idiots.
Boat on Thu, 4th Feb 2016 1:06 pm
China has most of the earths rare minerals and the use in products keeps growing. Researchers think prices have finally gotten high enough to reinvestigate rare earth mining in coal waste. Will tech solve another looming problem?
GregT on Thu, 4th Feb 2016 5:04 pm
Boat,
“Will tech solve another looming problem?
Tech is the root cause of our biggest looming problems, not the solution to them.
roman on Thu, 4th Feb 2016 6:53 pm
Poverty causes ignorance. Money causes retardation.