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Commercialization

Planetary Resources: Show Me The Money

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 30, 2012
Filed under

Ask an Expert: Explorer’s lessons for asteroid miners, USA Today
“No dummies, the firm has some NASA funding already for their development, reports Keith Cowing of NASAWatch. And a recent Forbes pieces hints that they may be stalking the remote-sensing industry with these small telescopes, ones that might eyeball our planet with even more ease than they spot passing asteroids.”
How Billionaire Asteroid Miners Make Money — Without Mining Asteroids, Forbes
“So when I had a chance to discuss the technology and business of asteroid mining with Chris Lewicki, the company’s President and Chief Engineer, one of my first questions was about that statement – is it true that Planetary Resources is already making money? “That’s correct,” he said. “When we started the company, one of the first things we did was to identify the roadmap that would get us from now until we got to the asteroids. That way, we could identify who would be interested in the things we’d be developing along the way. We already have contracts with NASA, some private companies, and even a few private individuals.”
Is Planetary Resources Already a NASA Contractor? (Yes), earlier post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “Planetary Resources: Show Me The Money”

  1. Steve Whitfield says:
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    We can learn from history and perhaps plan based on analogies, but only within limits.  It is often the differences between scenarios that determine the outcome of a new venture rather than the similarities.

    Steve

  2. DTARS says:
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    I’m wondering if their little telescopes shouldn’t be made out of dragon trunks to save money, plus they could use falcon refueled second stages to place them in locations around the sun

    • ASFalcon13 says:
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      A telescope mission is so totally different from a crewed mission that you’d probably be cheaper building it from scratch or using a preexisting telescope design (maybe grab a bus design from something like Kepler or WISE) than trying to rework a Dragon trunk into a space telescope.

      In particular, telescopes usually require finer pointing than crewed vehicles.  Thrusters have comparatively horrible pointing accuracy and guzzle fuel if they’re your only actuators, so you’re going to need to add some reaction wheels.  You’ll still need a thruster system to desaturate the wheels, but you can get away with a much simpler system; for example, Spitzer uses a cold-gas system…basically, just releasing pressurized nitrogen through small valves, producing fractions of a Newton of thrust per thruster.  The standard Dragon set of 18 90-pound Draco thrusters would be absolute overkill – way too powerful, and too many of them.  Depending on the accuracy of the Dragon’s attitude determination sensors, you might need more accurate star trackers as well.

      The Dragon trunk’s also got a bunch of ECLSS stuff you’re just not going to need, as there aren’t any humans onboard, so you can get rid of all that.  The solar panels are also probably oversized – again, a bunch of stuff you’d need to power for crew just isn’t needed for an uncrewed mission – so you’d want to go with smaller panels to reduce launch weight.

      The structure’s probably a lot bigger and heavier than you need as well.  Again, use Spitzer as an example…the spacecraft bus fit entirely within a Delta II payload fairing, with plenty of room left over for the solar panel/sun shade, telescope assembly, and a big dewar full of liquid helium.

      If I had to guess, the one part you’d actually consider using from a Dragon – the flight computer – is, I’m assuming, probably in the Crew Module, and not the trunk, so wouldn’t be included in the trunk package anyway.  This isn’t really a big deal though…RAD750s are well up to the task and are pretty much standard equipment at the moment, and aren’t sole property of SpaceX or anything like that.

    • frosty says:
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      and how do you plan on doing that? Oh I forgot NASA will pay for it.

  3. Joe Cooper says:
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    This idea of trying to cultivate a business around every step is reminiscent of the whole COTS program ideas, from my view anyway.

    When talking about this with people I explain that there are main steps between here and (for example) Mars – links in a chain – that one has to maintain. But if one can cultivate a market around one of them, than the cost burden of maintaining a step’s existence is shared with 3rd parties. SpaceX is a good example as they actively seek non-NASA customers, and the idea is exactly as successful as the vendors’ ability to do that… Hence the COTS requirements about business plans and so forth. To fail would be to become ULA; still launching functional rockets but, without non-government customers, the facilities are wholly funded by that revenue.

    Is this is a good explanation?

  4. John Gardi says:
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    Folks:

    I speculated about Planetary Resources Inc. ‘bootstrapping’ their way to the asteroids by making money all the way there on the day of the press conference:

    http://nasawatch.com/archives/2012/04/planetary-resou.html#comment-508354074

    They hope to make their telescope multipurpose. It would be used for laser come, navigation (although I still expect they’ll still have a star tracker), sensor suite and… a telescope. That and their flight computer will make a pretty good satellite core. Plug an ion propulsion unit to it and you have a pretty good probe. Put a small chemical rocket and some landing legs on it and there’s a cheap lunar lander. Put wheels on the landing legs and you’ve got a cheap lunar rover. If they can make their electronics tough enough to survive lunar night (and have them set to ‘boot on sunrise’) then folks could use swarms of cheap lunar rovers to do long term exploration on the Moon.

    If you had swarms of rovers on the Moon they could help each other get unstuck if one got into trouble. Cool.

    Wouldn’t that be rich. Someone buys Planetary Resources’ hardware to prospect on the Moon before they even get to the asteroids. Maybe that’s their plan anyway; creating enabling technology.

    Also, Planetary Resources Inc. may not end up making their big money off of the actual mining. They may just sell their data to large resource and energy extraction companies as many prospectors do today. If that’s the case, don’t expect them to tell us where they are going and what they’ve found once they get there.

    tinker