Larry Page and
James Cameron want to go to an asteroid and mine it. Well, strictly speaking, they want someone else to do it. Someone will set the
explosives and wield the pickaxe and Larry and Jim will make the big bucks.
Such is capitalism. But first Larry and J.C. have to get their miners there.
Mining asteroids isn’t easy. After all, it’s
mostly rocket science. There is also the matter of staying on the asteroid when
Newton’s third law of motion is
trying to push you away with each strike of your pickaxe.
Speed is a
problem for two reasons. Firstly, if people are involved, speed matters because
people get old, they get bored and they want to do other things than sit in a
tin can while it makes imperceptible progress toward Mars or Jupiter or the
asteroid belt. For space travel to be more than a scientific trifle, for it to
make economic sense or social sense, people must be able to get where they are
going fast, or at least subjectively fast.
The second
reason speed is a problem is because it is important to realize a return on
your investment as soon as possible. No one is going to invest in a venture
that doesn't pay back for fifty years. By the time you've made enough money to
invest in space, then waited for the profits to come home, it’s too late to
have any fun spending the profits. Speed is also important because stuff
changes. If the price of gold is x dollars per ounce when you invest in an
automated satellite to extract gold from an asteroid, it may be a fraction of
that or a multiple of that when your money comes back to you. Too much risk.
You need speed to reduce risk. Of course, you could set your gains up as a
college fund for your grandchildren but human beings are notorious for wanting
instant gratification and avoiding risk, and a fifty-year return doesn't meet
these criteria.
Cost
matters because… well cost always matters. The reason we aren't all building
rockets to the Moon is that it is just too darn expensive. The main challenge
for private space ventures isn't getting into space, it is doing it cheaply.
After the failure of the 'reusable shuttle' to save money, private space
entrepreneurs are tackling the issue of reducing cost. And they are succeeding.
That is why private space launches are becoming more popular, because they are
cheaper. And over the next ten, twenty years, they will continue to become
cheaper and more reliable. Once that happens, mining an asteroid is a feasible
project.
So where are the
stories in all this. Well, I think the speed of travel is already well
addressed, mostly in those horrifically morbid movies about trips to Mars, and
the more optimistic stories of generation ships. But most science-fiction
doesn’t accept the speed, it gets rid of it with hyper-drives and wormholes.
But there is still scope for stories about investments gone wrong or returns
delayed. Actually, this has also been done I think, just think of those stories
of medieval merchants waiting on a boatload of precious metals and rare spices
to return from the Americas or the Far East. Just update the technology.
A story around
the cost of spaceflight sounds mundane, but I think it could be done. The story
would probably be about the technology that makes spaceflight cheaper,
technologies such as spaceships grown as crystals, or living creatures, or
designed by computer and perfected by evolutionary programs that eliminate
unsafe or expensive design features.
