It's wonderful to see people spending huge amounts of money to expand the reach of humanity instead of our capacity for narcissism. Startups like these give me hope for the future.
"One possibility the company is considering is to nudge a small asteroid, perhaps one as long as a football field, into an orbit around Earth closer than the moon."
If you're going to bombard something for military purposes, the most effective technique involves using a very large number of nuclear weapons, which is well within the capabilities of anyone who would try to bombard the earth from space.
Back during the Space Race, the idea that the Russians could put something into orbit wasn't just a wound to the national pride, it was a technical demonstration of the fact that they could build ICBM's. If you have the rocket power necessary to lift something into orbit, you have the rocket power necessary to put a warhead on a ballistic trajectory to any point on the earth's surface. So if you can go into space and redirect asteroids, you can obviously launch an ICBM. And at this juncture, it's probably easier to develop the technology for nuclear weapons than the technology to capture asteroids and bombard the earth with them. The only way you could do more damage more cost-effectively with asteroids is if you had an extinction-level asteroid, but there's obviously no strategic value to that.
Bear in mind, I'm only talking about how scary it is, which isn't quite the same as discussing how militarily effective it is. By which I mean--obviously orbital bombardment can be worthwhile, but it would cause no more damage than nuclear weapons, and any magnitude of orbital bombardment that wouldn't trigger a MAD reaction would have to cause strictly less damage.
However, it's easier to claim that a mining asteroid crashing into your enemy was an act of sabotage/accident/non-national terrorism than a rain of nukes with your signature on them.
An interesting thing is that ballistic missiles that go through space, like the V2 and Scud, are dramatically easier than getting into orbit. Like 10% of the energy cost. Getting your ballistic missile to the other side of the Earth, though, does seem like it would require only epsilon less energy and precision than putting it in orbit. (I haven't done the math, so I could be wrong.)
> If you're going to bombard something for military purposes, the most effective technique involves using a very large number of nuclear weapons...
Only if you don't intend to occupy that land in the next 500 years, though. I'd imagine a tungsten telephone pole dropped from orbit has better deep-ground penetration than a nuke, too.
Sorry, this is a common misunderstanding. Modern nuclear weapons are generally very fuel efficient, while there are some short lived nucleotides that are brought on by the activation of elements exposed to the gamma ray flux during detonation, unless you actively try to make it 'dirty' (and thus long lived) you can go back to living there in a couple of months. The only cities which were atomically bombed are completely livable today (much less than 500 years).
The dangers of a large nuclear exchange are widespread climate change and economic disruptions brought about by entire supply chains being removed. Not 'wastelands' of bombed out cities too radioactive to visit.
Military applications may divert a couple billions into developing the technologies needed for peaceful applications. Even with traditional government inefficiencies, that's the equivalent of a couple hundred millions in private enterprise. Not entirely bad and consider we here at HN are not the first people to think about it.
Don't forget the Redstone and Atlas rockets that carried the Mercury capsules were (not very) modified ICBMs.
This scary thought makes up much of the backdrop for one of my favourite scifi stories, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Definitely worth a (re)read given this latest news!
From the Times article:
this one has the distinct advantage in that it has technical savvy and adequate capitalization to get started.
Gotta feel bad for the guys who provided the "inadequate capital" to the earlier companies that never had the "technical savvy" to make it happen.
I see the imaginations of the hackers here burning, and it excites me. I only wonder if the human species as a whole isn't too cynical to try risky space ventures again.
The public might not endorse risk that's Government sponsored, but I doubt we'll ever have a shortage of people willing to take extreme risks in the name of exploration.
A couple founders raising money and taking pre-orders can be cash flow positive. Then they will build out the team, it likely will be cashflow negative for a while (or else they wouldn't have raised money), and then hopefully it will be cashflow positive again.
No, according to the NY Times article, "the company employs about 25 engineers and has development contracts for technologies like laser communications that it believes it will need for prospecting and mining missions."
It's a slightly deceiving statement. A company can be "cash flow positive" as long as they are bringing in more cash (by any means) than they are paying out (for any reason).
A company that gets a $1m loan then spends $100k would be "cash flow positive".
It sounds totally insane, but I read somewhere that the backers just bought a bunch of platinum puts and then announced their plans to mine it from space...
Yeah, that's true. Maybe it will work if they keep their plans secretive until right before they are able deliver large amounts of platinum-group elements? They're only going to make a significant amount on these options if very few people buy these options, otherwise a large rush would shift the market prematurely.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that was curious about this, so:
> There are very limited laws against "insider trading" in the commodities markets, if, for no other reason, than that the concept of an "insider" is not immediately analogous to commodities themselves (e.g., corn, wheat, steel, etc.). However, analogous activities such as front running are illegal under U.S. commodity and futures trading laws. For example, a commodity broker can be charged with fraud if he or she receives a large purchase order from a client (one likely to affect the price of that commodity) and then purchases that commodity before executing the client's order in order to benefit from the anticipated price increase.
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What if it is? (I don't think it is, but let's assume for a moment). Does it matter? We will still advance as a species, regardless of the motivation of the original backers.
One of my favourite aspects of capitalism is that it can provide individuals with an incentive to achieve goals that benefit the species as a whole. Sure, the backers will get richer, and they will get loads of personal press out of it. But we will finally be expanding our resource gathering to the near solar system. That is worth feeding someone's ego IMO!
It doesn't. Just pointing out that much of what we do is driven by narcissism and it's better to accept this fact than to pretend that it is otherwise.
I'm pretty sure that if these people, with their background, were only looking to get even richer. They would use their time to invest on something here on earth.
It's wonderful to see people spending huge amounts of money to expand the reach of humanity instead of our capacity for narcissism. Startups like these give me hope for the future.