Corporate Space Mining Megathread!!111

[frunk]

Because the reason somebody has to go the kickstarter route is because he can't get commercial funding otherwise?  So there is a selection bias that these are inherently more risky. 

Stocks on the other hand are regulated, with auditing and accounting requirements, and there are ways to reduce risk such as diversification.

Presumably companies go public because they wanted more funding than they could get staying private.  Yes there's more regulation in stocks, but there have been successful prosecutions for fraud involving crowd funding.  If this type of funding continues to have success it will almost certainly become more heavily regulated.  I think the differences are much less than you think.

[Admiral Yi]

I'd say companies go public because the founders and early investors want to cash in their chips.

[Razgovory]

There's a much greater chance I'll get the game then Mono becoming wealthy playing the stock market.

You seriously underestimate the power of compound interest and reinvested dividends.

I don't gamble.

[Monoriu]

Because the reason somebody has to go the kickstarter route is because he can't get commercial funding otherwise?  So there is a selection bias that these are inherently more risky. 

Stocks on the other hand are regulated, with auditing and accounting requirements, and there are ways to reduce risk such as diversification.

Presumably companies go public because they wanted more funding than they could get staying private.  Yes there's more regulation in stocks, but there have been successful prosecutions for fraud involving crowd funding.  If this type of funding continues to have success it will almost certainly become more heavily regulated.  I think the differences are much less than you think.

Corporations exist for the explicit purpose of making a profit for shareholders.  Kickstarter projects are different.  I've seen a kickstarter project with the sole aim of putting a lance on the surface of the moon (to recreate a famous anime scene in real life).  When you compare stocks and kickstarter, I suspect you are thinking of stock floatations.  Floatations are regulated and, at least in HK, require a track record of revenue and profit.  And stock markets are a lot more liquid that kickstarters.  I can trade stocks with a few clicks.  Can I do that with my kickstarter rights or whatever they are called?  I can buy an exchange traded fund that passively track S&P 500.  Where is the kickstarter equivalent if you say they are similar?

[jimmy olsen]

Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived'
http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4

Goldman Sachs is bullish on space mining with "asteroid-grabbing spacecraft." In a 98-page note for clients seen by Business Insider, analyst Noah Poponak and his team argue that platinum mining in space is getting cheaper and easier, and the rewards are becoming greater as time goes by.

"While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and
technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn," the report says.

$2.6 billion (£2 billion) sounds like a lot, but it is only about one-third the amount that has been invested in Uber, putting the price well within reach of today's VC funds. It is also a comparable to the setup cost for a regular earthbound mine. (This MIT paper estimates a new rare earth metal mine can cost up to $1 billion, from scratch.)

[Eddie Teach]

So I guess Mono is on board.

[Monoriu]

So I guess Mono is on board.

I don't see why that is the case.  I want to work for Goldman Sachs.  Not take their investment advice.  If the investment advice is given by Goldman, I'll be inclined to avoid it, actually. 

[Josquius]

Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived'
http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4

Goldman Sachs is bullish on space mining with "asteroid-grabbing spacecraft." In a 98-page note for clients seen by Business Insider, analyst Noah Poponak and his team argue that platinum mining in space is getting cheaper and easier, and the rewards are becoming greater as time goes by.

"While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and
technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn," the report says.

$2.6 billion (£2 billion) sounds like a lot, but it is only about one-third the amount that has been invested in Uber, putting the price well within reach of today's VC funds. It is also a comparable to the setup cost for a regular earthbound mine. (This MIT paper estimates a new rare earth metal mine can cost up to $1 billion, from scratch.)

This was written by one of their pros or a work experience guy?

Promising.

[viper37]

Because the reason somebody has to go the kickstarter route is because he can't get commercial funding otherwise?  So there is a selection bias that these are inherently more risky. 

Stocks on the other hand are regulated, with auditing and accounting requirements, and there are ways to reduce risk such as diversification.

Presumably companies go public because they wanted more funding than they could get staying private.  Yes there's more regulation in stocks, but there have been successful prosecutions for fraud involving crowd funding.  If this type of funding continues to have success it will almost certainly become more heavily regulated.  I think the differences are much less than you think.

Corporations exist for the explicit purpose of making a profit for shareholders.  Kickstarter projects are different.  I've seen a kickstarter project with the sole aim of putting a lance on the surface of the moon (to recreate a famous anime scene in real life).  When you compare stocks and kickstarter, I suspect you are thinking of stock floatations.  Floatations are regulated and, at least in HK, require a track record of revenue and profit.  And stock markets are a lot more liquid that kickstarters.  I can trade stocks with a few clicks.  Can I do that with my kickstarter rights or whatever they are called?  I can buy an exchange traded fund that passively track S&P 500.  Where is the kickstarter equivalent if you say they are similar?

you're comparing apples and oranges.

I own a stake in an SMB.  I can't actively trade parts of my shares on the S&P 500.  I can't easily find a buyer to meet my price by tomorrow morning.

The lack of liquidity in an asset does not mean it is a different category of asset.  My company's stock are presented the exact same way in my financial statements that Microsoft's stocks are presented in theres.  Legally, my shares are exactly the same as any publicly traded corporation registered in Quebec.

Kickstarted is a platform to faciliate the exchange for venture capital.  These projects are too small for the traditional markets, too risky for the banks, they fall in between.  There is nothing preventing you from finding capital with your friends, or people on Languish, to send something to the moon.  The fact that it does not aim for profit and that the reward may be smaller in nature than traditional shares, because of the usually lower amounts of capital required, does not change the nature of the business.

Not all businesses are made for profit, and even for profit businesses may not be created with the sole purpose of getting rich quickly.  Again, that does not make them any less of a business.

[Eddie Teach]

Take that, 2015 Mono. 

[The Minsky Moment]

This was written by one of their pros or a work experience guy?

Research analyst covering aerospace and defense industry.  Not at the top of their hierarchy.  He's been banging this drum for years now.

Does Goldman want to spend billions on space mining probes?  No.  Do they want to earn fat fees on the capital raising required to support that kind of enterprise?  Ya Betcha.

[DontSayBanana]

Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived'
http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4

Goldman Sachs is bullish on space mining with "asteroid-grabbing spacecraft." In a 98-page note for clients seen by Business Insider, analyst Noah Poponak and his team argue that platinum mining in space is getting cheaper and easier, and the rewards are becoming greater as time goes by.

"While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and
technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn," the report says.

$2.6 billion (£2 billion) sounds like a lot, but it is only about one-third the amount that has been invested in Uber, putting the price well within reach of today's VC funds. It is also a comparable to the setup cost for a regular earthbound mine. (This MIT paper estimates a new rare earth metal mine can cost up to $1 billion, from scratch.)

The tech is there, sure, but the logistics of building continuous revenue on the enterprise? Hell no.

You've got to factor in the asteroid's opposition, perigee, apogee, how much the shortest line needs to deviate to account for the moon, mars, any other celestial objects, the contingency of any single mission failing or needing to be aborted... the fuel calculations alone are insanely complex and subject to so much variance that there's no way to build a business plan around them at this point.

[Savonarola]

From the BEEB

A Samurai Swordsmith Is Designing A Space Probe

If you wanted to slice stuff up in space, what would you bring with you? 'Samurai' swords, which have been made in Japan for centuries, might be on your list because the tempered steel used in them is notoriously tough. There are plenty of videos online showing these Japanese swords, also called 'katana', cutting up everything from thick boards of wood to metal pipes.

Now, a trio of engineers have teamed up with a master Japanese swordsmith to design a rock-sampling device made with the same steel used in these blades – and the plan is to use it on an asteroid.

Japan's Hayabusa missions have so far sent spacecraft, rovers and sampling tools to a one kilometre-wide asteroid called Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars. Hayabusa2's rovers recently sent back stunning images of the asteroid's black, rocky surface. But bringing fragments of Ryugu back to Earth is an enormously tricky task, which is why novel ideas are being suggested for how to do it.

In a paper detailing early experiments, the team – including Genrokuro Matsunaga, a 70-year-old swordsmith and Takeo Watanabe at Kanagawa Institute of Technology – explain how they have made several rock corers with various metallic compositions. Four contain tamahagane, the traditional metal made from iron sand and charcoal that is used in Japanese swords. "To achieve the sharpness and plasticity demand of the corer tip, we borrowed the techniques of traditional Japanese sword-smithing in fabricating the corer samples," the authors write.

Matsunaga used iron sand from a beach in Japan, melted it down and tempered it to make the tamahagane. The process involved heating the metal to searing temperatures and then cooling it rapidly, over and over again.

The resulting corers are small, cylindrical devices with a bladed edge angled inwards. Instead of swiping a katana sword at the asteroid – which would be cool but impractical – the idea is to launch the tamahagane-tipped corer at the space rock at great speed. In theory, it will dig into the asteroid and allow for a sample to be scooped up. A tether back to the mothership spacecraft could then reel the device and asteroid fragments in.

Back in 2005, an earlier Hayabusa mission showed how difficult it was to grab significant quantities of rock from an asteroid. Two attempts to sample Ryugu were not triggered properly, though a small amount of dust was collected in a canister. One and a half thousand grains were later returned to Earth, but ideally an asteroid-sampler could gather up a lot more than that – and go deeper than just the surface rock.

This is because the surface of an asteroid is "weathered" over millions of years by cosmic rays, ultraviolet light and X-rays from the sun.

"Clearly it would tell us more about solar system history if we could get a sample from deeper into the rock to look at the unexposed pristine rock," explains Martin Elvis at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

But even getting surface or near-surface samples is difficult because of a basic property of asteroids: they're small and don't have much of a gravitational pull. Every time a rover or collecting device connects with or pushes down against an asteroid, it can easily bounce back off it again.


"Anything that allows you to use less force to cut into the asteroid surface – like this tamahagane steel – has to help," says Elvis.

You might think of asteroids as solid boulders zooming through space, but often they are more like "rubble piles" of clustered rock that can be extremely unstable. Try slicing into that in near-zero gravity.

Indeed, we've very rarely got close to asteroids, let alone analysed what they're made of directly, so one can never be quite sure of what we'll find when we show up, says independent geophysicist and disaster researcher Mika McKinnon.

"You can even have ice mixed in and then as it heats up you can have an explosion as it turns to gas," she says.

So far, the Japanese team have tested some of their corers by dropping them down a long pipe towards a concrete slab at the bottom of a tall stairwell. The samplers successfully extracted some concrete, but occasionally dropped it when being retrieved.

"A mechanism to prevent samples from falling off during the extraction and recovery phase needs to be devised," the authors note.

Plus, the tamahagane corers themselves were not tested – because they were so expensive.

Still, these are the first steps towards blasting a sword-inspired sampling technology into space.

Is such a metal really the best material for the job? McKinnon is unsure, but she does point out that the emotional appeal of such a culturally significant metal is not to be ignored.

"By sending human elements with our spacecraft, we create ties to these machines that have gone on our behalf," she says.

Perhaps that is the real value of tamahagane – it forges a very human link between us down here on Earth, and the asteroid the steel may one day sample. A samurai-inspired emissary whizzing through the solar system would connect Japan's history and its future.

Toshiro Mifune to the rescue.

[Malthus]

Perhaps sending sword-wielding Samurai robots into space is the first step towards creating our dystopian Amine future. 

[Maximus]

"Samurai steel" isn't any harder than other modern steels.