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I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at
by hi 2y ago
I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company.
I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record.
My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this?
Overlapping Investors:
- 776
- Y Combinator
- Initialized Capital
- Caladan Ventures
- Alex-Programs 2y agoAs far as I know, launching on new, unproven rockets tends to be a lot cheaper. E.g. the Escapade mission launching on New Glenn.
- aaronblohowiak 2y agoI don’t know if that is what is happening here, but it is a common occurrence — both to juice numbers but also for special pricing (as mentioned in article) or mutual flexibility (dedicated launch), because the founders know each other, etc.
- numbsafari 2y agoverY Common…
- foobarbecue 2y agoDo they have a plan for reentry? Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space? (Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)
- grey-area 2y agoCouldn’t you make an ablative heat shield possibly from waste materials on the same asteroid? Then lob your metal toward a shallow sea on earth? Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there? Do we know what their reentry plan is?
- Loughla 2y agoI am not super comfortable with a company whose purpose is figuring out pinpoint meteor strikes. That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?
- MattExSci 2y agoDestroying civilization by redirecting an asteroid is not on the current roadmap.
- sonofhans 2y agoYou should frame this and put it on a wall somewhere.
- tsimionescu 2y agoIron rods from heaven is a fun idea, but it's very unlikely to be a practical weapon. It's not hard to change the orbit (and thus the landing spot) of an object in space that is small enough for us to control. And no country will allow any other country to store weapons in orbit, as soon as someone put one there, it would get blown out of the sky. The reason we have ICBMs is that we can store them safely on the ground, and launch them on an unpredictable trajectory, with minutes of travel time to their destination, preferably launched in a swarm that makes them even harder to track and individually stop.
- MattExSci 2y agoI get asked this all the time. And in short — no way in hell we can change the orbit of an asteroid that is large enough to make a massive impact. Cool (I guess) to think about, but physics make this impossible for our size craft.
- Scubabear68 2y agoHmm…see also The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you have the energy to mine in space, you have a massive kinetic energy well to “throw rocks” into.
- imglorp 2y agoIs asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space, although reentry could be cheap if you form it into a lifting body for re-entry and are willing to lose some from ablation as it glides in. So you have to get your miner and smelter and power plant into stable orbit at like $1m/ton, and then what? Does the money work out?
- fsckboy 2y ago>Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space are there middlemen in this market, or is it a vertically integrated "smelt it/dealt it" situation?
- heelix 2y agoI assume the point of mining in space is to have raw resources that are already outside the gravity well. Not so much for bringing it to earth, but space based construction.
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoGood point, but the assumptions are that this metal would then be used in potentially life critical systems and would require the full rigor of quality assessments for such materials. Not too sure how that might work in LEO.
- financetechbro 2y agoPortfolio company synergies is totally normal and a practice that Elon himself leans on
- tsimionescu 2y ago> They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company. To whom? Who is interested in buying the minuscule amounts of material you could realistically bring back to earth from an asteroid? What raw material would be expensive enough to warrant the gigantic amounts of fuel needed to transport even a few tens of kilos of back?
- spenczar5 2y agoThe usually cited mineral is iridium. It is exceptionally rare on earth (ninth rarest stable element!) but abundant in asteroids and very useful in alloys and many applications.
- adrian_b 2y agoAbundant in asteroids means that it is dissolved in solid iron at slightly more than 1 gram per ton of iron. It is obvious that you cannot bring back to Earth a thousand tons of iron with the purpose of extracting from it a kilogram of iridium worth only a few thousand $. Good luck for the extraction in the conditions at the surface of an asteroid of the kilogram of iridium that can be obtained by processing a thousand tons of hard iron alloy. That would need a really huge amount of energy and processing methods that do not exist yet. The average concentration of platinum-group metals in the Earth's crust may be lower by more than a thousand times in comparison with asteroids, but here these metals are not dispersed uniformly but they are concentrated in places where their concentration is similar or better than in asteroids. Moreover in these mining places the platinum-group metals are present as metallic nuggets or as sulfide minerals, which are much heavier and with different chemical properties than the surrounding minerals. Therefore they can be separated cheaply. Even so, the platinum-group metals are still only seldom separated directly, but usually they are obtained as by-product of extracting other metals, like nickel or copper, because they are more concentrated in the waste products than in the original ore. At this stage, while the cost of transportation to and from an asteroid can be estimated with a reasonable uncertainty, absolutely nobody is able to estimate the cost in energy and chemical substances for the extraction of plantinum-group metals or of any other valuable elements while on the surface of an asteroid. Until someone demonstrates on Earth a feasible extraction method, determining thus the amount of energy and of various chemical substances that do not exist on the target asteroid, which are necessary per mass of recovered valuable chemical elements, any commercial company that claims to have the purpose of mining asteroids can only be a scam for investors, because nobody knows if such an activity can become profitable before a remote future, e.g. one hundred years from now, when none of the present investors would remain alive. I am pretty certain that some time in a not distant future the mining of asteroids will happen, but it will be mostly for substances easy to extract and easy to use in space, like steel for building structures outside Earth, not for bringing anything back to Earth.
- MattExSci 2y agoHonestly, this had nothing to do with mutual investors. While that's great, the space community is small, and we all talk to each other. Andy and Stoke Space are an amazing team, and in this case, we shared a lot of benefits with each other. It's a rare win/win.