Written By Jeff Josse
For several years Google has had it’s eyes on the stars and more specifically the asteroids. A 500 meter long asteroid floating around space rich with platinum has had Google’s eyes on it since 2010 and their plan is by 2015 to launch a small spacecraft called “Firefly” to survey these asteroids and collect data on
their resources. This team plans on raising what they call a mere $3M from equity funds, venture capitalists to $10M the next year to begin building their spaceship the plan is to build a cheap yet efficient ship that will be able to serve its purpose. Several years later after enough data is collected they plan on building the “Dragonfly” which will be the actual miner planned to carry back a whopping 25-65kg sample back home, however earlier expeditions by NASA only proved successful in bringing back samples of dust. However everyone calls these plans farfetched, sadly that’s because they are, the planned expedition will cost millions of dollars no matter how cheap the try to make it, on top of that raising the money for it AND the Dragonfly will take more than a couple of equity funds and venture capitalists. The promise however on Google’s end was that they would be able to turn a huge profit on mining the asteroids, again however as I said many people are speculating whether it’s worth investing in this project because again NASA themselves were barely able to bring back dust from their expedition. Not only that but as any good economist knows even if in say 10 years they were able to start a full scale mining operation on said asteroid, the value of platinum and any other resource they mine will plummet which basically ruins the whole idea to turn this voyage into profit. Demand and supply will surely increase if they begin bringing back resources from outer
space which will cause overall prices to fall and not allow Google to repay any debt they’ll most likely have.
However on the upside no other country has shown this kind of technology and if they were to successfully build this spacecraft they could make money selling this technology to NASA and other space programs.
As well it would be a huge leap forward in science considering they also want to try and find oxygen, methane, and water on the moon's north pole. In my eyes this is a 50 50 chance and they take a big risk either way, because the news is out there that these are their plans, so my question is what do you think they
should do, is it worth the risk?
Venturing beyond our own planet, I think there is great benefits of exploring the beyond. Since we are currently not in a position to be spending so much money, I don't think that this expedition is worth it. In the past, even if scientists expected to have large samples, there was only a small amount of dust! This proves that all this money put into a project like this would be a waste of American money at this time. I believe that space exploration is important, and maybe we can put more money into exploring the universe rather than an asteroid. Although this would put the US at a point above most nations in selling this advanced technology, I think that the large amounts of money being spent are just not worth it. Sooner or later we can continue this process, but not right now. The point mentioned that the worth of the asteroid would go down also makes me think that this would be a waste of our money. Our spot in economics is not in the position to be spending billions of dollars to only get back some dust. This could be a good investment in the future, but until we solve our economic problems internally, I think that this is not worth the risk.
ReplyDeleteI thought this article was very interesting. I had no idea that there was an asteroid that had platinum in it. Platinum is a good resource but the risk that it would take to further explore this asteroid, is a big one. I think that if people really want to spend our money on space exploration then we should be spending $10M on the whole universe not just one asteroid. With our economy in the shape that it is in right now, spending millions of dollars on one asteroid is definitely not worth it. As I said in other articles about space exploration, I believe that we should get our economy back on track before spending money on things such as exploring an asteroid.
ReplyDeleteGoing beyond our plant and collecting samples from asteroids is very big step and cost a lot of money. If anyone could do it I would say it would be Google to that. They are a billion dollar company; there company is worth over a hundred billion dollars so this would not affect our government as much as people think. They could go through with this and then sell to NASA so they can begin research and other projects like this one. This really will change the economy more than anything.
ReplyDeleteI found this very interesting, mining in space, you don't hear that Every day. In any sense though it has major risks that sit on the edge of a knife. Because of this I don't think it is worth it. The concept itself sounds impossible as is. However by the sound id it google sounds confident in it so there must be some promise in it. I'm really curios now to see how it turns out.
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