Apologies to people who've already seen this over in the other place, but I wanted some more opinions from people I respect.
The Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, a student society, has a business plan competition in which you can win prizes of UKP30,000 or UKP10,000. I already have a business about to start operations and my product-based company ideas aren't at the business plan stage, but I've had another idea stuck in my head for a few years now: mining near-Earth comets and asteroids. I'm pretty sure I can write a detailed and convincing business plan that will bootstrap us in a couple of decades from a few hundred million dollars of investment right through to solar power satellites and giant space colonies. I can convincingly explain why none of this has happened yet and why the inelasticity of the launcher market makes it unlikely to happen in the near future, but also that I have insights that can make it happen. I can offer a return on investment in twenty years or so of at least several trillion dollars. The plan has a number of fallback positions and alternative options that make it very robust, and it requires the development of only modest amounts of new technology (no next-gen launch vehicles or anything like that). Also, I like the idea of standing up in front of the presentations dinner and starting a presentation with "Who'd like to be a billionaire? Okay, now who'd like to be a *trillionaire*? Who'd like to invest in a company which will become the most successful and powerful organisation in human history? I can offer you all this, and more..." and then follow up with detailed technical, financial and economic models showing that I can in fact offer all of that. On the other hand, it's going to be a lot of work and will draw attention away from my more near-term activities; it might embarrass the society if they have to give me a prize; and it might get me a reputation as a lunatic amongst the business angel and venture capital community. So, should I do it? Am I living in a Baxter novel? Oh, and here's a rough outline of the scheme (it's cobbled together out of an IRC conversation so it's not at all polished): ----------------------------------------------------------------------- At the moment, the key element is a solar electolysis factory. We put one of those in Earth orbit first. Then we launch blocks of ice to it from the Earth. Ice is good because it's high density and non-cryogenic. Both of these mean there's less mass overhead than with cryogenic fuels. So we can instantly start offering cryogenic fuels in Earth orbit at a cheaper rate than anyone else can. So we use that to fuel transfer vehicles to launch commsats to geosynchronous orbit. This lets commsat companies save a substantial amount on the cost of their launches. Next we launch a second electrolysis factory with an ice-digger and attach it to a transfer vehicle in orbit and shoot it off to land on a near-Earth comet. The factory lands, digs out a big block of ice, attaches it to the transfer vehicle, electrolyses some cryogen fuel and shoots the block of ice back to Earth orbit where it docks with the first electrolysis factory. (The advantage of this is that we don't suffer boil-off on the fuel we transfer and have no mass overhead for the tankage.) Then we launch a few empty transfer vehicles from Earth and fuel them at our Earth-orbit station. Now we can offer fully fueled transfer vehicles in Earth orbit (at the Station?) for a tiny fraction of what they cost to launch from Earth. Possibly we design our own transfer vehicle with enough excess fuel tankage to bring it back to low orbit from geosyncronous orbit. Now we're in the freight business! We can move people's satellites around for them and even refuel them. We can bring stuff back from geosynchronous orbit to be returned to Earth in the Shuttle. All essentially for free, compared with the current way of doing it. Next, we design and build a platinum mine and use one of our transfer vehicles to blast it off to a near-Earth asteroid. We also send a block of ice there (or maybe we can extract water from the asteroid itself) and an electrolysis factory. Now we mine deposits of platinum (or iridium, or other stuff) from the surface of the asteroid and ship them back to Earth orbit. The average near-Earth asteroid has around five to ten trillion dollars of platinum group metals in it. If we mine the surface few metres we ought to get a few tens of billions of dollars worth. Note that we can also move the mining station from asteroid to asteroid to re-use it. (We'll leave the electrolysis station there though because it'll come in useful.) Essentially for the cost of an electrolysis station we can mine all the surface deposits of the asteroid. Then we sit here manipulating the market for platinum group metals and making ourselves perhaps a hundred billion dollars a year. (Detailed calculations to follow.) With some of this money, we develop a second type of mining station, which extracts silica, processes it into amorphous silicon and makes solar cells from that. We can use these solar cells to power the various mining and electrolysis stations, but we can also use them to build solar power satellites in Earth orbit. Probably we'll have to ship some people out to geosynchronous orbit to oversee construction, but we can afford that by now. We can then use our cheap solar cells and cheap orbital transfer to land helium-3 mines on the Moon. Soon, RichCorp controls the Earth's energy markets as well as its precious metal markets. At this stage we buy the Middle-Eastern oilfields, because hydrocarbons might come in useful. Anyway, by now we can afford to land larger mining stations on asteroids and can begin mining bulk materials. Asteroids of the type we mine are mostly iron. We use this to manufacture steel plates and struts in orbit. We can use those to help assemble the SPS arrays and also to build the bulk structures of large, 2001-style stations. (If the joins aren't good enough, we can spray the insides with plastics to make them airtight.) We can now build O'Neill-style stations in Earth or Lunar orbit at reasonable prices (perhaps comparable to building ocean liners today). We can now start off-world colonisation. (This assumes some way of getting hundreds or thousands of people off Earth, which we can't really do yet and which is beyond the assumptions of my plan.) Essentially the whole point of everything so far is to be able to mine the main belt. The resources there utterly dwarf those available in the relatively small number of near-Earth asteroids. From there we can bootstrap to the Trojan asteroids, which contain even more material, and the Kuiper belt, and start mining the gas-giants for helium-3 and other far-out stuff. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I can repost some old Culture messages that outline why mining asteroids and comets is better than mining the Moon, if you'd like. I'll also be writing some material in the near future on why the inelasticity of the launcher business means that only items with high complexity and low mass should be brought up from the surface of the Earth (and clearly propellants and structural elements are not in this class). Rich GCU You All Thought I Was Joking About That God-Emperor Stuff, Didn't You? _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
