The (Not So) Small Business Of Space

FutureBoy.blog:

Risking the sneers of more down-to-earth prognosticators, Future Boy has long been bullish on the value of taking business into space. He sees a universe of potential ROI, and believes it belongs not to the lumbering government programs but to nimble entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan, Elon Musk, Jim Benson, John Carmack and Jeff Bezos, along with farsighted investors and partners like Paul Allen and Richard Branson.

FB was therefore very heartened to see that the Freakonomics blog convened an expert quorum on the topic “is space exploration worth the cost?“, and to learn that all the experts agreed it was. He was disappointed, however, by the paucity of the economic argument, and the fact that the only mention of ROI was that of NASA. (Apparently, every dollar we spend on the space program is worth $8 to the U.S. economy in licenses, technology transfer, contracts, and so on; in other words, if we weren’t spending $10 billion a month on the black hole of Iraq and gave it all to NASA instead, we’d all be very rich by now).But the potential ROI of private space exploration is so great, it laughs at NASA’s 800% return.

Meet 3554 Amun, an unassuming little M-class asteroid about two kilometers wide, which looks like it came straight out of The Little Prince. There are just a couple of reasons to care about 3554 Amun. Firstly, it crosses Earth’s orbit, and will probably hit us one of these millennia. Secondly, it is a kind of weightless El Dorado. Our best guess is that it contains roughly $6 trillion worth of cobalt, $8 trillion in iron and nickel, and $6 trillion in platinum.

Okay, so you can’t exactly get there on a paddle steamer. We’re talking about a minimum billion-dollar investment, and years of trial and error, of the kind that Elon Musk’s Falcon-1 rockets are undergoing. But if you time it right, 3554 Amun is easier to get to than the moon. And thanks to the Google-sponsored $30 million Lunar X-Prize, we already have starry-eyed entrepreneurs competing to land a mobile probe on the moon’s surface by 2012, six years ahead of NASA’s supposed return there.

Photo by lifeboat.com.

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