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?
Is 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?
I have directly worked with one of these companies on asteroid discovery. Even they would say it does not cash out for decades. But the premise is that as costs improve it becomes fabulously lucrative.
These companies are very, very risky. If they weren’t, you would see more competition!
I 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.
Good 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.
How are you planning to do that in future missions? Sending up a a capsule or heat shield for sample return, or is the ultimate goal to return a larger mass and lose some?
Pre-built sample return has been proven to work with another asteroid in a small way I guess, the Hayabusa mission.
They are going after platinum group metals, which are valuable enough that the cost of reentry is irrelevant assuming they can get a somewhat pure sample in space.
While the total amount of platinum-group metals in asteroids is many times greater than what is accessible at the Earth surface, because on Earth these metals have gone down, into the Earth's core, they are much more difficult to extract on asteroids than on Earth.
At the surface of Earth, the platinum-group metals are concentrated into metallic nuggets or metallic sulfide crystals, which are very different in density and chemical properties from the surrounding minerals, so they can be separated relatively simply.
On asteroids, these metals are present mostly as minute impurities in iron-nickel-cobalt alloys (i.e. around one part per million). Separating them mechanically is impossible and chemical separation requires great amounts of chemical reactants, e.g. of a strong acid, that would also be very difficult to produce on asteroids, which are depleted in volatile elements. Perhaps one could do some kind of distillation of liquid metals or a differential sublimation in vacuum, which would require a huge amount of energy and a lot of special equipment able to work at very high temperatures. Bringing back the PGE-containing iron alloy is impossible, as its weight is about one million times greater.
At this time there exists no technology that could be used for the extraction of platinum-group metals on asteroids. Developing such a technology is possible, but it is something much more difficult than making a spaceship going to an asteroid and back.
Any credible company that claims that they want to mine asteroids would have to first demonstrate on Earth how to extract the valuable chemical elements from the minerals that can be found on asteroids, and only then solve the simple task of transportation to the asteroids.
There are some celestial bodies where the platinum-group metals are found in forms that are easier to separate from the surrounding minerals, i.e. in the sources of the so-called chondrite meteorites, which are very small bodies that have never coalesced into big asteroids. There the minerals remain as they have condensed at the formation of the Solar System, without having ever been remelted. There much of the platinum-group metals may be in the form of microscopic refractory inclusions in the big mass of common minerals, e.g. inside the so-called calcium-aluminum rich inclusions, instead of being dissolved in iron.
While a survey mission could find such small bodies with a chondrite-like composition, the amount of valuable metals in each such body is very small (a few grams per ton) and the energy consumed with moving from a small body to another would be very large in comparison with the amount of extracted metals.
Moreover, no operations would be possible on such small bodies, the spaceship would have to contain inside the complete metal extraction facility.
What should be easy to make on asteroids is only high-quality iron or nickel or cobalt alloys, for building structures in space, not on Earth.
> ...which would require a huge amount of energy...
Think of an umbrella, and imagine something like it, only much bigger.
Like the girder-mast of a crane, optionally unfolding like a telescoping boom by means of scissors mechanism.
Maybe with some 'tensegrity' sprinkled on.
Spokes along its length folding out.
Some very thin, highly reflective foil stretched tight over these.
Shaped into a parabolic mirror.
Producing one fucking hot focal point, like a looking glass in the sun.
Embiggen or multiply as needed, necessitated by distance from the sun.
>...would have to first demonstrate on Earth...
Why would that be? There is gravity and atmosphere here, which can't be applied in the same ways 'up there', and probably wouldn't make sense to, anyways.
There is no ablation at 400°C to 800°C, which can be achieved by forming the 'lifting body' more into the direction of larger wingspans, instead of making it falling fast like a brick. Which hasn't been done so far, because larger wingspans are impractical for rocket lift from earth, but that doesn't apply here.
We refine it (or better yet, enrich it) in space and bring it back to Earth. I wish someone would buy it in space, but currently, that market is worth... 0.
So, we ship that shit back to Earth and sell it into the commodities market.
> 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?
The 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.
Abundant 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.
The target market is the same as normal mining, you probably mine platinum. The cost probably only closes with either starship or mining fuel in space.
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.)
Iron 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.
I 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.
The positions and velocities of every human ship in space are well known and easy to track. And any journey from space to Earth takes a long time. And anything that a single rocket that went out for mining (or even a dozen or a hundred rockets) could move back towards earth as a weapon can easily be moved slightly to hit a different destination using other weapons.
So if anyone tried to send rockets to fling back pieces of asteroid or of the Moon as weapons to Earth will be easily observed, tracked, and countered. And anyway, we're very far off being able to send a chunk of rock towards Earth that wouldnt entirely burn up in the atmosphere, nevermind one that could level a city.
> And anything that a single rocket that went out for mining (or even a dozen or a hundred rockets) could move back towards earth as a weapon can easily be moved slightly to hit a different destination using other weapons.
There's a lot of complexity here you're ignoring. You can nudge a rock into a collision course with Earth using a slow ion thruster, but you're not going to stop it with one. Time is not on your side, you need to get your affecter to the rock, during which the rock will be getting closer and (assuming it came from the asteroid belt) faster, both of which make the required impulse higher. Higher impulse means more mass and/or propellant, which means even more time and cost!
This is not a symmetrical problem, but defense rarely is. The fact we can shoot bullets at supersonic speeds doesn't make it any easier to stop them.
We absolutely can't, with current technology, move an asteroid of any dangerous size towards (or away from) a collision with the Earth - and even more so not with a single engine that has to have fuel for the entire duration of the flight. It would take thousands of years to get an ion engine on an asteroid to move it back to the Earth, and you'd have to constantly send fuel with it. And controlling where it will land is an entirely different problem.
And many years of the engine running would still be easily reverted by one or two high energy impacts, like a fusion bomb hitting the asteroid just right.
Consider this as well from an energy diff perspective - to hit a city with the same energy as a nuclear bomb, you have to have the final mass times the final speed squared about equal to the energy of the fusion bomb. And to get that, you have to put in energy that's proportional to the mass before burning up in the atmosphere times the square of the delta of the speed difference between its original speed and its speed on a collision course with the Earth. So you need to find an asteroid that's pretty close to hitting the Earth, and still put in the energy to move its full mass the extra distance.
You're right this is not fully a symmetrical problem, but it's asymmetrical in the opposite direction: defense is a lot easier than offense in this case, simply because of the massive inertia of the weapon. To alter your metaphor of the bullets, there's a reason why we shoot explosive rockets instead of just hurling huge rocks at our enemies. And it's precisely the same reason why a nuclear weapon is much better than an asteroid.
Why would you? Space weapons are also very definitively illegal. I don't see what you could accomplish this way that a nuke couldn't, and it's not like there's a shortage of nuclear firepower. Plus, this seems really slow to deploy.
Even if that's true, it still means that there is at best a tiny advantage to an asteroid weapon compared to a nuclear weapon - and a gigantic disadvantage in terms of energy cost of moving an asteroid from its orbit to Earth's surface, and in terms of the months or years it would take to deploy (in which time your enemy might even find a way to stop you, or at least launch all of its nuclear arsenal on you if that's not possible, MAD style).
I 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.
Honestly, 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.
> 8.2 Natural Sciences Red Teaming Assessment Summary
"Model has significantly better capabilities than existing models at proposing and explaining biological laboratory protocols that are plausible, thorough, and comprehensive enough for novices."
"Inconsistent refusal of requests for dual use tasks such as creating a human-infectious virus that has an oncogene (a gene which increases risk of cancer)."
> o1 models are currently in beta - The o1 models are currently in beta with limited features. Access is limited to developers in tier 5 (check your usage tier here), with low rate limits (20 RPM). We are working on adding more features, increasing rate limits, and expanding access to more developers in the coming weeks!
I'm in Tier 4, and not far off from Tier 5. The docs aren't quite transparent enough to show that if I buy credits if I'll be bumped up to Tier 5, or if I actually have to use enough credits to get into Tier 5.
Edit, w/ real time follow up:
Prior to buying the credits, I saw O1-preview in the Tier 5 model list as a Tier 4 user. I bought credits to bump to Tier 5—not much, I'd have gotten there before the end of the year. The OpenAI website now shows I'm in Tier 5, but O1-preview is not in the Tier 5 model list for me anymore. So sneaky of them!
> "o1 models are currently in beta - The o1 models are currently in beta with limited features. Access is limited to developers in tier 5 (check your usage tier here), with low rate limits (20 RPM). We are working on adding more features, increasing rate limits, and expanding access to more developers in the coming weeks!"
It may take a bit to appear in your account (and by a bit I mean I had to fiddle around a while, try logging out/in, etc for a bit) but it appears for me and many others as normal Plus users in the web.
The codebase heavily uses PyTorch XLA libraries (torch_xla.*), which are specific to TPU. Key TPU-specific elements include XLA device initialization, SPMD execution mode, TPU-specific data loading, and mesh-based model partitioning.
hi @dang and team, why is my content flagged? It's legit and confirmed from multiple sources that it was a bad gateway.
Guidelines state:
"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
What if it wasn't spam or inappropriate or off-topic then why flagged?
It won't be for a while. It really takes someone to focus on this and it isn't just AMD. The team at MLPerf will need to step in as well and from my discussions with them, they are busy enough as it is with their own goals.
My company, Hot Aisle, has a box of mi300x (soon to be +16 more) that we have dedicated as a free resource to unbiased benchmarking. That's instigated articles like the Chips & Cheese one and the Nscale Elio post...
> "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
I didn't know what the word "obstinate" meant so here you go: "stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion."
While PG's quote suggests a clear distinction, it's overly simplistic. Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently. The issue is that "reason" can be subjective. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
Referencing the Collison brothers highlights a bias towards successful YC alumni. It would be more telling to classify current batch founders as obstinate or persistent and revisit their success in a decade.
No it doesn't. The essay includes multiple parts talking about how the things are related, similar, sometimes indistinguishable, and also that it can be a spectrum.
In fact, arguably the entire thesis of the essay is how the two traits have both similarities and differences and that it is complicated.
> Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently.
Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening.
> For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
History didn't prove them right, science did. The fact that people considered them obstinate does not mean that they were. The only future where they would still be considered the obstinate ones is one run by obstinate people. They had the evidence, which was ignored by obstinate heliocentrists. Heliocentrists did not have convincing reasons for their belief that Copernicus/Galileo ignored.
> Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening
I think that may be a mistake.
Any value strategy that is primarily conservative (e.g., protecting sunk or resource assets) will be obstinate. That doesn't make it slower or stupider.
So oil and timber companies and monopolists et al will keenly monitor opposition and respond immediately and deftly -- with reality-avoidance. As will individuals who are primarily guarding something they feel is at risk of being taken away.
They have the same or more intelligence, judgment, and active listening; it's just that their strategy is not creation or innovation.
Indeed, in a fair fight the innovator will lose to the conservative, because it's just plain harder to make things happen, particularly when it involves convincing others to change their patterns or minds.
The Consensys case exposes the fundamental mismatch between blockchain tech and securities law.
The SEC claims MetaMask Swaps 'effects transactions in securities,' but can a smart contract be a broker?
This isn't just about Consensys; it's about whether the '34 Act's definition of a broker can encompass code without breaking the entire DeFi ecosystem.
Congress's silence forces courts to decide if 'protecting investors' requires stifling the very innovation that could democratize finance.
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