The price of the metals is based on Earth's supplies. If the expedition was successful, the supply would increase dramatically and the equilibrium would shift.
But having 1 entity control such a large amount of supplies means that entity can control the market rate (they simply hold on to it or sell it as needed). National banks, like the Bank of Canada, already do this with their country's currency.
Out of curiosity, what happens if a second company (say, Anglo Platinum) goes out there and blows up the facilities of these guys? Maybe even murders their miners (if there are to be any humans out there). What would the legal protection be?
"Out of curiosity, what happens if a second company (say, Anglo Platinum) goes out there and blows up the facilities of these guys?"
War.
However, the good news is that even on Earth the benefits of cooperation tend to outweigh the benefits of aggression, in space for the foreseeable future it will be even more so. It is so, so easy to trash a space facility and so, so hard to defend against it that in essence all private companies in space will de facto be in a MAD situation should they decide to go that route. It will be a long time before anyone will have a position where they can afford to attack somebody and have a reasonable expectation of survival.
What if the pioneer's space manufacturing, using their cheap and plentiful resources, gives them an insurmountable lead? They win the race to claim and defend new prospects against latecomers.
(To the planetbound, this might just look like a suspiciously long string of failures by all subsequent foothold missions…)
As a nation with an army, they could do something like this.
As a private company--especially if this mineral becomes very necessary and expensive--would be a very big target for some sort of 'congressional oversight' to 'protect national interests' and prevent a harmful monopoly.
With the Google folks running things, yes, that's very possible. Someone who's more savvy and experienced in these kinds of things would find ways around that problem, like De Beers has.
Diamonds would be a good example too, right? Platinum would be even better in this situation, I think, because it has more practical uses than diamonds.
I love how HN is some bastion of free-market thinking, but when it comes to items of fashion (aka items that females tend to desire), suddenly supply and demand go out the window, and the pricing of diamonds (and other fashion items) is a vast conspiracy. Horseshit. De Beers monopoly died a long time ago. Diamonds are no more overpriced than any other item of fashion. If you want to buy diamonds at "wholesale" prices there is nothing stopping you.
Cars and shoes depreciate because they wear out. Computers depreciate for the same reason, and more so for the fact that the price/performance ratio of computing technology improves so rapidly. Neither of those apply to diamonds.
diamonds aren't artificially scarce to control demand, they're artificially scarce due to low demand. bringing a gigantic chunk of platinum to earth isn't going to increase the utility of platinum, although if prices fall far enough it may increase the utilization
They would still be constrained to degrees by their marginal costs (the price floor) v what the market will bear. Who knows what the actual costs will be the day they have a giant rock in orbit, although I expect they will fall rapidly with advancing privatization. I am sure they will take very conservative actions, but imagine the potential liabilities–might be a lot more than the value of the rock.
Price will surely go down, but as long as they have exclusive control on supply, and the ability to manage it smartly they could still make a ridiculously huge amount of money.
You cannot value the asteroid at weight * current_price_per_ton.
Because the earth is surviving on 100 tons of platinum / year, and the current_price_per_ton is based on demand to supply.
If you rocket back with a whole 100 tons in the first year, you dramatically affect supply. The price drops; platinum suddenly becomes more affordable for more things, demand may increase and so on.
But we can all see that if there were mile cube of platinum delivered to earth, it wouldn't actually be worth $1500/ounce any more.
They would be the De Beers of precious metals [1]. With that kind of wealth at stake, the monopoly wouldn't last long. You'd see competition from other private ventures, as well as from countries (Russia, China, ...).
Yeah, it would. Modeling a demand curve is a really hard problem in economics; it's one of the holy grails in the field. That being said, I'm sure you can either take that into account and reduce the scope of the mission to more cheaply mine a smaller asteroid that won't flood the market.
I'm not so sure it would work like that; the costs of mining an asteroid are a bit too high for that. Mining in space is not even new yet, it is still a plan, and if it goes according to plan, it will still be very expensive, and there will be limitations in the system that limit the speed with which the metals are brought to earth.
My guess is that in the initial stage their profit margin would be low, or they'd have to work at a loss, if they have to compete with current prices. As scarcity drives the prices further up and their technology improves, their profit margins would soar, but that would only happen in the long term. Only then would supply start bringing the prices down.
It could, but you also have to consider the cost of getting these materials back to Earth. No article has mentioned the details of that. I don't know if Planetary Resources has disclosed that. And then there's extracting the material. Yes, the sheer scope does mean a huge wealth... But it costs to access. And until I hear a professional suggest a price tag on that, I'm not too worried about it destroying economies.
(Or maybe they could extract it in space... But that would need new first gen technology, but at least retrieval from space may pay off in the long run, as they'll no doubt require space extraction eventually.)
Only if there was competition. If they were the only ones with an astroid, then they could limit their sales to keep prices high. It's basically what DeBeers did back in the day.