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Maybe. Asteroid mining would be tremendously profitable, but not without a huge initial capital investment, the likes of which humanity has likely never seen (n

Maybe. Asteroid mining would be tremendously profitable, but not without a huge initial capital investment, the likes of which humanity has likely never seen (not hyperbole). But like the age old adage, you get rich by selling the pick axes, not by mining for gold. Elon probably figures that launches are where the money is, not the actual mining itself.

Retric 9y ago
Earth does not really have a shortage of most things, so I don't think there is much use for Asteroid mining in the next 10,000 years unless people are also moving into space. EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.
- WD-42 9y ago
  "just the world's oceans"? I think you understate just how vast the oceans are. That's some seriously diluted gold.
  - jws 9y ago
    Each person’s 5kg of gold also comes with a bonus of about 1/6 of a cubic kilometer of seawater. Hopefully yours is near a beach so you don’t have to haul it too far.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    I suspect the comparison was against asteroid mining. The oceans are vast and difficult, but less vast and less difficult than space.
  - Retric 9y ago
    My point is the earth is huge. 260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  But we do have a need for rare earth metals. Not as much as we thought we did in 2011, but it would still be a fantastic boon to manufacturing. It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
  - alex_young 9y ago
    Say you also own an electric car company...
  - Retric 9y ago
    rare earth metals are not nearly as rare as you might think. The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
- rtkwe 9y ago
  I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
  - Retric 9y ago
    As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume. Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home. PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes. I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
      - Retric 9y ago
        But what's the point of having large structures in space without people? We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  If everyone consumed like an American we’d need something like 4x Earths. There are not enough resources on this planet unless westerners start scaling back their consumption and members of developing societies scale their ambitions down to match the new, lower consumption models of the West.
  - jotm 9y ago
    There's enough resources (especially since they don't just disappear and can be recovered by recycling), afaik, except for food - that's what we're consuming too fast to replenish.
  - Asdfbla 9y ago
    Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining. Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.
maxerickson 9y ago
Where do you see the profit? I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all. People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).
- encrystation 9y ago
  There's probably lots of neat uses for gold at the moment that aren't financially viable due to the cost of the raw material.
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me. Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction. (This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
    - Neutrion 9y ago
      Also the disruption brought by let huge objects falling through the sky will be devastating to atomsphere.
      - mmjaa 9y ago
legitster 9y ago
Except it's hard to argue that Elon Musk does anything for profit. Both Tesla and SpaceX are examples of businesses set up to disrupt an industry and worry about money later.
- njarboe 9y ago
  I agree that he does not see the value of using money as a scoring system for his success, but making a profit, I am sure he is very interested in that. Profitable ventures are how he had the $100 million to create SpaceX. Profits of venture after venture until he acquired enough capital to actually start and fund a new aerospace company and be the largest investor in Tesla.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 9y ago
There is no profit to be had right now in mining stuff in space and sending it down to Earth. There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy. The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  Low gravity (e.g. the moon) and zero gravity environments could have manufacturing advantages that are used to create projects that are shipped to earth.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    In the longer term, yes; right now, nothing game-changing on the horizon. The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale). The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell. -- [0] - http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/ http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/
  - le-mark 9y ago
    Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes! When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important. Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.

Retric 9y ago

Earth does not really have a shortage of most things, so I don't think there is much use for Asteroid mining in the next 10,000 years unless people are also moving into space. EX: Just the worlds oceans has 5 lb of gold per person on the planet. It's far more abundant on land, but we really don't have a lot of need for gold.

WD-42 9y ago
"just the world's oceans"? I think you understate just how vast the oceans are. That's some seriously diluted gold.
- jws 9y ago
  Each person’s 5kg of gold also comes with a bonus of about 1/6 of a cubic kilometer of seawater. Hopefully yours is near a beach so you don’t have to haul it too far.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  I suspect the comparison was against asteroid mining. The oceans are vast and difficult, but less vast and less difficult than space.
- Retric 9y ago
  My point is the earth is huge. 260 billion cubic miles worth of asteroids without going into space. Sure we are currently limited to a tiny fraction of that but start processing magma directly is an option.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
But we do have a need for rare earth metals. Not as much as we thought we did in 2011, but it would still be a fantastic boon to manufacturing. It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.
- alex_young 9y ago
  Say you also own an electric car company...
- Retric 9y ago
  rare earth metals are not nearly as rare as you might think. The problem is they don't concentrate that much in any one area not that they can't be extracted for most places. So, we could extract them at 100x the current rate for the next 1,000 years and recycle them forever.
rtkwe 9y ago
I'd rather gather them from the asteroid belt if possible so we could stop/limit the terrible effects of mining on the environment on earth. Also if we can setup manufacturing and fuel creation in space it would let us build larger and go farther because we wouldn't have to lift the pieces up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. At the very least we could build the bodies of spacecraft and fuel them in space and just lift harder to build stuff like electronics from Earth.
- Retric 9y ago
  As long as we are just sending satellites up into LEO that takes far less energy than you might think. Flying around the world or getting to space are not that far apart. SpaceX for example is only worth ~20 billion because there is simply less demand for rockets and they cost less than many assume. Now, if we want to colonize outer space then asteroid mining becomes necessary. But, with current tech there is little personal benefit to being in space vs staying home. PS: I am not going to try and predict what happens 1,000 years from now, but space is unlikely to be a nice place to live any time soon.
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    Even short of full colonization sourcing materials from space will allow much larger structures and shapes that would be difficult. Ultimately right now we're severely limited by the fairings, inflatables like Bigelow Aerospace solves some of that but ultimately there still limits to the volumes. I agree we're pretty far out from being able to live comfortably in space but I think to get there we kind of inevitably have to mine resources from space.
    - Retric 9y ago
      But what's the point of having large structures in space without people? We can already get big stuff into space aka building sized, so you're taking about mega structures which seem rather pointless right now.
jdavis703 9y ago
If everyone consumed like an American we’d need something like 4x Earths. There are not enough resources on this planet unless westerners start scaling back their consumption and members of developing societies scale their ambitions down to match the new, lower consumption models of the West.
- jotm 9y ago
  There's enough resources (especially since they don't just disappear and can be recovered by recycling), afaik, except for food - that's what we're consuming too fast to replenish.
- Asdfbla 9y ago
  Then making that consumption sustainable and reducing waste would be a far better investment than pipe dreams of asteroid mining. Keep in mind scarcity of resources is not the only issue. If everyone on Earth really ever started consuming as much as Americans then it doesn't matter if there's enough surplus material in space, the ecosystem on Earth would be dead anyway and we'd have much bigger issues.

maxerickson 9y ago

Where do you see the profit? I would think precious metals get a lot less precious if they start falling out of the sky and I am pretty skeptical about other Earthside uses being profitable at all. People that go try to live in space are going to have a hard time of it so I wouldn't expect profit from supplying space industry either (the longer missions cosmonauts and astronauts have completed have had grave physical consequences, we aren't adapted to low g environments).

encrystation 9y ago
There's probably lots of neat uses for gold at the moment that aren't financially viable due to the cost of the raw material.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me. Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction. (This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
  - Neutrion 9y ago
    Also the disruption brought by let huge objects falling through the sky will be devastating to atomsphere.
    - mmjaa 9y ago

legitster 9y ago

Except it's hard to argue that Elon Musk does anything for profit. Both Tesla and SpaceX are examples of businesses set up to disrupt an industry and worry about money later.

njarboe 9y ago
I agree that he does not see the value of using money as a scoring system for his success, but making a profit, I am sure he is very interested in that. Profitable ventures are how he had the $100 million to create SpaceX. Profits of venture after venture until he acquired enough capital to actually start and fund a new aerospace company and be the largest investor in Tesla.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TeMPOraL 9y ago

There is no profit to be had right now in mining stuff in space and sending it down to Earth. There is however plenty of profits to be made in space, when we'll have a full space economy. Asteroid mining is an important part of both the future economy and of the current process of bootstrapping that economy. The idea is to use material mined in space, combined with manufacturing and processing in space, to create products and resources to be used in space, for space operations. Ultimately some of that may return to Earth, but the main goal is to avoid spending money on lifting things from Earth.

pythonaut_16 9y ago
Low gravity (e.g. the moon) and zero gravity environments could have manufacturing advantages that are used to create projects that are shipped to earth.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  In the longer term, yes; right now, nothing game-changing on the horizon. The best example would be the work of Made In Space[0]. They've started manufacturing optical fiber on the ISS, where they can reach much greater medium purity than what one can do on Earth. It can, in principle, make fiber optics installations cheaper (less need for repeaters along the way), but the savings are entirely eaten by launch costs (and lack of economies of scale). The primary output of asteroid mining and space manufacturing will naturally be utilized in space, because we need to bootstrap a pretty large and self-sustaining economy to be able to profitably ship useful quantities of useful stuff downwell. -- [0] - http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/ http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/
- le-mark 9y ago
  Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes! When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important. Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.