5 ms·

It sounds cool sure, but what resources do we even want from asteroids? We have plenty rocks and ice on earth and even something like iron ore is just 0,08$ per

by sisu2019 8y ago

It sounds cool sure, but what resources do we even want from asteroids? We have plenty rocks and ice on earth and even something like iron ore is just 0,08$ per kilo. Getting that kilo to LEO is 2200$ and getting cheaper every year. We have all the resources and infrastructure we need right here on earth while absolutely no one has any idea how to manufacture things in space.

codeulike 8y ago
Resources that arent stuck at the bottom of a gravity well is the attraction. Whether anyone can make it work is what we're trying to find out.
wongarsu 8y ago
> absolutely no one has any idea how to manufacture things in space. That's a bit of an overstatement. We have a 3d printer on the ISS and me make great strides in producing fiber optics in space that are superior to what we can do on earth at similar price points [1]. 1: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2421.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
whiskers08xmt 8y ago
A lot of heavy rare earth metals can only be found in very limited concentrations in the earth's crust, with the largest concentrations all being from asteroid impacts. As a consequence, these metals are incredibly valuable. A single high-concentration asteroid, could provide more of these metals than has been mined in the history of the earth, in high concentrations, and may be able to make a host of applications economically viable, which previously weren't.
- sisu2019 8y ago
  The rare earth scarcity scare is already receding: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metals-discovery-japan-china-monopoly https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metal... Yeah, heavy REMs are still expensive but there is really no reason to believe that they'll stay that way. New sites will be found, new extraction techniques will be tried and new processes developed and then the problem will go away. Sure, it could happen in space but it's so much easier to do here on earth that it might never be worth it to go to space for it.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    The guy's misusing "rare earth", in that phrase rare refers to the concentration in the ore, not the abundance in the crust.
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  but it would be, by far, the most expensive mining operation in the history of mining operations
  - whiskers08xmt 8y ago
    No doubt. It'd be incredibly expensive and risky, but with a huge potential pay-off.
  - mr_overalls 8y ago
    Yes, but if several thousand tons of iridium, platinum, or various rare-earth metals could be captured & towed to Earth orbit, the payoff could be astronomical.
    - HarryHirsch 8y ago
      Suddenly there would be so much of a supply that the sale won't be profitable any longer. That's probably the reason why no one is extracting rhodium from nuclear waste, where it is a common fission product.
      - mr_overalls 8y ago
        That's why I suggested orbit, where the supply could be parceled out (or its true extent even kept secret) so as not to crash the market.
        cwkoss 8y ago
        Orbital piracy is going to be a great subject for action films.
        HarryHirsch 8y ago
        The demand is mostly in chemical industry and very inelastic. No one is going to put another plant on line because platinum group metals are cheap (but plants may be pulled off line because the economy is in the dumps, as happened in 2008 and 2017). Even small increases in supply will lead to great drops in price. You can only hope that a plentiful supply would encourage new uses.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Rare earth metals are a bit of a misnomer, they're not that rare at all.
pjc50 8y ago
Fuel is the big one. A fully-loaded Space Shuttle is about 2 million kilograms; getting one to orbit and then refuelling it up there would cost several billion by your metric. This requires either finding watery asteroids or comets, or experimenting with metal-oxygen rocketry systems.
fernandopj 8y ago
There's the advantage of not having to mine _the Earth's ecossystem_ for resources, which is what we've been doing so far, impacting the environment. Mining a rock which has been drifting to space is basically getting an eco-friendly resource stream.
lmm 8y ago
Iron is the most abundant element on Earth. The likes of platinum or gold are significantly more expensive (and not just because of scarcity: they have useful electrical/thermal/mechanical properties).
- magduf 8y ago
  >Iron is the most abundant element on Earth. No, it's not. I'm pretty sure it's silicon. Iron is relatively rare (but not as rare as platinum or gold of course). Iron is the most abundant element in the Earth, but not on it. The core is full of iron. But that doesn't help us at all, because we can't get to that. We can only access materials in the crust, and there isn't much iron there.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > I'm pretty sure it's silicon If you include the biosphere, it's carbon. If you include the oceans, it's hydrogen (the hydrogen atoms in water). Even if you just include inorganic materials in the crust, I believe oxygen is more abundant than silicon (oxygen is part of silicate rocks).
    - magduf 8y ago
      Yeah, you're right about oxygen, I should have said silicon is the most abundant mineral. But you're wrong about the rest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#Crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... Oxygen is #1, silicon is #2, aluminum is #3, and iron is #4 (though far less than O or Si). Carbon doesn't even rank in the top 9.
      - pdonis 8y ago
        > you're wrong about the rest It says "in the Earth's crust". That indicates to me that the biosphere and the oceans are not being counted. Also, it's giving abundances by mass, which is not the only way to do it (I was actually thinking of abundance by atom count). Later in the same Wikipedia article, the top eleven abundances by mass for the ocean are given: oxygen and hydrogen are the first two, carbon is #10, and silicon doesn't even make the list. No figures are given in that article for the biosphere; my statement of carbon being the most abundant for that is based on the fact that it forms the "backbone" of all of the main types of molecules in living organisms: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids.
haldora 8y ago
At first it is not about metals, but water. Water is the oil of space. You can use it to make propellant, human/plant consumables, radiation shielding, and for further chemical processing. Once you have cheap water in cis-lunar space, it becomes 'easy' to move payloads around the Solar System and start the process for other resource utilization.
kamaal 8y ago
>>what resources do we even want from asteroids? Once you have capabilities to build in space, going down gravity wells makes zero sense. Want to build a factory or physics lab in space. You just mine things there and build them there. After a while you are looking at permanent colonies and then it's useful there.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

codeulike 8y ago

Resources that arent stuck at the bottom of a gravity well is the attraction. Whether anyone can make it work is what we're trying to find out.

wongarsu 8y ago

> absolutely no one has any idea how to manufacture things in space. That's a bit of an overstatement. We have a 3d printer on the ISS and me make great strides in producing fiber optics in space that are superior to what we can do on earth at similar price points [1]. 1: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2421.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

whiskers08xmt 8y ago

A lot of heavy rare earth metals can only be found in very limited concentrations in the earth's crust, with the largest concentrations all being from asteroid impacts. As a consequence, these metals are incredibly valuable. A single high-concentration asteroid, could provide more of these metals than has been mined in the history of the earth, in high concentrations, and may be able to make a host of applications economically viable, which previously weren't.

sisu2019 8y ago
The rare earth scarcity scare is already receding: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metals-discovery-japan-china-monopoly https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metal... Yeah, heavy REMs are still expensive but there is really no reason to believe that they'll stay that way. New sites will be found, new extraction techniques will be tried and new processes developed and then the problem will go away. Sure, it could happen in space but it's so much easier to do here on earth that it might never be worth it to go to space for it.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  The guy's misusing "rare earth", in that phrase rare refers to the concentration in the ore, not the abundance in the crust.
metalliqaz 8y ago
but it would be, by far, the most expensive mining operation in the history of mining operations
- whiskers08xmt 8y ago
  No doubt. It'd be incredibly expensive and risky, but with a huge potential pay-off.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  Yes, but if several thousand tons of iridium, platinum, or various rare-earth metals could be captured & towed to Earth orbit, the payoff could be astronomical.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Suddenly there would be so much of a supply that the sale won't be profitable any longer. That's probably the reason why no one is extracting rhodium from nuclear waste, where it is a common fission product.
    - mr_overalls 8y ago
      That's why I suggested orbit, where the supply could be parceled out (or its true extent even kept secret) so as not to crash the market.
      - cwkoss 8y ago
        Orbital piracy is going to be a great subject for action films.
      - HarryHirsch 8y ago
        The demand is mostly in chemical industry and very inelastic. No one is going to put another plant on line because platinum group metals are cheap (but plants may be pulled off line because the economy is in the dumps, as happened in 2008 and 2017). Even small increases in supply will lead to great drops in price. You can only hope that a plentiful supply would encourage new uses.
dnautics 8y ago
Rare earth metals are a bit of a misnomer, they're not that rare at all.

pjc50 8y ago

Fuel is the big one. A fully-loaded Space Shuttle is about 2 million kilograms; getting one to orbit and then refuelling it up there would cost several billion by your metric. This requires either finding watery asteroids or comets, or experimenting with metal-oxygen rocketry systems.

fernandopj 8y ago

There's the advantage of not having to mine _the Earth's ecossystem_ for resources, which is what we've been doing so far, impacting the environment. Mining a rock which has been drifting to space is basically getting an eco-friendly resource stream.

lmm 8y ago

Iron is the most abundant element on Earth. The likes of platinum or gold are significantly more expensive (and not just because of scarcity: they have useful electrical/thermal/mechanical properties).

magduf 8y ago
>Iron is the most abundant element on Earth. No, it's not. I'm pretty sure it's silicon. Iron is relatively rare (but not as rare as platinum or gold of course). Iron is the most abundant element in the Earth, but not on it. The core is full of iron. But that doesn't help us at all, because we can't get to that. We can only access materials in the crust, and there isn't much iron there.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > I'm pretty sure it's silicon If you include the biosphere, it's carbon. If you include the oceans, it's hydrogen (the hydrogen atoms in water). Even if you just include inorganic materials in the crust, I believe oxygen is more abundant than silicon (oxygen is part of silicate rocks).
  - magduf 8y ago
    Yeah, you're right about oxygen, I should have said silicon is the most abundant mineral. But you're wrong about the rest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#Crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... Oxygen is #1, silicon is #2, aluminum is #3, and iron is #4 (though far less than O or Si). Carbon doesn't even rank in the top 9.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > you're wrong about the rest It says "in the Earth's crust". That indicates to me that the biosphere and the oceans are not being counted. Also, it's giving abundances by mass, which is not the only way to do it (I was actually thinking of abundance by atom count). Later in the same Wikipedia article, the top eleven abundances by mass for the ocean are given: oxygen and hydrogen are the first two, carbon is #10, and silicon doesn't even make the list. No figures are given in that article for the biosphere; my statement of carbon being the most abundant for that is based on the fact that it forms the "backbone" of all of the main types of molecules in living organisms: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids.

haldora 8y ago

At first it is not about metals, but water. Water is the oil of space. You can use it to make propellant, human/plant consumables, radiation shielding, and for further chemical processing. Once you have cheap water in cis-lunar space, it becomes 'easy' to move payloads around the Solar System and start the process for other resource utilization.

kamaal 8y ago

>>what resources do we even want from asteroids? Once you have capabilities to build in space, going down gravity wells makes zero sense. Want to build a factory or physics lab in space. You just mine things there and build them there. After a while you are looking at permanent colonies and then it's useful there.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]