7 ms·

Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?

by red2awn 6y ago

giantrobot 6y ago
Physics followed closely by economics.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Have you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid? I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic. I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots: process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination. 100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.
  - grumpyoldman77 6y ago
    Space treaties- means war, inevitably Nudge towards earth Stable near orbit Remotes/ robots Process in orbit Drop to earth Space X Damn, you just outlined a horror novel in space
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      See "Footfall" by Niven & Pournelle.
  - evgen 6y ago
    I have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.
    - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
      That's the interesting and confounding part of it. Going up to get them is expensive, sending them back rather less so. (the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Yes I have seen the "estimated values" of asteroids. They're not that meaningful as they're only estimates of reserves with no regard for production. Prices of platinum group metals are what they are because known reserves are limited and production even more limited. If you suddenly increase the supply of PGMs they're now much less valuable and their price drops. Extra supply doesn't automatically create extra demand. But that's besides the physics problems. It's not in any way simple to attach an ion rocket to an asteroid and change its orbit. Today's best ion engines used on probes deliver fractions of a Newton of thrust and requires several kilowatts of power to do so. That's just to accelerate a relatively small spacecraft (Dawn is a bit under 2 tons). Adjusting the orbit of an asteroid of a non-trivial size with an ion engine would take orders of magnitude more fuel, power, and time than the Dawn probe. Even if by some magic you managed to mine the fuel from the asteroid itself, a technological feat unto itself, you still need power and time. Power and time are doubly impacted because most asteroids rotate. Unless that axis of rotation is perfectly aligned with the desired trajectory you can only apply thrust for at best half the asteroid's rotation. Rotating is problematic for power generation. If the asteroid miner is solar powered it's panels would be in shadow half the asteroid's rotation so it needs extra mass and complexity for power storage. If it's nuclear powered it's radiators are in continual sunlight for half the asteroid's rotation so additional mass and complexity is needed to rotate them parallel to the bearing of the sun to remain effective. Even with all that it could take centuries to move an asteroid of any significant size with ion engines. Even if it only took decades that is still a huge initial outlay with zero payback for decades. The only way that's even remotely sane is if you spammed every asteroid with probes to assess their composition and knew you were pulling in the Comstock Lode. But then you depressed the price of all the material and the whole effort barely pays for itself.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Demand and supply. Much like DeBeers is stock piling low grade dimonds to not ruin market prices.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    When the Spanish extracted all the silver and gold they could from South America, it caused a dramatic reduction in the value of silver and gold in Europe. I.e. dropping a huge chunk of rare Earths onto Earth will make them not-so-rare and prices will collapse.
    - Super_Jambo 6y ago
      Only if you don't have a monopoly...
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        You have to sell it to make money. It's like if Jeff Bezos dumped a big chunk of his Amazon stock on the market. The price would collapse.
lettergram 6y ago
In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale? If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent. However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way. Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)
- rlt 6y ago
  It’s probably just a coincidence, but I find it interesting that one of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla) has a huge demand for nickel and another one of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX) won a contract with NASA to explore 16 Psyche, an asteroid essentially made of nickel, and is working on a completely reusable rocket...
  - elihu 6y ago
    I was just thinking about posting a comment about 16 psyche... I hadn't heard about the exploration mission, that should be pretty interesting. Iirc, 16 psyche is thought to possibly be a fragment of a planetary core and so it might contain a completely different proportion of metals than what you might find on the Earth's surface.
  - evgen 6y ago
    The problems with this theory (and with asteroid mining in general) is that it is extremely unlikely that anything you mine in space will be economical to get back down. Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place -- if something was not worth the cost to launch it into space it is unlikely to be worth landing. The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.
vkou 6y ago
The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity. The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical. And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal. If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  As I understand it, there iron and nickel asteroids that aren't chemically combined with other substances like ore is on Earth. So perhaps the only processing required would be melting and reforming it.
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    Iron and nickel are too abundant on Earth, so their transport from elsewhere cannot be profitable. They and other abundant elements can be mined only for building structures on those asteroids or in space. The metals that are much more abundant on asteroids than on Earth will be dissolved in the Fe-Ni-Co metal in concentrations varying between 2 ppm for the most abundant (ruthenium) down to 0.05 ppm for the least abundant (rhenium). While these very low concentrations are still thousands of times larger than the average concentrations on Earth, mining them on asteroids would still require processing thousands of tons of Fe-Ni-Co metal for a few kilograms of precious metals. On asteroids that have never been melted, the processing could be easier, because most of the precious metals might be present in very small refractory grains dispersed between the grains of Fe-Ni-Co metal and silicate minerals and maybe a cheaper separation method could be found than for the case when they are in solution. However, the same huge quantities of material need to be processed. Right now, it is quite certain that this cannot be profitable. Some time, in a more distant future, we can imagine a technology much more advanced than what we have now, which would enable sending some robots able to perform completely automatically the tasks of building from local materials some huge installations for energy collection, for mining and for extracting the desired elements, so that asteroid mining would require the transport in both directions, between Earth and the mined asteroid, of only very small quantities of materials and equipment. Even if this is much beyond our current capabilities, it might become a necessity if we would exhaust the exploitable reserves for some of the least abundant elements, dispersing them in junk from which their extraction could become too costly. On the other hand, there are numerous research projects now trying to replace the use of less abundant elements with the use of more abundant elements, in a lot of applications. In most cases, it is likely that such substitution attempts are likely to succeed much earlier than the time when we would be able to mine those elements from outside the Earth.
elihu 6y ago
I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's just to bring back high-value metals to Earth, then that's probably the least complicated because the mass you have to move is low. I don't know the logistics of, say, gold mining in space, but you might not even bother with any on-site processing. Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That presupposes you know how to find such a rock. If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear. Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago
  > Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That's not how it works. Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball. The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it. The feasible options are either: 1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder. 2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer. The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.
imtringued 6y ago
Rockets are expensive to launch from earth. If you can refuel in space it's a different story but where would you get the fuel from if you haven't mined an asteroid or the moon yet? It's a chicken and egg type of problem.
snewman 6y ago
Casey Handmer has a great blog taking hard analysis of what activities will be practical in space. He argues there is no real reason for asteroid mining to bring resources back to earth. So the challenge is to identify a large market for resources to be used in space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-known-commodity-resources-in-space-that-could-be-sold-on-earth/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-k...
- Symmetry 6y ago
  So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic. In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Why not shaping it into some sort of lifting body, made out of honey comb like structures, and have that land into the ocean near the coast, to be towed to the next factory complex on land and disassamble the refined raw materials there? Combine with maybe inner compartments for standardized space containers for whatever else? This could be completely passive and autonomous, where the attached engine modules for deorbitng could detach and climb back up to some parking orbit or space dock before reentry happens. By choosing the right dimensions of that lifting body(surface to weight) you could avoid much of the reentry heat, down to about 400°C.

Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?

giantrobot 6y ago

Physics followed closely by economics.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Have you seen the estimated values of ores in a decent asteroid? I think it's technology and up front financing. Well, and there are probably space treaties that are problematic. I'd drop an ion drive on the asteroid and nudge it towards the earth (but not AT it), and once it's in a stable near orbit, figure out what to do with a much faster communication loop with remotes/robots: process in orbit, drop parts down to earth, or some combination. 100% chance SpaceX is considering this long-term.
- grumpyoldman77 6y ago
  Space treaties- means war, inevitably Nudge towards earth Stable near orbit Remotes/ robots Process in orbit Drop to earth Space X Damn, you just outlined a horror novel in space
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    See "Footfall" by Niven & Pournelle.
- evgen 6y ago
  I have seen people imagine what those ores are worth when they pretend that they are somehow magically transported to the surface of the earth, but I have never seen these same people budget the cost of the energy to retrieve, return, and land those same resources. If your value calculation did not go negative there then you are doing it wrong.
  - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
    That's the interesting and confounding part of it. Going up to get them is expensive, sending them back rather less so. (the major cost of doing anything in space is the earth surface to low earth orbit tax, which is going to be over half your cost. If you can avoid that tax, suddenly a lot of things become very interesting)
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Yes I have seen the "estimated values" of asteroids. They're not that meaningful as they're only estimates of reserves with no regard for production. Prices of platinum group metals are what they are because known reserves are limited and production even more limited. If you suddenly increase the supply of PGMs they're now much less valuable and their price drops. Extra supply doesn't automatically create extra demand. But that's besides the physics problems. It's not in any way simple to attach an ion rocket to an asteroid and change its orbit. Today's best ion engines used on probes deliver fractions of a Newton of thrust and requires several kilowatts of power to do so. That's just to accelerate a relatively small spacecraft (Dawn is a bit under 2 tons). Adjusting the orbit of an asteroid of a non-trivial size with an ion engine would take orders of magnitude more fuel, power, and time than the Dawn probe. Even if by some magic you managed to mine the fuel from the asteroid itself, a technological feat unto itself, you still need power and time. Power and time are doubly impacted because most asteroids rotate. Unless that axis of rotation is perfectly aligned with the desired trajectory you can only apply thrust for at best half the asteroid's rotation. Rotating is problematic for power generation. If the asteroid miner is solar powered it's panels would be in shadow half the asteroid's rotation so it needs extra mass and complexity for power storage. If it's nuclear powered it's radiators are in continual sunlight for half the asteroid's rotation so additional mass and complexity is needed to rotate them parallel to the bearing of the sun to remain effective. Even with all that it could take centuries to move an asteroid of any significant size with ion engines. Even if it only took decades that is still a huge initial outlay with zero payback for decades. The only way that's even remotely sane is if you spammed every asteroid with probes to assess their composition and knew you were pulling in the Comstock Lode. But then you depressed the price of all the material and the whole effort barely pays for itself.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Demand and supply. Much like DeBeers is stock piling low grade dimonds to not ruin market prices.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  When the Spanish extracted all the silver and gold they could from South America, it caused a dramatic reduction in the value of silver and gold in Europe. I.e. dropping a huge chunk of rare Earths onto Earth will make them not-so-rare and prices will collapse.
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Only if you don't have a monopoly...
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      You have to sell it to make money. It's like if Jeff Bezos dumped a big chunk of his Amazon stock on the market. The price would collapse.

lettergram 6y ago

In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale? If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent. However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way. Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)

rlt 6y ago
It’s probably just a coincidence, but I find it interesting that one of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla) has a huge demand for nickel and another one of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX) won a contract with NASA to explore 16 Psyche, an asteroid essentially made of nickel, and is working on a completely reusable rocket...
- elihu 6y ago
  I was just thinking about posting a comment about 16 psyche... I hadn't heard about the exploration mission, that should be pretty interesting. Iirc, 16 psyche is thought to possibly be a fragment of a planetary core and so it might contain a completely different proportion of metals than what you might find on the Earth's surface.
- evgen 6y ago
  The problems with this theory (and with asteroid mining in general) is that it is extremely unlikely that anything you mine in space will be economical to get back down. Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place -- if something was not worth the cost to launch it into space it is unlikely to be worth landing. The problem with asteroid mining is that it faces one of the most expensive chicken-egg problems it is possible to imagine. Without industry in space there is no need for the bulk gathering of raw materials, but without the bulk raw materials it is not worth developing industrial processes for space and a zero-g environment.

vkou 6y ago

The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity. The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical. And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal. If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.

lopmotr 6y ago
As I understand it, there iron and nickel asteroids that aren't chemically combined with other substances like ore is on Earth. So perhaps the only processing required would be melting and reforming it.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  Iron and nickel are too abundant on Earth, so their transport from elsewhere cannot be profitable. They and other abundant elements can be mined only for building structures on those asteroids or in space. The metals that are much more abundant on asteroids than on Earth will be dissolved in the Fe-Ni-Co metal in concentrations varying between 2 ppm for the most abundant (ruthenium) down to 0.05 ppm for the least abundant (rhenium). While these very low concentrations are still thousands of times larger than the average concentrations on Earth, mining them on asteroids would still require processing thousands of tons of Fe-Ni-Co metal for a few kilograms of precious metals. On asteroids that have never been melted, the processing could be easier, because most of the precious metals might be present in very small refractory grains dispersed between the grains of Fe-Ni-Co metal and silicate minerals and maybe a cheaper separation method could be found than for the case when they are in solution. However, the same huge quantities of material need to be processed. Right now, it is quite certain that this cannot be profitable. Some time, in a more distant future, we can imagine a technology much more advanced than what we have now, which would enable sending some robots able to perform completely automatically the tasks of building from local materials some huge installations for energy collection, for mining and for extracting the desired elements, so that asteroid mining would require the transport in both directions, between Earth and the mined asteroid, of only very small quantities of materials and equipment. Even if this is much beyond our current capabilities, it might become a necessity if we would exhaust the exploitable reserves for some of the least abundant elements, dispersing them in junk from which their extraction could become too costly. On the other hand, there are numerous research projects now trying to replace the use of less abundant elements with the use of more abundant elements, in a lot of applications. In most cases, it is likely that such substitution attempts are likely to succeed much earlier than the time when we would be able to mine those elements from outside the Earth.

elihu 6y ago

I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's just to bring back high-value metals to Earth, then that's probably the least complicated because the mass you have to move is low. I don't know the logistics of, say, gold mining in space, but you might not even bother with any on-site processing. Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That presupposes you know how to find such a rock. If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear. Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.

Tuna-Fish 6y ago
> Just grab a rock with a big gold vein and haul it back. That's not how it works. Simply put, most small asteroids are undifferentiated. Meaning, they all have roughly similar mix of materials that depend mostly on the distance to the sun of where they formed. Unlike on earth, since they formed they have never been molten or been subject to erosion and transport by weather and water, which concentrates like materials together. Most asteroids are basically balls of dust where any grain is pretty much in the place where it landed when it first hit the ball. The upside of this is that gold (and similar heavy metals) is much more abundant in asteroids than it is in the earth's crust, because when the whole earth was molten, all of our native gold ended up deep in the core. The gold we do have on earth is mostly what has rained down in meteors since the earth's crust has been solid. If they were on earth, each and every asteroid would be made of an exceptionally rich gold ore. However, add the cost of moving all of it back, and even with implausibly good rockets, it's just not worth it. The feasible options are either: 1. Refine in situ. Develop some process of separating all that gold (and other valuable materials that are much more abundant in asteroids than on earth) from the less valuable materials, and then just send the gold back. The fact that we are talking about dealing with a ball of barely-compacted dust makes this in some ways easier, in others harder. 2. Find one of the much rarer differentiated chunks of rock and metal instead. They have much higher concentrations of the stuff you want, and are in many ways much more convenient to deal with, given how they actually have a hard surface and all. The biggest problem with them is that they are generally going to be very big. As in, less rocks floating in space and more minor planets. The most promising candidate for this is 16 Psyche, which is believed to be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet that got smashed apart by a very energetic collision. It probably has more gold than all of earth's crust, and it probably exists as an uniform solid gold layer. The problem with 16 Psyche is that you are not moving it anywhere. It's >250km across and masses more than 2 quadrillion tonnes. So you have to dig into it. And, the layers above the gold layer are made of solid nickel-iron. So you either hope that there is a crack into the deep layers formed when the protoplanet was busted apart, and use that, or you somehow tunnel through a hundred kilometers of iron.

imtringued 6y ago

Rockets are expensive to launch from earth. If you can refuel in space it's a different story but where would you get the fuel from if you haven't mined an asteroid or the moon yet? It's a chicken and egg type of problem.

snewman 6y ago

Casey Handmer has a great blog taking hard analysis of what activities will be practical in space. He argues there is no real reason for asteroid mining to bring resources back to earth. So the challenge is to identify a large market for resources to be used in space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-known-commodity-resources-in-space-that-could-be-sold-on-earth/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/there-are-no-k...

Symmetry 6y ago
So, the current price to bring something from space to Earth is for a capsule that keeps the material in a comfortable Earth-like atmosphere with minimal heating and g forces on the way down the way humans like it. If you instead have an object that doesn't need to breath and doesn't mind pulling 1000s of gs then things are much simpler, just take a reasonably sized sphere of your platinum ore, wrap it in some cheaper ablatable material, and drop it onto a desert then take it out of the small crater. Which isn't to say I actually think that asteroid mining for use on Earth is viable, just that the numbers used in that article are way too pessimistic. In the short orbital communication is a >$100 billion a year industry and people are already looking at ways to manufacture larger antennas than can fit in rocket fairings in space for better signals. Even modest amounts of metal from an asteroid would be very valuable in orbit there since your competing with material that has to be brought up from Earth. Even bags of loose regolith could be very useful as radiation and meteorite protection.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Why not shaping it into some sort of lifting body, made out of honey comb like structures, and have that land into the ocean near the coast, to be towed to the next factory complex on land and disassamble the refined raw materials there? Combine with maybe inner compartments for standardized space containers for whatever else? This could be completely passive and autonomous, where the attached engine modules for deorbitng could detach and climb back up to some parking orbit or space dock before reentry happens. By choosing the right dimensions of that lifting body(surface to weight) you could avoid much of the reentry heat, down to about 400°C.