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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

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.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    > Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place Doesn't that depend on how you get it down. Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
    - evgen 6y ago
      Metal anything dropped from orbit at the speeds we are talking about would either burn up in the atmosphere or else hit the ocean surface and become lots of small chunks of something that is now sinking to the ocean floor. You need to shed a huge amount of delta-V just to get to the point where the landing site is described using any term other than 'impact crater.' Most of the mechanisms for dumping this energy tend to be a bit tricky to pull off and I am not sure, but there might be an upper limit after which ablation stops being a viable option.
      - Symmetry 6y ago
        Meteorites that arrive on the Earth from outer space are most certainly a thing that happens sometimes, that's wear all our existing Mars rocks come from for instance. Whether something survives reentry depends on a lot of factors including the size of the object, the angle of re-entry, its composition, etc.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        When you have the ability to make it into foam in space, why not use that to make lifting bodies out of it, and let them glide down, instead of crashing like a stone? Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
        evgen 6y ago
        You can't 'glide down' from orbit. You need to dump your delta-V somewhere. Stop thinking of orbit as though this chunk of metal is suspended from some big balloon out there. _Everything_ in space is moving, 0.0% if it is moving at the right speed and direction to enter the atmosphere and soft land without a lot of external assistance.
- azernik 6y ago
  Nickel is so common and cheap it is unlikely to be profitable to ship it to Earth. It's more likely that nickel and iron would be used as construction materials in space, to make satellites and stations cheaper by reducing the launch mass required. The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.
nine_k 6y ago
Mining an asteroid far away and then spend fuel to shuttle material from it to GEO or Moon seems rather uneconomical. I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).
- withinboredom 6y ago
  The problem is, a single accident or mistake can put the entire earth’s population at risk. It seems highly unlikely we’d bring big rocks back to earth.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  The fuel cost to shuttle the materials back would be fairly negligible. The main cost to getting anything into space at the moment is the initial launch to LEO. (This equation changes if you're not actually launching your mining vessel from the earth's surface)
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
One theory in favor of space mining is that (and I personally believe this is wishful thinking) one asteroid might have a lot of titanium in it that would be worth trillions (and probably crash the titanium market). But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.
- ben_w 6y ago
  I thought the biggest cost of titanium today was extracting from the oxide, not the ore itself? 2016 prices: TiO2 $150/ton; metal $3750/ton — https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/ https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/
- adrian_b 6y ago
  The only substances that might have a chance to be profitably mined from asteroids are those that on Earth are concentrated at depths too great to be accessible and they are depleted at the Earth surface by thousands of times, or at least hundreds of times. These elements are: 1. The 6 platinum-group elements 2. Rhenium and gold 3. Tellurium, selenium and germanium Besides these elements, only indium might be profitable. Indium is depleted only a little at the Earth surface, but its original abundance is very low, so additional extra-terrestrial sources could be useful. From all the rare elements, indium is the one for which there are no good substitutes in its main applications. Indium is completely irreplaceable in the best lighting sources (i.e. LEDs), in the best power semiconductor devices (with gallium nitride) and in the best transparent conductors (required e.g. for computer displays). For transparent conductors there are great efforts to find a substitute and those might eventually be successful. Nevertheless until now all the alternatives have various disadvantages.
- azernik 6y ago
  Titanium ore is cheap, and is produced at a large enough scale the market wouldn't crash. The expensive metals are platinum-group metals (iridium, osmium, rhenium, &c), which go for tens of thousands of dollars per kilo.
WalterBright 6y ago
I suspect the value in asteroid mining will be for building things in space that will remain in space, due to the high cost of trying to launch material out of Earth's gravity well.

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.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > Most people forget that it costs almost as much delta-V to get down as it does to get up in the first place Doesn't that depend on how you get it down. Metal foam dropped from orbit into an ocean would float, you could have a retrieval vessel go pick it up.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Metal anything dropped from orbit at the speeds we are talking about would either burn up in the atmosphere or else hit the ocean surface and become lots of small chunks of something that is now sinking to the ocean floor. You need to shed a huge amount of delta-V just to get to the point where the landing site is described using any term other than 'impact crater.' Most of the mechanisms for dumping this energy tend to be a bit tricky to pull off and I am not sure, but there might be an upper limit after which ablation stops being a viable option.
    - Symmetry 6y ago
      Meteorites that arrive on the Earth from outer space are most certainly a thing that happens sometimes, that's wear all our existing Mars rocks come from for instance. Whether something survives reentry depends on a lot of factors including the size of the object, the angle of re-entry, its composition, etc.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      When you have the ability to make it into foam in space, why not use that to make lifting bodies out of it, and let them glide down, instead of crashing like a stone? Stop thinking in terms of projectiles. Just because the Space Shuttle came down like brick in a controlled crash doesn't mean there are no other ways to do this. Without the need for ablation, btw!
      - evgen 6y ago
        You can't 'glide down' from orbit. You need to dump your delta-V somewhere. Stop thinking of orbit as though this chunk of metal is suspended from some big balloon out there. _Everything_ in space is moving, 0.0% if it is moving at the right speed and direction to enter the atmosphere and soft land without a lot of external assistance.
azernik 6y ago
Nickel is so common and cheap it is unlikely to be profitable to ship it to Earth. It's more likely that nickel and iron would be used as construction materials in space, to make satellites and stations cheaper by reducing the launch mass required. The profitable stuff to ship to Earth would be platinum-group metals, which have values in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. But those require much more capital investment, as you need to get to farther-off asteroids and do more intensive in-space refining.

nine_k 6y ago

Mining an asteroid far away and then spend fuel to shuttle material from it to GEO or Moon seems rather uneconomical. I would suggest finding a small enough (a few dozen kilotons) space rock made of a valuable / precious metal, and brought to it a large solar array and an ion gun. Metals make good ion gun fuel. Slowing the asteroid down to fall to an elliptic orbit around Earth, and then righting the orbit to put it on GEO or drop it to.the Moon seems doable with a rather limited use of mass. Technology permitting, a large enough solar sail could help slow down / steer the rock on its way towards Earth (or Moon, or Mars).

withinboredom 6y ago
The problem is, a single accident or mistake can put the entire earth’s population at risk. It seems highly unlikely we’d bring big rocks back to earth.
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
The fuel cost to shuttle the materials back would be fairly negligible. The main cost to getting anything into space at the moment is the initial launch to LEO. (This equation changes if you're not actually launching your mining vessel from the earth's surface)

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

One theory in favor of space mining is that (and I personally believe this is wishful thinking) one asteroid might have a lot of titanium in it that would be worth trillions (and probably crash the titanium market). But again, personally I think that's wishful thinking to try and get investors to push money into a space mining company. Based on nothing whatsoever, I believe most asteroids will be made out of fairly worthless materials.

ben_w 6y ago
I thought the biggest cost of titanium today was extracting from the oxide, not the ore itself? 2016 prices: TiO2 $150/ton; metal $3750/ton — https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/ https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/
adrian_b 6y ago
The only substances that might have a chance to be profitably mined from asteroids are those that on Earth are concentrated at depths too great to be accessible and they are depleted at the Earth surface by thousands of times, or at least hundreds of times. These elements are: 1. The 6 platinum-group elements 2. Rhenium and gold 3. Tellurium, selenium and germanium Besides these elements, only indium might be profitable. Indium is depleted only a little at the Earth surface, but its original abundance is very low, so additional extra-terrestrial sources could be useful. From all the rare elements, indium is the one for which there are no good substitutes in its main applications. Indium is completely irreplaceable in the best lighting sources (i.e. LEDs), in the best power semiconductor devices (with gallium nitride) and in the best transparent conductors (required e.g. for computer displays). For transparent conductors there are great efforts to find a substitute and those might eventually be successful. Nevertheless until now all the alternatives have various disadvantages.
azernik 6y ago
Titanium ore is cheap, and is produced at a large enough scale the market wouldn't crash. The expensive metals are platinum-group metals (iridium, osmium, rhenium, &c), which go for tens of thousands of dollars per kilo.

WalterBright 6y ago

I suspect the value in asteroid mining will be for building things in space that will remain in space, due to the high cost of trying to launch material out of Earth's gravity well.