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Imagine how this is going to completely destroy the markets for metals unless they artificially restrict the supply.

• baq 3y ago
  'destroy' as in actually 'price discovery working as intended'? ;)
• kibwen 3y ago
  It would affect the market for gold as a store of value, certainly. But for actual useful economic purposes, the cost of getting those metals back to the surface of the Earth would be so eye-wateringly expensive that I don't know if it would even make sense. A single SpaceX Starship claims to have a reusable payload of 150 tons. Current annual mining operations extract 21 million tons of copper, 3,000 tons of gold, and 300 tons of platinum. So let's focus on platinum. You'd need two starships per year to match current platinum production. But it's a 12-year round trip, so you'd need 24 starships in continuous operation just to haul the metals (let's ignore where they're getting their fuel from for the return trip). And that's before you get to the actual costs of the mining operation itself; bootstrapping fully autonomous robotic space mining on a rock 200 million miles away is going to take more money that anyone has lying around. And the final result of this is that you've spent a trillion dollars just to crash the market for platinum.
• jandrese 3y ago
  You need to consider the costs associated with in-orbit mining and then de-orbiting the material before declaring terrestrial mining dead. Those are big unknowns at the moment. It might only be useful for in-orbit manufacturing, which is also a near complete unknown at this point. Pretty exciting for anybody contemplating building massive orbital stations.