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Asteroid mining only makes sense for constructing things in space. For applications here on Earth, the logistics of both leaving and re-entering the gravity wel

• Teever 2y ago
  But once you have that infrastructure in space that can mine and construct in space won't that greatly shorten the supply chain for asteroid mining and bring the cost down? It seems to me that when people make the kind of argument that you're making they're forgetting to price the negative externalities that Earth based mining cost our society via environmental damage. If the environmental damage and species decline that we're experiencing from our planet-side economic endeavours were properly priced in space based manufacturing and asteroid mining would look a lot more attractive.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    The key to manufacturing is humans. Robots help yet need a lot of human maintenance. Human-free spacecraft require a lot of lead time and still begin from a human touch on earth. NEO is too resource starved for it to ever be independent enough to be cheaper than just managing resources better on the surface of Earth.
    • im3w1l 2y ago
      Maintanance is hard, but there is a solution. Design the robots out of materials that can be found in space. Then make them capable of reproduction. Then you can just scrap damaged robots as long as you can replace them fast enough. This also has the benefit that you just need to send up a tiny bootstrap population, but with time you will have quite the formidable workforce.
      • paulryanrogers 2y ago
        Doubtful there are enough resources to sustainably maintain much of anything in NEO. Asteroids with significant reservoirs are far apart and navigating between them is fraught. Also how are the robots going to know what and how to maintain things? Otherwise they must be remote controlled. Yet their sensors break down over time. Do reproducing robots even exist on Earth? How robust, nimble, and capable are they? Are their inputs found in space? All that said, I do love the idea of a robot space colony producing useful things, even if all we gain are space probes and knowledge.
        • im3w1l 2y ago
          Robot production on earth is entangled with the whole global supply chain. I do believe many of the steps are automatic or semi-automatic. It's """simply""" a matter of separating taking all those steps and separating them from the whole, packaging them into a bunch of boxes and sending them to space. So in other words it's incredibly complicated... but possible.
          • Teever 2y ago
            You may find this link interesting: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories
      • collingreen 2y ago
        Kind of a hand-wavy solution here - don't worry about maintenance just invent a self replicating universal tool that is either perfectly recyclable or cheap enough that we don't need to worry about their resource costs or cleanup. With that kind of tech nailed down pretty much ANY endeavor sounds very achievable (until the cheap startup version cuts one too many corners and the gray goo scenario begins I guess).
        • Teever 2y ago
          But isn't it just the natural progression of innovations like interchangeable parts and assembly line manufacturing? And isn't it already a thing that we're progressing to with increased industrial output and reduced labour requirements? This is where we're going, we just need an driver to push us to do it. Space exploration and resource extraction from the asteroid belt/moon to prevent the complete destruction of our environment seems to be as good a driver as any.
• drexlspivey 2y ago
  The space elevator will make bringing cargo to/from earth trivial and it will happen way before asteroid mining (current estimates for it being built is 15-20 years)
  • rapsey 2y ago
    Wildly optimistic when there is no known material that can be used to build it.
    • drexlspivey 2y ago
      Carbon nanotube is an existing material, manufacturing it at scale is one of the challenges.
      • troupo 2y ago
        manufacturing and building anything out of them in the required scale
      • Llamamoe 2y ago
        Carbon nanotubes are not even close to strong enough to build a space elevator, that's the whole problem. We have no idea if anything that strong even exists, at this point.
        • drexlspivey 2y ago
          > Carbon nanotubes are not even close to strong enough to build a space elevator, that's the whole problem. Do you have any sources for that? Because from a quick search online I’m seeing that SE requires a tensile strength of 60-80 GPa and the theoretical max strength of carbon nanotubes can reach 150-200 GPa (with a 63 GPa being demonstrated back in 2000)
          • adrian_b 2y ago
            Nobody can make a nanotube with a length of one meter, much less with a length of 1 km or of 100 km. We can imagine a molecular machine that would grow carbon nanotubes like a silkworm grows silk filaments, but we are many decades away from this kind of things. Moreover, the tensile strength is not all. It must resist to some intentional or accidental collisions, to earthquake waves and so on.
• IshKebab 2y ago
  I dunno, Dragon's return capacity is 3000kg which is about $240m... I think if there was a giant sack of pure gold bars up there it would be economically viable. The problem is there isn't. No way are you going to be able to refine it in space either.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    Indeed, I'm referring to the cost of the whole operation, including all the bits where you need to develop and deploy a fully-autonomous robotic mining operation a zillion miles from anywhere.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It might not be so hard to do because space is such a good insulator. You could get two chunks spinning on a tether and use a solar pumped laser to heat them. It would be a sort of melting-point chromoatograph where you'd get different materials melting out at different times. Cooling the collected material would be expensive, but you'd end up with most of the gold all together in one stratum of the result.
    • lightedman 2y ago
      "It would be a sort of melting-point chromoatograph where you'd get different materials melting out at different times." In geology, we do something incredibly similar called the Bowens Reaction Series. Take a bunch of stuff, melt it and cool it, watch what precipitates and crystallizes from the melt in order to determine the overall composition.
    • kadoban 2y ago
      > Cooling the collected material would be expensive Can't you just throw it in the shade and wait? Space is an excellent insulator, but radiation cooling still happens. Just let it sit there for a few weeks/months and you're all set, right?
      • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        I think you're right. I've been thinking in terms of vehicles with habitats, where the conductive heating would eventually be a problem. But this is just a few buckets on a cable, the whole assembly can stay at molten-metal temperatures for weeks without hurting anything.
• alemanek 2y ago
  If any of these asteroids have water ice buried that might be a good start. Easier to refine water and carbon into methane for fuel depots in space than other applications. Also drinking water, splitting for hydrogen or just use the ice as a radiation shield all are near term applications that don’t require lots of supporting infrastructure. I suspect that near term they might make some decent money just returning small samples for labs to analyze. If they can figure out how to do that economically they can likely survive off of grant money from various government entities. Contracting their asteroid lander for various science missions is also a good opportunity.
  • antupis 2y ago
    Yup that is how I would do it. Water sample returns to labs > water mining > platinum/gold/etc.
  • prepend 2y ago
    I remember reading an article from back when Blue Origin was a space mining concern that the first thing to grab is water just to supply the space station. Because it’s so expensive to take water into orbit and retrieving a comet or something else was fairly cheap and could yield billions of water for use by anyone in orbit.
  • UIUC_06 2y ago
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• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Suppose one of the things you construct in space is a skyhook. The economical way to operate one of those is to bring down as much mass as you bring up, that way the net change in angular momentum is 0. This would change the economics of bringing space-materials down to earth. That said, we're a long long way from being able to build a skyhook. I'm only objecting to the "never, ever" part of your post.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    > I'm only objecting to the "never, ever" part of your post. Sure, let me qualify "never, ever" as having a time horizon of "so long that anyone claiming that you, the eager investor, will see an economic return on this endeavor in your lifetime is secretly banking on breakthroughs in life extension technologies to make that statement technically correct".
    • nahkoots 2y ago
      "within your natural lifespan" isn't really a qualification of "never, ever". The two are very different time frames. I think it's good that you're willing to adjust your opinions given new information, but it would be nice if you admitted that you changed your mind based on what MatrixMan said instead of acting like "within your natural lifespan" was your original intent.
      • kibwen 2y ago
        Every prediction about the future--this one, every other one ever made, and every other one that will ever be made--is implictly made under the assumption that if the prediction lies beyond the predictor's lifespan, then the predictor will not be in a position to care one whit about the veracity of the prediction when that time comes. My clarification isn't at all motivated based on what the parent commenter said (I find the construction of a skyhook approximately as likely as the construction of a space elevator, which is to say, it will "never, ever" happen), but rather as an explicit clarification of the aforementioned implicit assumption.
• hypertele-Xii 2y ago
  Silver is antimicrobial. Gold is highly conductive. If we had these materials in absurd excess, we could literally build hospitals from silver and the electric grid from gold, and it would be great for our civilization.
  • otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    Gold and silver is less common in space than here on Earth.
    • blooalien 2y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/golden-asteroid-mission-is-back-on-track-says-nasa/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/go... You sure about that? Here's just one asteroid made of mostly gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth many times more than the entire global economy. Pretty sure that anything we have here on Earth also exists "out there" in much greater abundance than we could ever possibly imagine here on our finite little speck of a planet (except maybe "life", which we only have absolute proof of here on Earth).
      • adrian_b 2y ago
        In the whole Earth the abundances of the elements are similar to the averages of the Solar System, with the exception of some volatile elements, most of them being non-metals, which have been lost in space during the condensation of the Earth and also later. However the Earth is made of layers with different chemical compositions and many elements are concentrated in layers that are too far from the surface to hope that we will ever reach them. So in the accessible part of the Earth, close to the surface, those elements are seriously depleted. Some asteroids, unlike the Earth, have never been melted. In that case their composition is homogeneous, similar to the averages of the Solar System. Other asteroids are broken parts from the cores of bigger planets, so they have a composition like in the Earth at very high depths. However, in the latter kind of asteroids the useful metals are dissolved as tiny percentages in an iron-nickel-cobalt-germanium alloy. This will make their extraction incredibly energy-consuming. On Earth such metals have been separated during millions of years from their surrounding minerals and they have been accumulated as native nuggets or metallic sulfides that are very easy to process for their final separation and purification. With the alloy that exists in planet cores and asteroids nobody has demonstrated an efficient separation method yet. The laboratory methods used for such separations use huge amounts of water and acids and they will be impossible to implement on an asteroid. Carrying raw metal from asteroids, which is almost completely iron, would also increase the costs tremendously. So it is absurd to even consider asteroid mining before demonstrating a method that can extract the metals from iron at the mining sites and with a minimum consumption of energy and of non-recyclable reactants.
• BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Surely reentering is very much not the problem?
  • kibwen 2y ago
    Re-entering is a very large problem. Say you've got a few thousand tons of material hurtling towards Earth. How do you get it down to the surface in a useful way? You're not just going to shotgun it raw into the ocean, because then you still have to retrieve it somehow. You're not going to land it with rockets, SpaceX-style, because the fuel costs would be astronomical. You're not going to land it with a short atmospheric drag followed by parachutes, Apollo-style, because the weight makes the energies too great (the Apollo command module weighed about 6 tons upon re-entry). You're going to need something much more sophisticated, Space Shuttle-style, but on a grander scale than ever, and you're going to need to bear the cost of putting that thing back into orbit every time, or you're going to need to develop something brand-new (like a HUGE inflatable re-entry vehicle) or something that exists in the realm of sci-fi (like a space elevator).
    • tzs 2y ago
      Does it have to be hurtling toward Earth? How about first parking it at the L4 or L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and then nudging it so it leisurely meanders toward Earth instead of hurtles toward Earth? That would enter the atmosphere orders of magnitude slower than meteors do. Would that be enough for it to largely survive the fall to the surface either stay largely intact on impact or break up but the pieces would all be in the same general area?
      • DennisP 2y ago
        Heh that's an interesting point. It doesn't have to orbit the Earth, so it doesn't necessarily have lots of lateral velocity to burn off. It'd be interesting to work the numbers for just matching the Earth's velocity around the sun, at a distance of a few hundred kilometers. Edit: based on a quick chat with Claude Sonnet, reentry velocity would be about a fourth as high, but getting to that initial orbit in the first place makes the whole project significantly harder. But maybe if ablation from reentries became an environmental problem, and deep-space propulsion got really good, it'd be worthwhile.
• thebruce87m 2y ago
  Might make sense for Mars or a moon base too.
• theptip 2y ago
  I don’t think this is categorically true. A couple obvious options are constructing titanium gliders to land materials on earth, and de-orbiting incoming metal loads with a space tether to provide inertia that can then be used to launch planetary loads to orbit. It’s true that the relative value of these materials will be higher in space (since your alternative is lifting it out of the gravity well) but there may be so much supply that you can saturate the space market and justify the extra transport cost to sell it on earth too.
  • salomonk_mur 2y ago
    Or most likely in today's scenario, demand is miniscule in space compared to earth's so you sell on the earth market while demand in space materializes.
    • me_me_me 2y ago
      If you make water cheap in the orbit, and have capability to produce fuel... it would drive investments into space through the roof. Suddenly you only need to get to orbit, as everything else is cheap, because you can refuel and get water. You can go where you want to go, you can grow food, you can stay in low earth orbit for cheap.
• datadeft 2y ago
  Citation needed. Moving the biggest polluters from Earth to space makes a lot of sense. I am not sure about economic realities.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    To be clear, I think there's a lot of reasons to do cool things in space (Moon base, etc.). However, we're kidding ourselves if we think one of those reasons is "make a profit based on the intrinsic economic value of the endeavor".
• tejtm 2y ago
  This neglects the cost of extraction. In particular, the most rare (and therefore precious) commodity in the solar system and indeed the universe is the 4 billion year old bioreactor we refer to as "topsoil". Getting all the other elemental material we need without screwing that up will be a win for our descendants.
  • nradov 2y ago
    The topsoil lost from mining is miniscule compared to other causes. Most mines aren't even located in places that could be used as productive farmland.
    • solarengineer 2y ago
      Perhaps not productive farmland, but lots of forests have been cut down and have been proposed for deforestation to support mines
      • ethbr1 2y ago
        Far more forests were cut down to produce iron and steel, post-mining. Thankfully, forests are self-renewing, and we no longer use charcoal as a carbon source. Mines are also generally pretty small compared to forests.
        • solarengineer 2y ago
          Some points for you to consider: Charcoal is very much in use around the world, forests are now small enough that entire forests are marked to make way for mines, and forests are not-self renewing on time nor does a mine convert back into a forest.
          • ethbr1 2y ago
            4,620,000 kg of raw wood to equip a standard Roman legion with iron/steel is a lot of wood. Charcoal is no longer used as a primary heating source in the way it was in antiquity, given the global trade in oil, gas, and coal. Furthermore, mines in civilized parts of the world generally do have reforestation requirements as part of their decommissioning. We can certainly gripe about the legacy of toxic tailing ponds et al., but tree cover is usually handled decently.
• solardev 2y ago
  Can't we just shape the mined platinum into rods and drop them into the oceans from orbit? Or onto rival mining companies, for that matter?
  • vosper 2y ago
    Often referred to as Rods from God, but Syndicate Wars had the better name: Satellite Rain.
    • shepherdjerred 2y ago
      Related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
  • RecycledEle 2y ago
    Why not make a mostly-empty mesh from mined metals? Someone talked about 3D printing mostly hollow golf balls in outer space and dropping them onto a desert where they could be picked up .
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • me_me_me 2y ago
    if space fuel is cheap you can just elongate your orbit and at the peak retro-burn to match the relative earth speed. Then release the cargo, it would fall with terminal velocity to earth. and burn with your cargo-craft back to establish the orbit.
• tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Rare earth metals might be a good use case....say the stuff used in cytalitic converters etc
  • daymanstep 2y ago
    Rare earth metals are not actually rare.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  I think it makes a lot of sense. You leave the earth light and you return heavy and have a gravity assist to return it to earth for free.
• jessriedel 2y ago
  Bringing stuff down from space is not that expensive with reusable systems like Starship, and this is even more true if you don’t need to soft land it i.e., spray an ablative on a huge rock of precious metals and redirect it to Earth. The delta V costs are quite small. There’s no fundamental physics barrier here.
  • teractiveodular 2y ago
    The going rate for a ton of iron ore is under $100. Pack 100 of those into a Starship, and your gross revenue will be a cool $10,000.
    • jessriedel 2y ago
      Iron is not precious. Marked to market, 100 tons of platinum is worth $3.2B. That’s a bit more than half the annual world production, so the price would fall significantly, but still easily be more than $1B.
      • lucubratory 2y ago
        Exactly, and people complaining that the price would fall so it wouldn't really be "that" valuable are missing the forest for the trees. Having a hundred times more platinum available to our civilisation (and platinum being a hundred times cheaper) because there are 200 shiploads of it coming down a year is going to drive innovation & utility in ways we can't even predict yet. Same goes for every other precious metal we can get in abundance from asteroids.