I'm so intrigued by the prospect of mining asteroids! The amounts of metals and other resources, including rarer things like platinum family metals is incredible. There are some serious challenges that would need to be overcome, but the first country or company which pulls it off would open the doors to a future where we don't need to rip up earth to obtain all the rare stuff we need for high tech industry. And with huge amounts of asteroids being in the belts in our solar system, a practically inexhaustible supply too.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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It is exciting but what’s the market? It’s hard to see this being at all a reasonable cost having to bring it back to Earth, especially unrefined, and it’s hard to imagine it not being worse than current mining, given the flight back to Earth, especially if refining is still on Earth
On the other hand I’m more excited over mining regolith and water. Such simple things, but will be a huge difference in cost to maintain any off-world presence. Shelter, radiation control, rocket fuel, drinking and bathing, growing food : water and dirt are pretty basic, but just think of the sheer tonnage of supply missions launching from Earth it could replace
I think the real value is amount of rare metals that could be harvested, scientists have found an asteroid that is comprised mostly of metals. Scientists think it may be the exposed core of a proto planet:
Metal asteroid Psyche has a ridiculously high 'value.' But what does that even mean?
So that kind of haul could potentially be worth it, but smelting, refinement and processing would probably be more cost effective in space. Who knows what the future will bring, mining the asteroid belt may only make sense once we have a much strong presence in space, I.E., colonies on Mars, the Moon, etc etc.
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Launch costs are coming way down. Once we get enough people into space to get industry going this will be great. Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet. Asteriods are airless lumps of rock and metal just hanging around.
Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet
Space Mining, Deep Rock Galactic style
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ROCK AND STONE
Rock and stone in the heart
If you rock and stone, you're never alone!
IF YOU DON'T ROCK AND STONE, YOU AIN'T COMING HOME!
I sure hope we find a way to do this and spread the increase in wealth and prosperity mostly equally amongst all people.
I would hate it if one guy got super powerful and filthy rich off this and then monopolized the asteroid mining industry.
Spoiler, it's definitely gonna be option 2.
If the movie Armageddon taught us anything it’s that it’ll be super easy to train miners for space.
Harry Stamper never never misses a depth that he aims for.
Also love how this movie stuck up for Mom and pop oil companies
Can we just get on with engineering a space elevator already? We're going to want one if we're serious about exploiting resources off planet.
You might as well ask: "Can we just get on with engineering an FTL drive?" as it is about as far beyond our capabilities as a space elevator is.
It really isn't. We know it's possible, we roughly know how to build one, it's only our material science that isn't there yet. But there are promising leads in that direction and with the right investments that problem looks solvable.
https://youtu.be/lldv_u4R6BU?si=65llxa5uHygOlT3K
With FTL our current science is saying that it's probably impossible and will never happen. We might be wrong about that, but if we are it's not going to be cracked anytime soon.
Yes, we have the theory of what is required to build one but every material we have (including graphene and carbon nanotubes) is about 2-3 orders of magnitude below the tensile strength that is required for a space elevator on earth. Add in the fact that the longest graphene and carbon nanotube we can currently produce is in the mm range and we need it to be ~50,000 km and perfect at the atomic level we would be at best decades away from production if they could be used.
Ironically the best place for us to begin is in space.
Building space elevator on the moon is much, much easier (1/6 G and no atmosphere) and Mars is also a much easier proposition than on earth (1/3 G and 1/1000th the atmospheric pressure).
I fully expect that if humans ever build space elevators the first one will not be on earth.
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Sure, if you can find a material strong enough
I also am under the assumption that no material exists that could be stacked tall enough to build a space elevator.
You'd want tensile strength rather than compressive. The trick is to anchor a counterweight out beyond your target distance and let it pull the weight of the cable up rather than building a tower. Think of swinging a ball on a string rather than building a skyscraper. Assuming a sufficiently sized counterweight you can support the weight of the anchoring cable plus whatever else you want to hang off of it (space dock, elevator terminus, etc.)
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My guess is that we won't be doing any digging on asteroids at first. We will send a Spaceship (with 100tn of cargo capacity) and grab a whole small asteroid. Then the spaceship with the small asteroid Inside the cargo bay will return to earth. It sounds science fiction but don't forget we have already collected material from asteroids twice (the Japanese returned with 5gr and tre US 250gr).
You don't even have to go very far, there are hundreds of small asteroids between the moon and earth. I think we will be able to collect a whole small asteroid in 10 years max.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
For instance, a study by Ian Lange of the Colorado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries.
While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.
Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow.
By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton.
Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities.
The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals.
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