Live data from Hacker News

There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

visualcapitalist.com

1–10 of 107 posts

Re: There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

#4
post #3

how much platinum is there in the earth's core? $ 100 million per ounce is hardly grounds for a gold rush to the asteroid belt.

The Platinum in the Earth's core is not accessible, not even a little bit, not even with orders of magnitude improvements in technology.

Re: There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

#5
This will only be profitable at precise times of the year - depending on what prospected material is needed for that time next year when it's had time to wait till the closest location of the parent planet after its had time to mine in that gravity well and slung back when the parent planet has circled around.

Re: There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

#8
> NASA estimates this belt to hold $700 quintillion of bounty. That’s about $100 billion for each person on Earth.

Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x (current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value listed, I'd assume the later. But of course, no one could expect the price of anything to remain stable when you're dumping orders of magnitude greater quantities of it onto the market, so a more realistic analysis of the actual economic opportunity would be helpful.

Re: There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

#10
post #8

> NASA estimates this belt to hold $700 quintillion of bounty. That’s about $100 billion for each person on Earth. Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x (current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value listed, I…

Realistically I think the result would be a more civil version of the diamond market. Since there are only a couple players who could bring back anything you would just park your supply in orbit and bring it down when it was profitable. You'd still lower the prices but how much you brought home would be ceilinged by the total market demand. You'd probably bankrupt literally every terrestrial mining operation which wouldn't be the worst from an environmental and quality of life standpoint.
Post reply on HN