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There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

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

#61

Post by shmerl »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #56
shmerl wrote: post #11

> That’s because the value of many asteroids are measured in the quintillions of dollars Doesn't abundance of certain material make it cheaper? So the value isn't necessarily linearly dependent on the amount. Reminds me "The Laxian Key" by Robert Sheckley[1] (read it, if you haven't yet). [1]. https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-11/Galaxy_195...

I mean, even if we got a tenth of that value, it would still be a tremendous amount of money and could spur whole new industries on earth, much like the advent of steel production did.

Sure, I'm not saying it's not going to be useful.

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

#62

Post by neltnerb »

andrewflnr wrote: post #57
pitaj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The earth is venting about 50,000 metric tons of mass per year. The addition of rare materials from space probably wouldn't match that. That's not even considering that the vast majority of materials would be used for space travel itself.

Um, what? If you're thinking about volcanism, I'm pretty sure none of that escapes earth. It doesn't change our total mass.

For comparison, human CO2 emissions are 10 billion metric tons per year. 50,000 tons is such a small amount that they're probably just referencing helium and other gases escaping the atmosphere.

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

#63

Post by syllogism »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #42
adlpz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earth crust is estimated to be in the order of 10^19 kg. The 6x10^24 figure you mention is the mass of the whole earth. So your calculation if off by 5 orders of magnitude.

That's what Wolfram Alpha told me, sorry. But my $956 quintillion number is about as relevant as the article's $700 quintillion number. Even 5 orders of magnitude off, we're still not supply limited. The only number that matters is the $32/gram number.

That's not usually a good attitude to take when you're told you're 5 orders of magnitude off.

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

#64

Post by jiltedfrog »

Or maybe strap rockets to the asteroid and safely drop it in a shallow part of the Ocean, where you can retrieve it at convenience.

First you have to break it into smaller pieces, a regulated implosion or something. Then strapping rockets to it, so you can control its motion in three axes (three rockets, maybe) and remotely guide it to earth. 3/4 ocean is hard to miss.

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

#65

Post by taneq »

Gracana wrote: post #43
bryanlarsen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low Earth Orbit is still fairly close to earth, cost wise. (yay SpaceX). A gram of platinum in LEO is only about 20% more expensive than a gram of platinum on Earth. It's the stuff that's cheap but bulky like iron, water & rocket fuel ectrolyzed from water that you'll want to mine in space for use in space. Platinum and other rare metals will simply be waste products that are profitable to ship back to Earth. edit: m…

> A gram of titanium in LEO is only about 20% more expensive than a gram of titanium on Earth. Can you elaborate on that? I can't parse that statement in a way that would make it seem correct, so... What exactly do you mean?

Translation: It cost 20% as much to lift titanium to orbit as it costs to refine in the first place. Which seems very wrong because it costs between $5 and $50 per kilo according to a quick search, and I'm pretty sure it costs a LOT more than that to lift a kilo into orbit.

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

#66

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

shmerl wrote: post #48
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law is a high-latency side-chain of authority. When / if we get to mining asteroids, and generally inhabiting space, either personally or via robots, treaties / laws will be remapped to match the reality of the times.

Hopefully no one will remap them to allow owning planetoids. That would be pretty nasty.

Why not?

Over 200 asteroids are known to be larger than 100 km,[49] and a survey in the infrared wavelengths has shown that the asteroid belt has 0.7–1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more.[1]

The volume of a sphere 1 kilometre in radius 4.19km³. If you can build a mining operation on one of those I don't see any problem with granting you exclusive access. We already do something similar on Earth.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Characteristics

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

#67

Post by jon_richards »

kchoudhu wrote: post #25
mzw_mzw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is big. I mean, really big. The orbits that are most useful for our current-day satellites are crowded, of course, but you could stash your asteroid booty anywhere you like. Putting it in orbit around the Moon might not be a bad move.

Why bother bringing it home at all? Set up orbital factories as well, and ship the finished goods back to Earth via space elevator. Get rid of mining and dirty manufacturing on earth once and for all.

Aren't atmospheric elements required for most refining processes?

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

#68

Post by zdkl »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #31
bryanlarsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, the production cost of most rare metals is very highly correlated with the cost of energy. It seems likely that space mining may have to compete with metals produced at a price an order of magnitude cheaper than the current price because cheap solar energy appears to be coming.

Solar power is going to be way, way cheaper in space than even the most optimistic ground-based solar technologies. For instance, it'd be practical to build a multi-kilometer diameter mirror out of thin plastic, and just melt the entire asteroid and distill off what you wanted. To expand a bit: a mirror for a solar furnace on Earth has to be strong enough to hold itself up against the force of gravity and handle wind…

There's much less high speed objects to puncture the mirror on earth. I think the environment up there is more hostile than you describe

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

#69

Post by zdkl »

zaszrespawned wrote: post #2

Nearly all the space sims - elite, eve, sc have mining as main feature. Appeals to the capitalism inside everyone :)

Wild tangent about eve online: it's adopting a free tier on nov. 15! (Join usss)

I guess we're all fascinated by extracting riches from 'the next frontier', for our epoch that's space and I can't wait to see real implementations of this dream of belt mining!

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

#70

Post by prodmerc »

zdkl wrote: post #69
zaszrespawned wrote: post #2

Nearly all the space sims - elite, eve, sc have mining as main feature. Appeals to the capitalism inside everyone :)

Wild tangent about eve online: it's adopting a free tier on nov. 15! (Join usss) I guess we're all fascinated by extracting riches from 'the next frontier', for our epoch that's space and I can't wait to see real implementations of this dream of belt mining!

I've grown tired of getting killed by some vastly superior player every time I undock. Otherwise, pretty good game.
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