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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

#71

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

manicdee wrote: post #60
wyager wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you could bring the asteroid into an earth orbit. You can ship down some of the expensive metals to cover your cost right away, but leave the bulk materials in HEO for spaceship construction. The easiest way to do this is to find an ice-rich asteroid and use a nuclear-thermal engine to vaporize the ice for propellant.

Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing (thanks to our atmosphere). Crash the asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean, then continue with more conventional mining techniques.

That sounds a bit dramatic. How big would an asteroid need to be for the economics of bringing it to the surface of Earth to make sense.

That meteor that lit up the sky in Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 20m in diameter and weigh around 13,000 tones[1], it exploded in the atmosphere releasing the energy of 500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), about 29 times the energy released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.[1]

Not sure I'd want to be on the planet when you crash your asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

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

#72

Post by Lerc »

The conclusion is broadly correct. There _is_ a lot of money to be made in asteroid mining. The reasoning is completely ridiculous. Imagine giving everyone on the planet a 1000kg ball of gold. It would make it pointless to trade and be a pain to have around, You'd pay people to take it away and dump it.

Asteroid mining _will_ be a massive provider of resources in the future. Industries that use those resources will pay for them. I imagine some truly awesomely huge structures will be manufactured in space in the further future with the vast resources available.

There will be an interesting adjustment to the valuation of metals once the industry develops. The metals most used will drop to around the cost of collecting them (plus some profit for the miners). Metals that have less use than their relative abundance within the asteroids being mined are effectively a waste product where supply would exceed demand. Gold is probably in that category. It's useful for things, but not _that_ useful.

So I wouldn't invest in Gold long term. That might be quite a long term though.

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

#73

Post by Turing_Machine »

zdkl wrote: post #68
Turing_Machine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you're vastly overestimating the density of such objects. Space is really pretty empty.

Also, small holes won't hurt the mirror to any significant degree.

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

#74

Post by Pica_soO »

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…

Your mirror is going to evaporate gas from the asteroid and push it around out of focus?

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

#75

Post by Turing_Machine »

andrewflnr wrote: post #55
Turing_Machine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have references about this solar mirror refining idea? It sounds fascinating.

I'm almost sure the concept was discussed in Gerard K. O'Neill's 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, but my copy is in storage at the moment so I can't verify that. The idea has been around for at least that long.

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

#76

Post by Turing_Machine »

Pica_soO wrote: post #74
Turing_Machine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your mirror is going to evaporate gas from the asteroid and push it around out of focus?

As I said, you're going to need some station-keeping ability.

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

#77

Post by nazka »

BWStearns wrote: post #10
kcorbitt wrote: 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 wo…

Something even better is to reffined and process everything to raw materials in orbit and then bring them on Earth.

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

#78

Post by Beltiras »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #21

By comparison, there's $956 quintillion of platinum in the earth's crust, and similar amounts of other precious metals. 5 ug/kg (incidence of platinum in crust) x 6x10^24 kg (crust size) x 32 USD/g (price of platinum) Asteroid mining is crazy silly. We're not supply limited for any element on earth, we're demand limited. If the price of platinum rose substantially, so would supply. It doesn't matter how much of anyth…

Even if it's present in the crust there's the question of how easy or hard it is to convert into usable bars/wire/films. The first asteroid mining operations will focus on asteroids where you can get huge chunks of ore.

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

#79

Post by jiltedfrog »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #71
manicdee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing (thanks to our atmosphere). Crash the asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean, then continue with more conventional mining techniques.

That sounds a bit dramatic. How big would an asteroid need to be for the economics of bringing it to the surface of Earth to make sense. That meteor that lit up the sky in Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 20m in diameter and weigh around 13,000 tones[1], it exploded in the atmosphere releasing the energy of 500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), about 29 times the energy released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshi…

You could make Soyuz sized chunks, strap them with mechanisms that deploy parachutes as it enters earths atmosphere. It wont burn up like a meteor that way.

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

#80

Post by echelon »

jfoutz wrote: post #26
bryanlarsen wrote: post #21

By comparison, there's $956 quintillion of platinum in the earth's crust, and similar amounts of other precious metals. 5 ug/kg (incidence of platinum in crust) x 6x10^24 kg (crust size) x 32 USD/g (price of platinum) Asteroid mining is crazy silly. We're not supply limited for any element on earth, we're demand limited. If the price of platinum rose substantially, so would supply. It doesn't matter how much of anyth…

But we're using a lot of the crust. No one will be mining under Atlanta. There are plenty of places we aren't using, but the crust is also thick. A mile down sounds really deep, much less 20 miles. I mostly agree with you, but it might wind up easier to nab an asteroid than dig a mile under the ocean.

Is Atlanta rich in rare earth minerals or something, or are you just using a random city as an example? I'm aware of various granite mines around the city (such as where they filmed Walking Dead and Stranger Things), but I wouldn't have imagined Georgia to have disproportionately more minerals than other states in the Southeast.
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