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There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

visualcapitalist.com

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

#91

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

Can't you ship it home with a heat shield and a parachute?

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

#92

Post by geon »

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…

The metals already being in orbit has a value too. Getting metal up in orbit from earth would cost many times the value of materials.

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

#93

Post by geon »

stale2002 wrote: post #17
ant6n wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost probably would depend on the 'moat', i.e. how easy is it for another player to enter the market. On the other hand, we may get a kind of OPEC of asteroid miners.

The problem with cartels like this is that all it takes is a single person to break to cartel, for the whole thing to come crashing down. Someone might even do it as a charity operation.

Not in the diamond business. A player who won't conform is simply crushed.

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

#94

Post by geon »

stale2002 wrote: post #17
ant6n wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost probably would depend on the 'moat', i.e. how easy is it for another player to enter the market. On the other hand, we may get a kind of OPEC of asteroid miners.

The problem with cartels like this is that all it takes is a single person to break to cartel, for the whole thing to come crashing down. Someone might even do it as a charity operation.

Not in the diamond business. A player who won't conform is simply crushed.

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

#95

Post by geon »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #18
personjerry wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where would you store all of it?

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.

Earth orbit isn't that crowded. And you don't need to spread out. A cube of 100x100x100 m would store plenty of metal, but would not need more safety margin distance than any other satellite.

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

#96

Post by zdkl »

prodmerc wrote: post #70
zdkl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to team up! SOlo play is unfortunately not very interesting at first. Try to find some friendlies to fly with until you're confident enough to strike out on your own.

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

#97

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

The experience of unowned land and resources on Earth are quite terrible, so I hope for the opposite.

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

#98

Post by zdkl »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #73
zdkl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm more worried about kinetic energy than density in this scenario, but younre certainly right that this is low frequency anyway

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #73
zdkl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by wyager »

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.

> Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing

The asteroid already has to be going slowly enough to avoid burning up in the atmosphere, and circularizing at HEO is much cheaper than circularizing near LEO. You also probably don't want to crash anything of this size into the earth.

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