101–107 of 107 posts
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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?
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 p…
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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.
Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's governments.
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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.
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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.
Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's governments.
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Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's governments.
Governments these days compete with each other to pander to corporations. The promise of a few jobs and a few political donations is enough to get a government to do just about anything you want.
For every government supporting cartels there will be a dozen trying to break them, because of how much money you can make by breaking a cartel.
Greed still wins, for the betterment of humans.
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> 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.