asteroid mining

[ostrich]

Does anyone think asteroid mining will become a thing because there is two companies that are looking to do that?

 

Edited December 18, 2015 by ostrich

[RainDreamer]

Well, it will be a thing eventually. Whether it is going to happen in the next 50 years is going to be another thing. Right now it is still way too expensive to launch stuff and mine asteroid to get any kind of meaningful return of investment.

[Bill Phil]

It'll be a very useful source of resources once we become truly spacefaring (loads of people living in space and loads of people going to and fro).

[ostrich]

Well both companies (planetary resources and deep space industries) say they want to start in the 2020s.

[Nibb31]

They can say what they want. They are in the business to attract investors in order to keep paying the bills. There is no way they will ever be profitable.

Asteroid mining might become a thing one day, but not in our lifetimes, and it certainly will not involve humans living in space. If you're in a business to make money, you don't want to make stuff more expensive by man rating everything and adding life support and habitation volume. Teleoperation and IA can already do wonders, and there's no reason to believe that robots won't get better in the future.

[wumpus]

2 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

They can say what they want. They are in the business to attract investors in order to keep paying the bills. There is no way they will ever be profitable.

Asteroid mining might become a thing one day, but not in our lifetimes.

The minimal requirements for asteroid mining involve:

Locate a largely platinum and/or iridium asteroid with an orbit that gets "pretty close" to Earth (I'm pretty sure a few candidates have been found).

Build a "miner" that can latch on to said asteroid (harder than it sounds, ask the Rosetta people) and have an ion thruster capable of an Earth transfer and capture.

Launching said "miner" (megabucks).

Fling said asteroid into a large shallow portion of the ocean, Antarctica, the Sahara, or some other place you can both safely hit with a returning asteroid and retrieve what's left of said asteroid.  Note this may involve paying large bribes to change existing laws: as far as I know only the US recognizes asteroid mining and I doubt you could even drop it on Alaska.  You would hate to have to race to the landing site against all the other treasure hunters in the world.

Bonus points if the miner can be sent out for a second haul.  Enough of these (and possible refueling in LEO) and you might even make a profit (ignoring lost interest costs).

While most people would expect that a company that does such a thing would expect a profit from the actual metal, try to remember just how big an idiot magnet precious metals are.  If there were gold asteroids, this would already have been tried, but I suspect that platinum is enough to get it done.  I don't believe for a second that the amounts invested in precious metal mining on Earth comes even close to covering costs.  And yes, you still probably want to beat "all the other treasure hunters in the world" to the site (just try not to be in the first wave of the shoot out).

Another thing to remember is that steel (take your pick on the main alloy, you might have to recast the thing if you want specific traces in your alloy) asteroids are a dime a dozen (until you try to take them home, but asteroids fly painfully close to Earth all the time).  Any large scale construction in space or anything with serious shielding requirements may very much want a handy asteroid nearby.