Asteroid Mining

[Dominatus]

This generation- my generation- has a unique opportunity that we may finally be able to exploit. Asteroids contain elements not commonly found on earth, and elements that may be otherwise difficult to obtain.

It shouldn't even be too difficult. Simply send the components required into low earth orbit, and assemble a ship there. Head out to a nearby asteroid a kilometer or two across, and set up a mining operation. Refine the resources either at that location or near another, more suitable location and vent the toxic fumes into space... Or find some other suitable way to dispose of them. Fuel can be obtained from water sources on ice moons, and the facility can be powered through either a fission reactor or a solar array.

The initial start-up costs are obviously going to be quite high. That doesn't matter, because the payoff that one could receive for bringing a metric ton of refined platinum, or whatever it is that you manage to mine out of the asteroid would be rather large. Rare resources on earth may be more common in asteroids. In order to save money, probes can be constructed to land on and then "prospect" potential asteroids to find out the materials contained within, with rare metals such as gold being prioritized over more common elements, such as aluminum.

In addition, the more basic material can be brought back to earth orbit after it is refined, and then machined into parts that are assembled in spaced allowing for more mining facilities to be constructed, increasing output. Contracts can be taken for space stations and ships, which are then assembled in orbit for a large fee. The truly rare resources are essentially a massive source of profits, and so by returning these to earth we allow for an expansion of industry on the planet, with rare resources suddenly not quite as rare.

There may be some challenges associated with this, but these can almost certainly be overcome, if not at this moment in time then within the next decade. The stations can either be manned, or unmanned, with advantages and disadvantages to both. Unmanned stations will be almost completely autonomous, using pre-programmed instructions that can be updated from earth at most any time. Manned stations may prove less expensive, as enough workers would be willing to go to space so that we are in as much danger of running out of volunteers as you are in KSP.

What are the challenges? Why won't this work? And if it will work, why hasn't anyone made a move yet!?

[epoca]

I'm confident we will soon (aka in the next century) see the first asteroid mining expeditions take place. After all, some asteroids are easier to reach than our own Moon.

[Laie]

I'm still wondering what the mining is supposed to look like. Conveyor belts, crushers, pretty much all mining & processing equipment I can think of relies on gravity. What kind of machinery do you need when dust virtually never settles and the particles can be any size?

[bdito]

Shouldn't be too difficult? That's all extremely difficult. And within a decade? It just went from extremely difficult to impossible.

In all seriousness we're probably many decades if not a century away from that. The cost alone makes it unlikely and I can see a myriad of problems with asteroid mining as no 2 asteroids are really the same. The engineering involved would be incredible.

It takes about 5-10 years to get a traditional open pit mine operational on earth (without all the environmental assessments) so I don't see anything happening in space for a very, very long time.

Edited January 28, 2015 by bdito

[Ten Key]

The market for resources mined in space won't be on Earth. It will be in space. And right now, there is no market.

[Neil1993]

People are already trying to make this move (see Deep Space Industries), but there are quite a few difficulties you haven't considered. First, the amount of space based infrastructure required to create this economy is simply massive. You need large mining craft to travel to asteroids, mine the resources and then, either refine them or transport them to a whole other spacecraft for the refining operations. That's a helluva lot of stuff to put in space.

Second, prospecting is quite a large problem. There may be some asteroids that are close to earth, but the majority are just hanging around in the asteroid belt and it may take a while to find an asteroid that's worth mining. Remember the difficulty that the philae lander had extracting information from just one comet? Attempting to prospect an asteroid to find its complete mineral composition will be orders of magnitude more difficult.

Finally, something like this will have to remain mostly space based. The best way we have of returning things to earth is by shooting it down into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour. Doing this with a metric ton of platinum would present a massive risk to the investment.

This isn't to say that I think asteroid mining is hopelessly futuristic. I just think it's a difficult challenge. I would like to see regular asteroid mining within my lifetime.

[Nibb31]

This generation- my generation- has a unique opportunity that we may finally be able to exploit. Asteroids contain elements not commonly found on earth, and elements that may be otherwise difficult to obtain.

Most elements could be extracted from sea water for a fraction of the cost of asteroid mining.

The initial start-up costs are obviously going to be quite high. That doesn't matter, because the payoff that one could receive for bringing a metric ton of refined platinum, or whatever it is that you manage to mine out of the asteroid would be rather large.

Platinum is around $40000 per kg, so a ton, at current prices, is "only" $40 million. That's not even enough to launch a Falcon 9. The propellant to bring it back to Earth would outweigh that cost, and so would the cost of sending up the machinery that you would need to extract that ton of platinum.

And you also have to consider that dumping several tons of platinum on the market will crash the price, making it even less worth while. The mass market for platinum is the industry, mainly for catalytic converters for gas-powered engines, which will be phased out over the next couple of decades. There will be other industrial uses, but the main reason platinum is expensive is because it's rare. Remove the rarity, and down goes your profitability.

There may be some challenges associated with this, but these can almost certainly be overcome, if not at this moment in time then within the next decade. The stations can either be manned, or unmanned, with advantages and disadvantages to both. Unmanned stations will be almost completely autonomous, using pre-programmed instructions that can be updated from earth at most any time. Manned stations may prove less expensive, as enough workers would be willing to go to space so that we are in as much danger of running out of volunteers as you are in KSP.

If there ever is asteroid mining, it will be fully automated or teleoperated. Adding humans into the equation increases the cost by orders of magnitude.

Edited January 28, 2015 by Nibb31

[Mazon Del]

It may increase the cost quite a bit, but chances are it also increases the reliability. If nothing else, all it does is make the investors rest easy at night knowing that a random computer glitch isn't going to shut down their billion dollar investment.

Besides, as I've said before, the real value in getting into asteroid mining right now is not the value of the returned materials, but the value of that asteroid in the near/far future. The standard idea for asteroid mining involves covering the asteroid in a tarp-like object. This minimizes cast off debris from the mining operations which can be a navigation hazard. Even though currently a company/nation cannot own an asteroid, by wrapping one up, you claim it as your own by virtue of the fact that someone else has to damage/destroy your property (the tarp) to get to it. You de facto own the asteroid because nobody can get to it without damaging your property and nobody has the authority to make you leave.

[-Velocity-]

If there ever is asteroid mining, it will be fully automated or teleoperated. Adding humans into the equation increases the cost by orders of magnitude.

You can't teleoperate asteroid mining; the asteroids could be will frequently be tens of light-minutes away.

[Neil1993]

You can't teleoperate asteroid mining; the asteroids could be will frequently be tens of light-minutes away.

It would most likely be tele-operated like the Mars rover is tele-operated. We would basically be sending commands to a very advanced and intelligent computer that could execute the commands and deal with any complications on its own.

[linkxsc]

My curiosity. Why must we return space borne materials to the earth surface to give them worth. Like said above its prohibitively expensive to put the mining equipment in space, to be followed by even more cost returning the products.

My thought has always been, why? Keep the stuff in space, maybe move it to a station in earth orbit, and use them in space to build stuff. Tech in things like 3d printing have been skyrocketing. Given a century, Im pretty sure that we could just be building new satellites up in space, rather than launching them from earth. All wed need to lift Then would be people, and small amounts of things that are too difficult to manufacture. (Semiconductors come to mind) could probably build the hulls of satellites and probes up there. Heck if the station were just off of geo graveyard orbit (so it would get chances to grab at all the defunct satellites out there without an extreme difference in orbital speed). Could recycle defunct satellites also.

But i know why we wouldnt. Because there wouldnt be any short term economic gain on earth. So its worthless. But then again, so is exploring space anywhere beyond GSO (which is only worthwhile due to com sats). Ya know what, screw this whole space business. I want a giant ocean floor base first.

[Dominatus]

Thank you everyone for your replies. I knew I wasn't considering anywhere near all the issues that would be involved with this sort of undertaking. It made sense at the time to an extent but there is a lot to consider... I don't know the first thing about mining or refining resources on earth, let alone in space. The reason why I was so optimistic is due to human ingenuity and the progressive leaps companies make when they smell profit in return for innovation. That is, since there is a large potential payout from mining in space, it makes sense to focus on research and development in order to make this a reality. The space economy for this will not exist until resource collection and orbital construction come into play, creating a market. That's the way I see it anyways.

[-Velocity-]

It would most likely be tele-operated like the Mars rover is tele-operated. We would basically be sending commands to a very advanced and intelligent computer that could execute the commands and deal with any complications on its own.

I thought that teleoperation implied real-time control, but I might be wrong.

[Sky_walker]

My curiosity. Why must we return space borne materials to the earth surface to give them worth.

Because there is no industry in space to make use of these materials.

Creating it would be prohibitively expensive for little to no gain in current economy. What will happen after a century is a wild guess with no relevance to anything we might care about now. Equally well in a century human kind might struggle to live at all due to some crazy nuclear war.

I thought that teleoperation implied real-time control, but I might be wrong.

I'm quite sure you were not

[SargeRho]

Space would actually be ideal for producing semiconductors. Gravity limits the size of silicon wafers, so you can produce far bigger ones in microgravity, and thus make more chips per single crystal.

[Neil1993]

I thought that teleoperation implied real-time control, but I might be wrong.

I'm pretty sure it does. I don't think that the control of the Mars Rover could be termed as tele-operated, but I was just trying to draw a comparison

[Rakaydos]

The real value of this is in combination with other space based infrastructure.

Find an asteroid in a good starting orbit, and push it into a Mars Cycler orbit via lunar slingshot. Mine the asteroid, use it to build a deep space habitat -in- the cycler orbit, and use the habitat as a safe waystation on trips to mars.

[-Velocity-]

This just popped up on space.com

http://www.space.com/28320-asteroid-mining-bacteria-microbes.html

Sounds a little crazy. But what if they surrounded the asteroid in a big air-tight bag to keep the volatiles from leaking out?

First that would be a big balloon. But secondly- where would they get enough water in the first place?

This doesn't strike me as practical or plausible on first examination. However, what if instead of injecting the bacteria into the asteroid, they could inject the bacteria into a smaller section of the asteroid they separated and put into a bag?

All this seems more complicated and less practical than some kind of chemical extraction, but I'm not a chemical engineer.

- - - Updated - - -

Space would actually be ideal for producing semiconductors. Gravity limits the size of silicon wafers, so you can produce far bigger ones in microgravity, and thus make more chips per single crystal.

Not true, at least, not yet. Right now, at processing factors, like uniformity, the resulting expense of the necessary silicon process equipment, and the availability of process equipment limits the size of silicon wafers, really. We can make bigger wafers than the equipment can operate on. They thought that that we would have already moved on to 16" wafers by now, but the most advanced foundries are still on 12", because the new equipment to process 16" wafers is so expensive, hard to develop, and still experimental. Having no gravity could actually make silicon microfabrication more expensive and difficult, but I've necer studied the problem.

[RatchetinSpace]

One problem is that launching material into space is extremely expensive and getting it back, even more so. To rendezvous with an asteroid requires alot of Delta V so the payout gained from mining an asteroid might not exceed the cost of launching the spacecraft in the first place. It is an interesting concept though, I think the main reason that no-one has done it is because no-one knows if its going to work. Once we send Humans to an asteroid and collect samples we might begin to see big companies like Virgin launching robotic mining operations on asteroids for elements like iridium and platinum. If a body like NASA can prove that asteroids can be collected and brought back to Earth, it may become a reality. Things like orbital stations to refine these elements are out of the question right now but prehaps in the near future it may become more of a reality.

[MrJacobean]

If the materials are refined on the ship, then it could drop a crate full of said material into the atmosphere, which would para-drop near a designated area, then the ship can go back out again.

The crate could also be made of materials mined from the asteroid, and fuel could be found in the asteroids as gases.

[magnemoe]

My curiosity. Why must we return space borne materials to the earth surface to give them worth. Like said above its prohibitively expensive to put the mining equipment in space, to be followed by even more cost returning the products.

My thought has always been, why? Keep the stuff in space, maybe move it to a station in earth orbit, and use them in space to build stuff. Tech in things like 3d printing have been skyrocketing. Given a century, Im pretty sure that we could just be building new satellites up in space, rather than launching them from earth. All wed need to lift Then would be people, and small amounts of things that are too difficult to manufacture. (Semiconductors come to mind) could probably build the hulls of satellites and probes up there. Heck if the station were just off of geo graveyard orbit (so it would get chances to grab at all the defunct satellites out there without an extreme difference in orbital speed). Could recycle defunct satellites also.

But i know why we wouldnt. Because there wouldnt be any short term economic gain on earth. So its worthless. But then again, so is exploring space anywhere beyond GSO (which is only worthwhile due to com sats). Ya know what, screw this whole space business. I want a giant ocean floor base first.

Any near time ideas is about mining water too use either as shielding or break down to hydrogen and oxygen. It has the benefit that water is pretty easy to extract even if bound to the stone and not as ice. You will bag the asteroid, then heat it, you might have to drill down to heat the core too, heating with solar and / or an reactor, you might use steam to increase the heat transfer.

[Aethon]

Neil mentioned Deep Space Industries earlier. They have an interesting plan to use microbes, genetically engineered to process metals and other materials, and to live in space. This low temp mining space bug 'soup' will be launched on a mother ship containing multiple cubesats. After finding suitable candidates for mining, the mother ship dispatches a cubesat to inject the 'soup' into the fissures of the asteroid. Years later, you return to a semi processed pile of resources.

http://www.space.com/28320-asteroid-mining-bacteria-microbes.html

Edited February 3, 2015 by Aethon

[-Velocity-]

Neil mentioned Deep Space Industries earlier. They have an interesting plan to use microbes, genetically engineered to process metals and other materials, and to live in space. This low temp mining space bug 'soup' will be launched on a mother ship containing multiple cubesats. After finding suitable candidates for mining, the mother ship dispatches a cubesat to inject the 'soup into the fissures of the asteroid. Years later, you return to a semi processed pile of resources.

http://www.space.com/28320-asteroid-mining-bacteria-microbes.html

This just popped up on space.com

http://www.space.com/28320-asteroid-mining-bacteria-microbes.html

Sounds a little crazy. But what if they surrounded the asteroid in a big air-tight bag to keep the volatiles from leaking out?

First that would be a big balloon. But secondly- where would they get enough water in the first place?

This doesn't strike me as practical or plausible on first examination. However, what if instead of injecting the bacteria into the asteroid, they could inject the bacteria into a smaller section of the asteroid they separated and put into a bag?

All this seems more complicated and less practical than some kind of chemical extraction, but I'm not a chemical engineer.

required text

[LordFerret]

Most elements could be extracted from sea water for a fraction of the cost of asteroid mining.

Platinum is around $40000 per kg, so a ton, at current prices, is "only" $40 million. That's not even enough to launch a Falcon 9. The propellant to bring it back to Earth would outweigh that cost, and so would the cost of sending up the machinery that you would need to extract that ton of platinum.

And you also have to consider that dumping several tons of platinum on the market will crash the price, making it even less worth while. The mass market for platinum is the industry, mainly for catalytic converters for gas-powered engines, which will be phased out over the next couple of decades. There will be other industrial uses, but the main reason platinum is expensive is because it's rare. Remove the rarity, and down goes your profitability.

If there ever is asteroid mining, it will be fully automated or teleoperated. Adding humans into the equation increases the cost by orders of magnitude.

I highly doubt that. The world is about to discover that oil is abiotic.

[-Velocity-]

I highly doubt that. The world is about to discover that oil is abiotic.

I've heard that assertion before from fringe people and frankly, it is completely ridiculous and illogical. Many oil deposits are located in areas (oceanic crust) where the crust is young, only a few hundred million years. The oil and coal is located right int he middle of sedimentary layers of rock. How did it get there if it wasn't through biology? Oil can't melt its way up from the mantle like magma, and the high temperatures of the mantle would destroy it anyway. So either oil has a biological origin or the great Oil God simply dropped it out of the sky. This proves that it was something that was not born with this planet, but created afterward. Oil and coal are concentrated carbon, and carbon does not make up very much of this planet. The only way to concentrate it to such degree is through biological processes.

Now is it possible to create oil without biological processes? Sure. Does that ever happen in nature? I donno. Even if to does occur though, all the fossil fuels we produce here on Earth are, in fact, FOSSIL fuels. No "primordial" oil would have survived Earth's early years, and we don't find oil in old cratonic crust anyways... a gigantic hint as to where it comes from....

Edited February 3, 2015 by |Velocity|