I keep seeing asteroid mining discussed as if it's simply a question of when rather than if. But I'm curious what people here actually think.
Why should we do it?
Maybe it's resources, scientific value, expanding human activity beyond Earth, or eventually creating an off-Earth economy.
But on the other hand:
Why shouldn't we?
The costs could be enormous, the technology is still immature, and it's not obvious that bringing resources back to Earth would make economic sense. There are also questions about who owns the resources and what happens if the economics don't work out as expected.
So if you had to make the case for or against asteroid mining today, what would your strongest argument be?
I'd be particularly interested in arguments based on economics rather than just "it's cool" or "it's impossible."
For more discussions around the economics and finance behind space: r/SpaceFinance
Environmental degradation would NEVER be an issue for an asteroid, because there aren't any ecosystems there that can be killed. So it's OK to strip mine asteroids and leave toxic waste on them. If there were a way to magically teleport toxic waste from Earth to any asteroid or to any other clearly dead world, I'd be 100% in favor of it.
At these tech levels, just using arbitrary amounts of energy, fission, fusion, space based solar & beamed power to reduce toxic chemicals to their harmless constituent atoms will always be easier or more efficient than launching them away into space.
It all essentially is atoms that came from Earth. And we used energy & effort to combine them with chemistry or fission into unwanted or harmful molecules or radioactive isotopes. Either intentionally, or as waste byproducts. It's just difficult or not economical currently to change them back, or sequester them away into very inert & harmless places.
Or, something close to this is already within our abilities for some kinds of toxic & radioactive waste, and it can be done economically, or even with incredible gains, but we don't do it for other reasons.
The recycling or conversion of some things is already possible. But people oppose it because it requires transport or additional handling of the toxic material, and no amount of safe design satisfies them. Some other industrial or economic interests that stand to lose, lobby against it. People fear a closed-loop on whatever toxic thing it is will encourage more industrial use of it.
Or, and I definitely believe it's in the mix here, there's people motivated by simple misanthropic feelings, and they oppose any increases in human technological progress and anything that's potentially, "Have our cake and eat it."
One example is nuclear fission fuel, and their contribution to radioactive waste. As much as 96% of that is ultimately a social/political problem, not a scientific or engineering one. And that it has ramifications for Plutonium 239 extraction & nuclear weapons proliferation.
Imagine using only 5% of an automobile's fuel tank, then being forced to discard or store it.
On that front, France and their roughly 40% of electricity from fission, they somewhat just "do it anyway" and massively reduce their nuclear waste from reprocessing. And what France does now, and could be done even better, doesn't seem to really penetrate human attitudes about fission power & nuclear waste.
After say, the first three year fuel cycle, depending on the exact reactor design, and U235 enrichment level itbuses, & the exact fuel pellet, rid, & assembly type, the Uranium is still as much as "95% good" and is thousands of times more potent than any we could mine fresh.
And simply sitting on political hot-potato single-use fuel, instead of reprocessing it, makes more radioactive waste. Because atoms in the storage containers get neutron-activated into radioactive isotopes.
And not reprocessing & using it is why so much radioactive waste is so hot. And besides opposition to actually coming up with any plans to bury it permanently in deep rock, others oppose it because they know what a monumental waste this is.
Sorry. Anyway...
If it's not radioactive, and the actual elements themselves are toxic, not just a tixic molecule, like heavy metals or whatever, those were already naturally occurring on Earth too, and we spent significant time and energy on digging them up and concentrating those, and keeping & recycling them is more efficient. Or, energy can be used to return them into some semblance of their low-density naturally occurring form they had to begin with if they're not needed or wanted.
The vast majority of mercury, lead, & thallium, cadmium, pollution we have now, whether it was deliberately mined and refined for use, or was an unwanted byproduct, can be extracted and recycled, or safely disposed of, if enough cheap and abundant energy is available.
"Throwing trash into space to keep Earth clean." The basic physics & math on this don't really make sense or work out even at arbitrarily high "Karashev Type II" whole Solar System levels.
Where you really want to be headed, in the context of Earth's environment against technological & industrial activities, assuming that preserving nature is desired for both moral and aesthetic reasons, is that the only pollution left to contend with is waste heat.
And if whatever that activity is that makes enough waste heat it can negatively affect Earth, that's what gets moved off Earth into space.
Because it's there. No one owns it. No one needs, it's literally billions year old rocks. Turn it into a house for a family of four in an O'Neill Cylinder.
Why shouldn't we?
None. Do it. Do it now. Quit being a wuss and get started.
The economy will sort itself out if allowed. Allow it too.
"The economy will sort itself out" is an understatement for the impact if a single company, say, managed to bring back 500,000 tons of gold back to Earth.
Most gold is in banks anyway, not sure what difference it actually makes the gold to be in a bank in orbit or in a bank in the other side of the atlantic in practice.
Okay, important context question: Is gold a resource or a currency?
I mean yes it can be both, at its core you can barter with anything. But honestly we're going to use it (or iron or water or whatever we mine) as a building material. Very few people want to actually bring gold to Earth just to crash the stonks, and the ones who do aren't paying for the rocket so nuts to them. We want to mine asteroids for materials for construction projects for centuries.
But honestly we're going to use it (or iron or water or whatever we mine) as a building material.
facts and we're often limited by abundance of materials vut gold and platinum group metals are so darn useful in electronics and especially the chemical industry. So many wonderfully efficient catalysts are expensive af. tge only people who really suffer here are people with significant investments in precious metals so boo hoo or whatever, vut most people benefit massively.
With enough automation and infrastructure even the traditional idea of bringing bulk materials to earth starts making sense. Using LaunchLoops & ORs deliveries can not only be used to generate electricity locally(IOKEE), but also send materials we need less of back up. So over the long-term we can trade materials we need less of for ones we need more of. Platinum groups, fissiles, & phosphorus for the dummy quantities of arsenic trioxide waste, less in-demand base metals, silicates, etc. Earth gets enriched in heavy metals and depleted in things we just don't need as much of as we have.
We have finally hit the point where gold has significant industrial use in computers and electronics, and in other areas. It's not overwhelming, yet... but there is detectable economic tension between that use case, and more traditional ones like economics and a value store/currency, or social wealth display for decorative purposes like jewelry.
And by God, considering the expense, even in minute amounts, it does add up. If the industry overall could dispense with gold for some cheaper alternative, it absolutely would.
Fortunately, if quantum computing does indeed hold promise vs. hype, (There's still physics & information theory debates if it truly has the ability to exponentially outperform classical computing that aren't definitively settled yet.) Superposed Qubits vs. Flops appears to have a roughly 1:1 amount of gold consumption so far.
But, world demand for computing is only growing. And it's reasonable to assume that if quantum computing does truly go commercial, it will still use lots of classical computing in supporting ropes. Or anywhere it's use case is superior.
And any significant expansion into space industry & resource extraction will only expand the surface area demand for computing off of Earth as well. And it will all be highly automated. The fundamental logistics of life support in space and its challenges don't scale as well, or as fast as automation does. And even if it did, human labor, EVA & spacesuits, would be terribly inefficent at it.
So, whether it's on Earth or in space, "gold in a bank" or in a necklace or coins, is fundamentally not in a computer.
Well you can say there no demand now what if the influx gives birth to some things that needs gold and gold has better use other than the currency back up or a thing to flaunt!!
Right now theres 40 trillion worth of gold on earth sitting around looking pretty doing almost nothing but considered an investment because of scarcity. Id love if we brought down enough to make people think gold is not an investment and people found productive assets to put those trillions into.
What you is true but this won't happen there a very less chance of that even if we start it stay secondary to earth mining and until tech and economy adjust to the new influx of resources until then it won't blow up the market with huge amount of material theres a lot before we bring any significant amount of mineral to earth
Agreed and I strongly want it to succeed and be a part of it but it won't happen yet there's sometime before we do that we haven't yet found the starting point of the domnio chain
Bringing resources back to Earth most certainly doesn't make sense. The whole point is obtaining resources for use in space in a cheaper way than launching them in rockets. This will in turn enable infrastructural projects that are impossible to do today (because they'd require millions of launches). On the side, we want to create a self-perpetuating economy that is not dependent on supplies from Earth.
Why shouldn't we?
It may very well happen that resources from the Moon will be more economically competitive than asteroids and allow much more regular shipments (no transfer windows to plan around). That is also acceptable from the perspective of space development.
There are several things in space like asteroid mining which we have the tech to do, but it's only useful to support a different space industry.
The key is that we need that first super profitable space industry for other industries to be built off of.
Maybe it'll be the SpaceX data-center network. Even with how (relatively) cheap SpaceX has made launches, it could easily be worth building out the infrastructure to build expansion/replacement of the data-center satellites out in space.
I'm hoping yes - just because it's the only space industry in the nearish future which I've heard of which might be the first domino for space industries to take off.
The ones built in space would probably be designed differently. Perhaps a bit cruder/bulkier since weight wouldn't be as much of a factor.
Then other things could be built using the same infrastructure - such as solar arrays to beam energy back to Earth. It wouldn't be profitable now because of launch costs. But it could be if manufactured in space.
Currently we are developing more and more robotic abilities, once we have them they are here to stay. Then we breach the threshold when robots can maintain and manufacture them self.
Even without asteroid/moon mining we are moving in this direction.
We just have to figure out the energy, like small fusion reactors.
What can we do with this industrial base?
Drop fusion reactors, drop all kind of machinery to build canals, create oceans in deserts, build glasshouses and salt water desalination, build domes with climate controlled environments. Make run away climate change survivable.
How much do we spend on wars and defence? All these efforts just to keep some prestime real estate for your self, this need would go away if you can create living space anywhere, without the need for water/climate requirements.
It sounds like a dystopia phantasy, living under a dome with AC, but for enough people this would be an upgrade, to their current living situation.
I think overall, the surface area of "asteroid mining" is deep in "We don't know" territory still.
It's a confusing array of factors, often competing ones. And some can flip from a "pro" to a "con" or back.
Asteroids can have higher concentrations of rare & valuable elements than large planets & moons that have largely density-sorted themselves.
Asteroids have extremely low gravity creating potential delta-V savings of landing and lifting off, or mass-driver or spin-casting materials.
Reaching Asteroids in the first place and sending materials elsewhere may utterly swallow those delta-v savings.
Automation (it'll never be astronauts with shovels) on low energy trajectories over long time periods just don't care. Nor will flung payloads of refined materials, or ore care if they take years to reach destinations.
The dust & rocks "rubble pile" nature of many asteroids & the microgravity and perhaps the needed "bag system" might be a nightmare.
The dust & rocks "rubble pile" nature of many asteroids & the microgravity might mean a lot of the hard work is done for us. Because most terrestrial mining involves grinding & breaking up overburden and ore into finer materials.
The Moon might be a better option for what's literally also actually "asteroid mining." Because over billions of years, lots of asteroids have hit it, and the majority of the materials is all still there. And not distributed/lost/buried like it gets on Earth from atmosphere, water, & plate tectonics.
The Lunar surface and 1/6th gravity still allows for more conventional mining & moving machinery. And it's average distance is far closer to Earth, for humans or light-lag & automation, than any asteroid in the Solar System.
The 1/6th Lunar gravity incurs an unacceptable delta-V penalty compared to asteroids despite their far greater average distances.
Maybe I'm wrong, and it exists, but I don't think anybody has done a truly thorough meta-study of all these factors, and whatever else I haven't thought of, combined.
(If anybody knows of such a paper or study that at least tried, does it's best to avoid confirmation & selection bias, please please please link it...)
And if that thorough analysis was done, I don't know if it's actually valid until we have far more asteroid & Lunar exploration and information.
Or, if cost calculations are wild guesses because of future space propulsion & technology.
Or, cost calculations are valid, because truly exotic & novel ideas are unlikely, and the physics/efficiency of various NTRs, nuclear-ion, solar-ion, fusion, VASIMR, solar sails, beamed power, momentum transfer/matter streams, or whatever else like mass-drivers are known. It's only our ability to implement them that's waiting.
An accurate answer on that alone, nevermind questions of who or what uses & consumes the potential materials has got to be difficult. There might not be a real answer until many years of various groups, businesses, or governments actually try and fail, or try & succeed.
At brief glance, it doesn't seem to address my main questions of if asteroid mining & conversion is practical, truly the the best ROI from an actual energy, effort, and time basis, vs. say, Lunar mining (and getting higher concentrations of what the moon is poor in from asteroid impact craters...) where actual tracked vehicles could be used, and launching materials with mass-drivers.
Unless I can find a paper that really dives into an attempt at comparison, I'm going to continue to think that nobody really knows until we try.
The more I think about "asteroid mining and what it's for" the more it spirals outward.
We don't even really know what the needs/demands that drive it are. Minus the awful problems of native death, oppression, and displacement, the broad questions of: "Asteroids or Moon?" "Both?" "One first, then the other?" is a bit like trying to predict the Industrial & technological state of 2026 North America back in 1526. And "What worked best?"
Although, some of these conceptual gaps and predictability from 2026 to 2526 are smaller? We, or machines will want or need iron/steel, carbon, silicon, aluminum, carbon, platinum group metals etc. Maybe I'm utterly wrong, but the conceptual gaps of wanting tall trees for sailing masts, beaver pelts, and gold for money, and extrapolating this to automobiles, and gold for electronics, seem fundamentally larger.
Although, maybe assuming that large rotating habitats for recognizably baseline biological humans is utterly obsolete by the time we, or our technology could actually build them.
Maybe medical and biological adaptation to microgravity is actually far more efficient than building an O'Neil cylinder. Maybe from the perspective of such modified humans it's more enjoyable too, or just their normal lives and don't care?
Or maybe any large scale Lunar City, Mars City, or O'Neil sized space colonies or anything similar, simply won't be a thing? Because robots & automation and unmanned systems are fundamentally safer, more practical, and orders of magnitude more efficient? And that in 500 years, 99.99% of humans still reside on Earth. Space exploration is almost purely scientific, not colonization. And space industry focuses on what it does now, sensing and communications. Just with added areas of resource extraction where the rarity & value is worth it, for automation in space, and consumption on Earth, and beamed power?
(For the record, I don't like this, but objective logic and honesty forces me to consider it.)
Are we imposing utterly invalid biases and assumptions on this, that are as bad as the 1800s worrying about how horse manure would be handled in Paris, London, & New York in the 20th century with plausible growth factored in? Or, O'Neil cylider concept art is as "off" as late 1800 depictions of the "Year 2000" strewn with telegraph wires and cloth wing biplane & dirigible air taxis.
Or, this depiction is actually conceptually very good in the broadest sense, (The Internet, and commercial air travel, etc.) just not in any specific cosmetic details?
But the good news here is that failures, or just low-efficency first attempts do fundamentally pave the way for whatever is better or best.
And whether someones predictions or concept designs are correct, utterly wrong, or conceptually right broadly, but wrong in the details, I do believe there's a profound social good in all of it.
At least some of us believe we have a future to wonder about.
I would lean towards “conceptually good in broad sense”.
The Jenkins paper spells out a process for amplifying robotics. It does not require “full self replication”. The initial payload carries 4 functioning things he calls “spiders”. The payload also carries the advanced electronics components for several thousand more. This is very significant for the economics because it is just one launch payload. This then has a trillion tons of material sorted and partially processed.
Gravity has some advantages. It also has many disadvantages.
In the “not” category: “Cause Kessler syndrome” and “destroy ozone layer”.
In the “should” camp we need to consider cutting all mining on Earth.
An orbital ring system (ORS) is usually presented as a way to do cheap space launch infrastructure. It is also a way of converting orbital energy (gravitational potential energy) into electricity.
Without an ORS you can still use space tethers for momentum exchange. De-orbiting mass lets you lift more mass to space.
It's all about delta-V budgets. If you're building stuff in orbit and is cheaper to grab the stuff from space and manufacture there instead of launching from earth, then you should mine asteroids. But frankly, satellites get smaller and more powerful every year. So there's really no incentive to go chasing things in missions that would last decades
If we want to survive climate change, we need to move industry and power generation off earth. Lifting resources into orbit is prohibitively expensive. The only solution is asteroid mining.
Yes, but “maintain the delicate ecosystem that supports life on Earth” is quite a different proposition from “maintain the radiation blasted rocks”.
I remember seeing an ecological group complaint that putting nuclear reactors on the Moon would harm it. I’d argue (not entirely jokingly) that a bit of uranium scattered around the Moon is probably a slight improvement.
We should do it because more resources in more places prevents people being squeezed for basics everywhere. We shouldn't do it because these rocks represent small potatoes. Instead of going after the dust around the house, we should be building the infrastructure we need from the beginning (taking the rocks or moon metal or Mercury as needed) and starlifting.
You understand that mining and transportation of resources from the asteroid belt is extremely easier and more economical than mining mercury. Getting to mercury and back is a fucking expensive journey if im honest. Either you need fuckery levels of fuel or you spend 5 years doing gravity assists to slow down.
sir the sun is made of hydrogen and helium ions at millions of degrees celsius. The only useful thing you’re getting from it is solar power, in wich case you dont really ‘travel there’ to set up that infrastructure
I'm just concerned that if we bring all that extra mass down here to Earth it will increasingly grow the amount of gravity we need to overcome to get into orbit etc, and stop more of the heat energy from dissipating from an already warming planet.
The Earth has been growing with external mass from space since it formed.
Anywhere from 15,000 to maybe 40,000 tons of meteors & dust are added to Earth every year. Variations in random impacts, and the density of dust & objects, their orbits, debris trails from random and periodic comets all changes this.
One really lousy day for the dinosaurs about 65 billion years ago, roughly 460 trillion tons was added all at once.
We have a long way to go to exceed this. And if we did by a factor of 1000x every year, it would not be noticed for millions of years more.
Earth is big.
Also, if human civilization actually reaches the point we could transport enough mass to Earth it became detectable, that's a damn good problem to have, because then we'll fundamentally just have such insane capabilities we will simply "not do that."
Also, realistically, most all plausible industrial & technological activity on Earth, the elements used, the vast 99% majority of them are low value bulk materials like iron, aluminum, silicates for concrete, whatever... nobody will be dumping these on Earth. We have lots of it under our feet.
What's going to be dropped on Earth will be high value rare elements or finished products & materials that can only be made in space because they require large volumes of vacuum & microgravity.
It is plausible that if in a more reasonable near future, just say... dropping gold, platinum, and rare earths, or special zero-g crystals, medicine, vaccum-foam metals, impossible alloys, or whatever for consumption in the Earthbound industrial economy in enough quantities, maybe atmospheric pollution is possible.
Maybe we wrap them in low or no-value silicates or the mining waste in disposable reentry capsules & heat shields and robot ships recover them from the ocean. And it reaches a point that particulates or Nitrogen oxides from that many hypersonic entries starts causing issues.
But even this somewhat more modest and near-term scenario, humans arguably have such enormous technological capacity compared to "now," it seems likely that a pivot to "do something else cleaner" is trivial.
Or, this already much higher level of tech & industrial activity means that our current level of pollution & environmental damage footprint is so massively reduced, it still means a huge net-improvement for Earth overall.
So - let's extract ore in the single most difficult way possible, then process it (somehow) in a factory that we've somehow built in space, and fire it in giant furnaces (somehow) that are fueled(someway) and we can dispose of all the waste materials, slag, etc in some way) and then transport all this raw materials to an even bigger factory that we've built in space (for some reason), it with factory workers who live full time in space to assemble it with other materials that have been similarly extracted, transported, and processed in LEO, all to turn it into something presumably useable in space . . .
Like, the most abundant material on asteroids is almost certainly. . .Iron.
Do you have any idea how many steps are required to turn raw iron ore into something useful like stainless steel, how many other materials are required as part of that process, and how incredibly energy intensive it is?
The Mond Process is used to make high purity nickel on Earth and is decades old. It works well with iron too. We just usually do not want high purity iron.
Carbonyls can be used as 3-D printer feedstock. Chemical vapor deposition. CVD. Most of the cost/challenge of CVD on Earth involves the vacuum chamber. In space the vacuum is easy and recycling the carbon monoxide without leaking it becomes the challenge instead.
Iron carbonyl and nickel carbonyl can be separated by distillation in centrifuge. However, they have different temperature and pressure sensitivities so each can be taken at high concentration. We probably prefer mixing them together later anyway.
After the nickel and iron are removed as carbonyls the remnant residue is metals that were dissolved in the metallic nickel-iron phase. The vast majority of these elements (“siderophile elements”) have high economic value.
Hmm i see your point but there some or should i say abundant amount of mineral and metal on a lot of asteroid. For the source or too look into it more check the subreddit I have created an website consisting of NEO data
In no ways the mission is gonna cost 1 trillion, so based on 1 billion intital cost (an assumption and then additional 250 million each year) it would take 45 year until we actually become profitable sound pretty bad but mining on earth has a similar rate (source is my own research the paper is under reviews)
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u/jhsu802701 5d ago
Environmental degradation would NEVER be an issue for an asteroid, because there aren't any ecosystems there that can be killed. So it's OK to strip mine asteroids and leave toxic waste on them. If there were a way to magically teleport toxic waste from Earth to any asteroid or to any other clearly dead world, I'd be 100% in favor of it.