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Comment by tangue | Hacker News Reader

Each time I'm hearing about minerals (like in asteroid mining) I'm wondering how do you deal with atmosphere re-entry ? Meteorites made of metal are melting so what's the plan here ? And which country will be ok to receive a ton of unguided metal on its territory ?

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I think the whole idea of space/asteroid mining is to use them eventually in space based manufacturing. The biggest cost of space exploration is actually raising a spaceship into outer space. If you just build it up there it's very fuel efficient to transport between space and to other stations/planets.

Ok in an Ender's game future, but asteroid startups are talking about ten years...

There's literally 0 chance that mining anything on Mars and bringing it back to Earth would be profitable. Obviously mining is still going to be important to build things on Mars, but sending any metals over, no matter how rare, is just crazy.

You are thinking what we can do right now. Probably the same thought had the Europeans 500 years ago.

The energy cost of transporting mass over distance isn't going to change no matter what technology we invent.

Maybe not Mars, but asteroids definitely. Platinum is $33k per kg. Bringing back a tonne would net you $33 million.

I think the point is that while it may be worth $33 million, it would take much, much more than that to get it safely back to Earth.

Also, the price of platinum is currently driven by the knowledge that it's naturally scarce and the likelihood of a large amount of "new" platinum coming on the market is low. If this ever changes (we somehow figure out how to profitably bring back a tonne of platinum), then the price would likely crash, as the amount out there in space is essentially infinite.

If you bring back a tonne it would make the value plummet. And $33 million is still more than your average space mission, and this wouldn't be an average space mission.

Coat the metal in an ablative shield made of Martian rock (handwaving over how this is done), fire it to earth using a mass-driver, guide it in with an on-board chemical rocket engine, and drop it into the Pacific for recovery (more handwaving).

Of course, this also has other uses [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

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