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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

It's long been my thought that the value from mining asteroids will not be the return of the materials to Earth, but a vast reduction in the cost of putting stuff up in space. Imagine if all the shuttle ever had to do was ferry people and food cargo up/down while the ISS was built in space-sourced materiel. Suddenly the cost/kg for the ISS components becomes largely irrelevant and the total cost for similar projects drops to a fraction of what we paid (transport of people/food/(maybe fuel) + mining costs).

Next step, start building the ships themselves in orbit and crew them from the growing population of space acclimated folk.

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This. Exactly. The potential profit value of doing asteroid mining, Moon mining, Mars mining, etc. is going to be much higher if the products are sold and used locally. The farther the material has to move, the delivery price goes up, and it becomes less attractive to buyers, and for less buyers. But set up a mining operation anywhere out of Earth's gravity well and orbit, and you call sell your stuff to, say, any colonies that are created on the Moon, Mars, or other asteroids. Plus the problem space of successfully and profitably doing mining and manufacturing off-Earth is really wide open right now, no competition, so huge potential long term profit upside for those willing to take the risk now and begin developing the capability.

Going up is costly, coming down isn't (as much). I'm no rocket scientist, but I guess it would still be possible to have large heat-resistant/disposable wrappers around a large gunk of asteroid rock and send it crashing into the ocean, or land by a simple parachute.

There's a great idea I read once (can't remember the book), where space mining smelters inject nitrogen into the molten metal creating a foam. This drastically changes the thermal and density characteristics of the material and allows tons of the material to be dropped from orbit into the ocean without causing an accidental extinction event.

Here's some links on it

http://dailyreckoning.com/foam-technology/

A better question is that this seems to only make economic sense for relatively rare materials, but the sudden flood of material would lower their market price potentially pushing them too low to be economically viable to support space mining.

Relatedly, there are powers in the pharmaceutical industry that would love to be able to carry out syntheses in space. The lack of an effective gravity force allows crystals to grow larger and this would be a useful property.

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