What will be the valuable resource everyone is hunting on the asteroids, that is so valuable it covers the trip there?
Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)
Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)
And in modern attention economy there is another extremely valuable resource to mine - attention of millions. At least initially the trips by IG/TikTok influencers (would be like Jack London posting TikToks as he goes instead of writing books later) will generate tremendous revenue paving the interplanetary ways for us, mere mortals.
>Gold is way too cheap (and much easier to get on earth, even if the current mines are exhausted)
With that logic Manilla Galeons wouldn't have happened :)
Edit: just looked up prices of iridium, rhodium - $6K-$10K/ounce. So just 10kg - $2M+ . Thus it looks like there is a lot of economic sense for asteroid mining once we get to cheaply launch into LEO 100+ ton items like nuclear powered ships.
(even filtering sea water for it here on earth sounds a lot cheaper)
Optimistically though I think by that time ticket to Moon on SpaceX cattle class will be $100K.
(For me exploring space and working towards becoming a multi planet species is justification enough)
Some very rare elements or tritium maybe, but this is is a big maybe.
Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally. The same thing will be with mining as the cost structure - absence of environmental, regulatory and political costs in particular and much cheaper energy (solar and nuclear) - is much better in the space than on earth. Also scale - you can easily find asteroids where you can have a mining operation 10x or even 100x the largest earth operation - and scale drives cost down. The earth based operations will just lose the competition.
>You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)
Actually people do see the madness in this, hence all the "produce local" initiatives instead.
The only reason it made sense, was not caring about external costs from fossil fuels and bad worker conditions in china.
"You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)"
Not hard. What do you think recycling smelters do?
It just does not make economical sense to melt and separate any rock and purify the elements. You use the ones you know have already high amounts of iron, copper, .. and you seperate them before as much as possible as smelting is energy intense and handling molten elements is hard and therefore expensive.
And the other point, yes, if there is a automated space industry, that can produce cheap reentry vehicles, some space mining might make sense. But if we would have that tech, we might as well use it on earth. Because you cannot just point a lump of iron towards earth. That would be called a asteroid and would be a weapon of mass destruction. You need spaceships. Going down .. and then up again, unless you use throwable spaceships?