
There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining - bemmu
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/theres-big-money-made-asteroid-mining/?utm_content=buffer38745&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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kcorbitt
> NASA estimates this belt to hold $700 quintillion of bounty. That’s about
> $100 billion for each person on Earth.

Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that
would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive
calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x
(current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value
listed, I'd assume the later. But of course, no one could expect the price of
_anything_ to remain stable when you're dumping orders of magnitude greater
quantities of it onto the market, so a more realistic analysis of the actual
economic opportunity would be helpful.

~~~
BWStearns
Realistically I think the result would be a more civil version of the diamond
market. Since there are only a couple players who _could_ bring back anything
you would just park your supply in orbit and bring it down when it was
profitable. You'd still lower the prices but how much you brought home would
be ceilinged by the total market demand. You'd probably bankrupt literally
every terrestrial mining operation which wouldn't be the worst from an
environmental and quality of life standpoint.

~~~
ant6n
Cost probably would depend on the 'moat', i.e. how easy is it for another
player to enter the market.

On the other hand, we may get a kind of OPEC of asteroid miners.

~~~
stale2002
The problem with cartels like this is that all it takes is a single person to
break to cartel, for the whole thing to come crashing down.

Someone might even do it as a charity operation.

~~~
xenobioticants
Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing
rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's
governments.

~~~
kristianp
Governments these days compete with each other to pander to corporations. The
promise of a few jobs and a few political donations is enough to get a
government to do just about anything you want.

~~~
stale2002
Yes, you are right. And these governments compete with each other.

For every government supporting cartels there will be a dozen trying to break
them, because of how much money you can make by breaking a cartel.

Greed still wins, for the betterment of humans.

------
bryanlarsen
By comparison, there's $956 quintillion of platinum in the earth's crust, and
similar amounts of other precious metals.

5 ug/kg (incidence of platinum in crust) x 6x10^24 kg (crust size) x 32 USD/g
(price of platinum)

Asteroid mining is crazy silly. We're not supply limited for any element on
earth, we're demand limited. If the price of platinum rose substantially, so
would supply.

It doesn't matter how much of anything is available in space, the only thing
that matters is cost. Can it be extracted and brought back to earth for a cost
less than the current price on earth? AFAICT, we're not even close to that for
anything.

~~~
jfoutz
But we're using a lot of the crust. No one will be mining under Atlanta. There
are plenty of places we aren't using, but the crust is also thick. A mile down
sounds really deep, much less 20 miles.

I mostly agree with you, but it might wind up easier to nab an asteroid than
dig a mile under the ocean.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"But we're using a lot of the crust."

39% of the surface area is used by agriculture, and 3% by urban areas. That
excludes oceans & Antartica. Including those, the number drops to less than
10%.

Mining takes up less than 0.05% of the surface area of the earth.

I think we're good.

~~~
jfoutz
Because it's easy. Digging a hole even a mile deep is _hard_. It might be
worth it, but again, it might be easier to just grab an asteroid.

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xenobioticants
What I've never understood about this: the Outer Space Treaty says _" The
treaty also states that the exploration of outer space shall be done to
benefit all countries and shall be free for exploration and use by all the
States.

The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial
resource such as the Moon or a planet.[3] Art. II of the Treaty states that
"outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to
national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation,
or by any other means"."_

This basically means that no one can lay claim to stuff in space. But say
there is an extremely valuable metal floating around, and company A wants to
mine it. They arrive and start to mine it. Now, company B arrives a year later
and also wants to mine it but company A is in the way. According to the
treaty, company A can't claim the resource so they can't tell company B to go
away, and company B can't tell company A to get out of the way. How does this
get resolved?

~~~
phkahler
>> How does this get resolved?

Same way it does on earth. Whoever actually controls the resource becomes its
owner. Once someone establishes an independent presence is space they will
claim independence from earth and such treaties and lay claim to anything they
can reasonably defend.

~~~
xenobioticants
Actually, reading up on this:
[http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...](http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.html)

shows that if you mine it, you own the ore but not the site. Although you are
right that as long as there's no 'space police' there isn't really a way to
effectively enforce policy.

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shmerl
_> That’s because the value of many asteroids are measured in the quintillions
of dollars_

Doesn't abundance of certain material make it cheaper? So the value isn't
necessarily linearly dependent on the amount.

Reminds me "The Laxian Key" by Robert Sheckley[1] (read it, if you haven't
yet).

[1].
[https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-11/Galaxy_195...](https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-11/Galaxy_1954_11#page/n30/mode/1up)

~~~
wyager
Even after completely saturating the market, a large asteroid would easily
fetch tens of trillions over the next hundred years. The first person to bring
in a large metal- and ice-rich asteroid would dominate the space production
market for decades to come.

~~~
BurningFrog
Depends on when the second person brings in a similar rock.

~~~
gizmo686
Does it? By "bring in", I assume we are talking about placing into a
convenient orbit, because I do not see a reasonable way to bring a large
asteroid down to the surface in the forseable future.

However, my (non laywer) understanding of space law is that it is prohibited
(by treaty) to own celestial objects. You can own samples you minded from
them, but not the objects themselves. If this understanding is correct, it
means that after you park the asteroid in orbit, you are allowed to mine it,
and sell the ore. However, so is everyone else; despite the fact that you
invested the money in moving the asteroid.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Law is a high-latency side-chain of authority.

When / if we get to mining asteroids, and generally inhabiting space, either
personally or via robots, treaties / laws will be remapped to match the
reality of the times.

~~~
shmerl
Hopefully no one will remap them to allow owning planetoids. That would be
pretty nasty.

~~~
pitaj
It would probably be based on a homesteading system. In the case of a planet,
you'd get what you changed. In the case of an asteroid, if you moved it into a
different orbit and set up facilities on it that's probably enough to count as
a homestead.

------
WalterBright
What space mining is good for is having construction materials for space ships
that don't have to be boosted up out of Earth's gravity well.

------
Lerc
The conclusion is broadly correct. There _is_ a lot of money to be made in
asteroid mining. The reasoning is completely ridiculous. Imagine giving
everyone on the planet a 1000kg ball of gold. It would make it pointless to
trade and be a pain to have around, You'd pay people to take it away and dump
it.

Asteroid mining _will_ be a massive provider of resources in the future.
Industries that use those resources will pay for them. I imagine some truly
awesomely huge structures will be manufactured in space in the further future
with the vast resources available.

There will be an interesting adjustment to the valuation of metals once the
industry develops. The metals most used will drop to around the cost of
collecting them (plus some profit for the miners). Metals that have less use
than their relative abundance within the asteroids being mined are effectively
a waste product where supply would exceed demand. Gold is probably in that
category. It's useful for things, but not _that_ useful.

So I wouldn't invest in Gold long term. That might be quite a long term
though.

~~~
beautifulfreak
It would be only slightly more valuable than asphalt once we pave the streets
with gold.

------
antishatter
But where are we going to find a rag team of drillers that we can train to be
astronauts to go mine in outer space?

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a-b
I was always curious if it is possible to land few water ice based comets on
the Mars while no one lives there.

------
bryanlarsen
The comments on the article by Tom Billings are far more interesting than the
article itself was.

~~~
mooreds
Did a bit of research on Tom and seems like he knows his stuff.

Thanks for the pointer, otherwise I wouldn't have checked out the comments
section.

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moneytide1
This will only be profitable at precise times of the year - depending on what
prospected material is needed for that time next year when it's had time to
wait till the closest location of the parent planet after its had time to mine
in that gravity well and slung back when the parent planet has circled around.

~~~
wyager
No, you could bring the asteroid into an earth orbit. You can ship down some
of the expensive metals to cover your cost right away, but leave the bulk
materials in HEO for spaceship construction.

The easiest way to do this is to find an ice-rich asteroid and use a nuclear-
thermal engine to vaporize the ice for propellant.

~~~
manicdee
Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing (thanks to our
atmosphere).

Crash the asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean, then continue
with more conventional mining techniques.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
That sounds a bit dramatic. How big would an asteroid need to be for the
economics of bringing it to the surface of Earth to make sense.

That meteor that lit up the sky in Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 20m in
diameter and weigh around 13,000 tones[1], it exploded in the atmosphere
releasing the energy of _500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), about 29 times
the energy released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima._ [1]

Not sure I'd want to be on the planet when you _crash_ your asteroid into a
_convenient desert or shallow ocean_.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor)

~~~
jiltedfrog
You could make Soyuz sized chunks, strap them with mechanisms that deploy
parachutes as it enters earths atmosphere. It wont burn up like a meteor that
way.

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zaszrespawned
Nearly all the space sims - elite, eve, sc have mining as main feature.

Appeals to the capitalism inside everyone :)

~~~
zdkl
Wild tangent about eve online: it's adopting a free tier on nov. 15! (Join
usss)

I guess we're all fascinated by extracting riches from 'the next frontier',
for our epoch that's space and I can't wait to see real implementations of
this dream of belt mining!

~~~
prodmerc
I've grown tired of getting killed by some vastly superior player every time I
undock. Otherwise, pretty good game.

~~~
zdkl
You need to team up! SOlo play is unfortunately not very interesting at first.
Try to find some friendlies to fly with until you're confident enough to
strike out on your own.

------
kashkhan
how much platinum is there in the earth's core?

$ 100 million per ounce is hardly grounds for a gold rush to the asteroid
belt.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The Platinum in the Earth's core is not accessible, not even a little bit, not
even with orders of magnitude improvements in technology.

~~~
idlewords
Not with that kind of attitude!

------
akhatri_aus
The next type of pollution: gravitational pollution. Increasing the earth's
gravity.

~~~
pitaj
What do you mean? The earth is venting about 50,000 metric tons of mass per
year. The addition of rare materials from space probably wouldn't match that.
That's not even considering that the vast majority of materials would be used
for space travel itself.

~~~
andrewflnr
Um, what? If you're thinking about volcanism, I'm pretty sure none of that
escapes earth. It doesn't change our total mass.

~~~
neltnerb
For comparison, human CO2 emissions are 10 billion metric tons per year.
50,000 tons is such a small amount that they're probably just referencing
helium and other gases escaping the atmosphere.

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psranga
Is it possible that mining activity could accidentally change the orbits of
one of these asteroids enough to send it crashing into earth eventually (in a
few decades)?

~~~
ctrl-j
Technically yes. But really, no.

Technically a pigeon in New York could deuce one out mid-flight, and it could
catch an updraft and wind up landing on my car in Seattle. Will it ever
happen? Those odds are probably better than a rogue asteroid set loose from
mining hitting the earth.

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tim333
It's not economic now but come the singularity we can send the robots up there
to get gold diamonds for our palaces. Or something like that.

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BuffaloBagel
Reminds me of the Monty Python skit with the price of crotchless panties
skyrocketing on Jupiter. It's all about supply and demand.

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gina650
Just had a meeting with this billionaire & pretty sure his goal is to be a
trillionaire.

[https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/billionaire-
breaking-i...](https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/billionaire-breaking-
into-trillion-dollar-space-market-gains-faa-approval-on-tomorrows-tech-
podcast)

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idlewords
There's always money in the banana stand.

------
jiltedfrog
Or maybe strap rockets to the asteroid and safely drop it in a shallow part of
the Ocean, where you can retrieve it at convenience.

First you have to break it into smaller pieces, a regulated implosion or
something. Then strapping rockets to it, so you can control its motion in
three axes (three rockets, maybe) and remotely guide it to earth. 3/4 ocean is
hard to miss.

