
Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? - xupybd
There is a a private space race going on but it seems space tourism, satellite deployment and contracting for space agencies are the only goals. Is it not yet possible to make money gathering resources in space?<p>Do we currently lack the technology or the precedent for profitable asteroid mining?
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mdorazio
See Planetary Resources [1] for an example company working on this already.
Bottom line: we might theoretically have the technology to make this happen,
but realistically it would take decades and many billions of dollars to get an
asteroid safely into earth orbit and put a mining station on it. There are a
lot of challenges that need to be overcome (launch cost, spacecraft design,
anchoring to an asteroid, stopping its rotation, bringing enough delta-v to
get it moving, steering it into the right orbit, stopping it in the right
orbit, mining in micro gravity, refining the mined materials in orbit,
delivering materials from orbit to the ground or establishing in-orbit
manufacturing, etc.) before it would actually be practical. Also note that
current targets are actually near-earth asteroids, not the asteroid belt ones
you're probably thinking of.

Side note: if you haven't already, I highly recommend playing Kerbal Space
Program for a while to get an intuitive understanding of the challenges of
space industry. It's really fantastic for learning about orbital mechanics,
the tyranny of delta-v requirements, and challenges of in-orbit docking
maneuvers. It even has some missions where you can try to capture an asteroid.

[1] [https://www.planetaryresources.com/](https://www.planetaryresources.com/)

~~~
rmtech
> delivering materials from orbit to the ground

As far as I am aware, there is no material that is expensive enough that it's
worth the cost of moving it from space to earth. Even pure gold from space
would be a loss.

~~~
mdorazio
Supposedly relatively pure platinum _might_ do it. Note that if you're already
in orbit, getting things to the ground is a pain, but not necessarily super
expensive. For example, old spy satellites used to basically de-orbit their
film, which was then picked up by airplanes [1]. The problem in this case is
getting your asteroid into a nice orbit, then getting valuable chunks (instead
of just regolith) off it, wrapped up, and on a nice return trajectory to the
ground.

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

~~~
rmtech
> relatively pure platinum might do it

the question for that is how much you would have to get to cover your fixed
costs.

Still, deorbiting stuff in a controlled way is going to require something to
be sent up - some reentry vehicle. And getting the reentry vehicle up there is
expensive. If that reentry vehicle gets used up it will certainly wipe out
your profit. 1 ton of platinum is $25,000,000... but a reentry vehicle plus
launch costs is definitely more expensive than that.

Maybe some modern day space shuttle system that was fully reusable would work.
Perhaps it could be a revenue generator for SpaceX's Starship on the way back
from Mars?

~~~
mdorazio
Check your launch costs - they've come down a lot since SpaceX got their
rockets going. You can get a reusable Falcon 9 for about $60M and it'll put
5.5 metric tons in geostationary transfer orbit, or significantly more mass in
your choice of low earth orbit. A return capsule for metal/rocks pretty much
just needs to be a heat shield on the front of a dumpster with some
parachutes, so not very heavy. And an imperial ton of platinum would only be
roughly half a cubic meter (surprisingly small, but platinum is dense), so
volume isn't exactly an issue, either.

If you had the asteroid in orbit already _and_ in-orbit mining + refining,
getting the metals back down would be profitable.

~~~
rmtech
> A return capsule for metal/rocks pretty much just needs to be a heat shield
> on the front of a dumpster with some parachutes, so not very heavy.

The problem is that "just" a cargo return capsule would still be very
expensive because everything in aerospace is very expensive. And there would
be fixed costs running into many millions.

I think if the scale of the operation was big you could turn a profit at
current prices. But a large scale operation would affect the price.

Also having a lump of platinum conveniently parked in LEO is kind of easy
mode. If you have to get from somewhere then you're looking at an
interplanetary mission, and the cost goes way up.

Again it would be profitable at scale... but the price would be affected. At
some point I think there's a crossover.

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nitePhyyre
So you spend 20 billion dollars to bring back trillions of dollars worth of
gold. What have you really done?

Spent 20 billion dollars to make gold worthless. That's not a good investment.

------
rmtech
I think what holds it back is that our space infrastructure sucks. To mine
stuff - even really expensive stuff - and still turn a profit, it has to be
sufficiently cheap to do all the mundane things like get the equipment into
space, repair the equipment when it breaks, get the product back to earth.

All of that stuff is currently so eye-wateringly expensive that you could park
a big pile of gold bullion on the moon and it would be safe from thieves
because it would cost more to go and get it (per kg) than the gold is worth.
Someone on Quora estimated that sample return from Mars costs about
$1,000,000/kg using current tech[1], another estimate says $1,200,000/kg to
the lunar surface[2]. No bulk material that I know of is that expensive.
Platinum is $25,000/kg for example.

Another issue is that if you mined a small amount of gold/platinum/whatever in
space, you might make a profit per kg, but you wouldn't cover the huge fixed
costs of operating a company in space. If you mine a very large amount (tens
of thousands of tons), you would negatively impact the price of expensive
materials, reducing your profit per kg (perhaps enough that you were making a
slight loss per kg). Even news of a serious effort to mine stuff in space
would dent the prices of what was going to be mined. I think this latter
argument is sometimes overplayed though. At some price level the price would
stabilise even with greater production because these materials are quite
useful as well as being visually attractive and traditional stores of value.

Better space infrastructure around earth could be as simple as SpaceX making
reusable rockets work properly and reducing the cost per kg to get into low
earth orbit. That could kickstart a lot of other developments like LEO (low
earth orbit) space hotels, spinning space stations, in-orbit assembly. This
would actually provide a nice market for asteroid mining - materials like
water and metals could be put to use in space without coming back down to
earth. We could have a thriving economy in LEO and MEO, supplied both from the
surface and from trips to asteroids (some of which are not very far in delta-v
terms from LEO)

1: [https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-landing-and-
returning-o...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-landing-and-returning-
one-kilogram-of-payload-on-from-the-surface-of-Mars-cost) 2:
[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4720/what-is-
the-m...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4720/what-is-the-marginal-
cost-of-landing-on-the-moon)

~~~
ryacko
I've read that for every order of magnitude increase in price, available
reserves of minerals triples. It seems more likely that space colonies will
export intellectual property than mineral wealth, especially since even if we
get space elevators, Earth has all we need, especially as mines become
automated.

~~~
rmtech
At some point it will be worth it to mine asteroids and bring the stuff back
down to earth. I think that point will be when the scale of the mining is
absolutely huge, and the infrastructure is amazing, and the price of the stuff
we're mining (gold, platinum, etc) is substantially lower than what it is
today.

It all comes down to whether you can get stuff from LEO to earth and earth to
LEO really cheaply. If you can do that, then our economy will go grab this
stuff and someone will make a lot of money doing it.

> space colonies will export intellectual property

Not for a long time though. Earth will have an advantage at making IP for a
very long time. People will do research in nice places on earth rather than in
cramped & dangerous conditions in space. The exception is microgravity
research, but that's already a thing. Of course as the cost to LEO goes down
we will do more of it. Eventually someone will commoditize it and you will be
able to ship a container of a certain size with your low-gravity experiment to
LEO for a fixed fee.

~~~
ryacko
Space is only cramped to minimize surface area, if inflatable habitats or some
other form of assembly was used, structures can and will be much larger.

Sending materials to Earth will cost as much as sending them into space, as
the materials must land safely and be recovered as efficiently as possible.

~~~
rmtech
> Sending materials to Earth will cost as much as sending them into space, as
> the materials must land safely and be recovered as efficiently as possible.

that's not true because the journey from space to earth has an aerobrake
option, but the journey up requires a rocket with a certain amount of energy
per kg you want to send.

In a large scale operation I think you could send stuff down relatively
cheaply. A lot of effort would go into making a really mass-efficient reentry
vehicle.

Another thing that would probably end up happening is a reentry bolo - a
spinning tether that would subtract a huge amount of velocity from things
going down.

