Here’s a report on the gold content of meteorites. In short, it ranges up to the low part-per-million levels, which is roughly the same as economic gold mines on Earth. However, this gold also comes with large amounts of iron and nickel, among other things. So the overall value is much higher compared to an equal quantity of gold ore.
Your post here is the first time you’ve mentioned “return on investment”, which is a technical phrase that does imply profitability. But in common usage, “return” could be any economically useful material, regardless of the cost of extraction. Meteoric iron is certainly valuable; not enough to justify an expensive mission, at least not right now, but by no means zero, either.
Thanks for providing a cite. Unfortunately, that cite bolsters my case that asteroids are worthless shit today.
The nickel-iron content is a distraction. The world contains at least 50 years of reserves for both nickel and iron at today’s prices. Higher prices would encourage deeper exploration, as it always does. There’s no chance that the thousand-fold more expensive asteroid material could compete this century. Nor could gold, even at those percentages.
The gold fantasies always involve extracting every bit of gold from a sizable asteroid and magically transporting it to earth, as in this wonderfully optimistic paper. Even that author protected himself with his closing statement.
Despite this great potential, first‐order technological, scientific, and economic uncertainties remain before the feasibility of exploitation of asteroids for precious metals can be ascertained.
Ya think?
BTW, the first time I used “return” was in post #5, “return a single penny on a trillion dollar investment,” which you yourself quoted. That’s pretty explicit and obviously didn’t involve alternate meanings of return, such as my sending a shirt back to Amazon. Again, I have to ask that people read my posts and quote me accurately.
Aside from space use, you mean? Asteroid material could certainly compete with iron shipped from the ground, even with Starship-level costs. And I expect some degree of space construction this century.
Nickel is more interesting than iron. Costs on Earth are $14k/ton, as compared to $100/ton for iron. And I’m not sure we have 50 years of reserves with the amount of growth needed to electrify all industry–it’s a crucial component of lithium ion batteries.
That is not the technical phrase “return on investment”, or ROI. “Return a single penny” has a much stronger binding there due to adjacency, and is of course false–a decent lump of iron/nickel returned to Earth is worth much more than a penny.
You may have intended to mean ROI, and that’s not a completely invalid interpretation either, but you were by no means unambiguous there. Especially since ROI is a ratio, not a dollar figure, so even saying “ROI of a penny” is basically nonsense.
At any rate, I think we’ll find means of extracting resources from asteroids much more cheaply than the estimates, but it will take time (and require automation).
Of course the mining of Earth minerals causes significant environmental damage to the Earth as well as unique natural habitats in places like DR Congo. There is also terrible conflict and corruption due to the riches from the mines (and the militia that control the mines will often deliberately damage the environment and shoot animals such as gorilla in order to exert control). Now of course we could and should spend more energy solving these problems right here on Earth but we cannot escape the fact that some minerals are very rare and yet very useful.
I’ve no idea if any rare earth minerals have ever been found in astroids but I’m willing to bet we’d find them if we looked. Moving these mining operations off the Earth might help to make this a better world to live on. Not for financial reasons but because we’d be helping to protect our natural environment.
Or maybe we could just work on our alchemy skills.
A penny return on a trillion of investment is exactly what a ratio is.
Now if you have something more substantive to say than “it’ll all happen someday somehow” I’d like to see it. Otherwise, I’ll wait a decade or so for the next round of this same conversation.
All I can say is to follow Starship development. We’ve had several threads on it. and I’m happy to answer questions.
Ultimately it’s all a function of launch costs. If they can be brought low enough, then everything in space gets cheaper, because you no longer have to spend $10k to save 1 kg on your spacecraft by making it out of some advanced titanium alloy. Instead you build it out of steel or other common, cheap materials and just pay a bit more in launch. Instead of making everything absolutely perfect, you build in redundancy and fault tolerance. This again takes mass but it’s not a problem if launch is cheap.
SpaceX has a great deal of experience with reusability at this point and I think they’ll succeed. Physics is on their side and they have the track record. Starship has made tremendous strides so far but it’ll be a few years before it’s operational. Until then, we have to speculate.
1 million people with a sustainable industrial base in Antarctica or on the ocean floor seems a million times more achievable and cheaper than one on Mars, yet I see very little effort in that direction. The idea of a Martian colony is sexy but ridiculously unfeasible economically even if the technological obstacles can be overcome.
Lessening the cost of exploration and expansion is exactly the major return that we would expect from in situ resource exploitation.
As you have mentioned, launching thing from Earth is expensive. Anything in orbit is worth tens of thousands of dollars a pound, simply for being in orbit. So, anything we can take from asteroids or the moon is worth at least that much.
People pay lots of money to put a satellite into orbit. If all that has to be launched is the electronics and other high end parts, and the rest comes from space resources, that can drop the cost of satellites substantially. That people currently are willing to drop the best part of a billion dollars to have hardware in space should tell you that there is value to be had there.
We are looking at building another space station. If nothing but the trusses and other exterior structural elements were sourced from materials already in space, that would save billions or tens of billions in costs, as well as allow us to build it much more robustly than we would if we had to pinch pennies on launch costs and fit everything into a fairing.
As far as precious metals, those are almost an afterthought. They certainly have value, and could be useful for a more immediate return than space construction, but they are not the primary reason for learning to utilize resources in space.
Returning precious metals from a body that has undergone any sort of mining is easy. Remember that getting off Earth is hard, getting back to the surface is relatively easy.
At first, it seems as though returning thousands of tons of gold and platinum to the surface would destroy the market, but then you have to realize that there are a million uses for gold or platinum that they are not currently used for due to cost.
A platinum alloy HDMI cable would be better than what I’m using now. It wouldn’t be good enough to justify the cost, but if platinum were 1% the price is is now, then it just might be. Catalytic converters on cars are engineered to use as little platinum as possible. They could be made smaller, more efficient, and all around better if the platinum cost were not the primary concern.
And, while we are at it, getting iron and other base metals out of the sky, rather than out of the ground, should be far more environmentally sound. Moving manufacturing of a growing list of goods into orbit, using the resources collected from space materials, will do even more.
Assuming you’re suggesting using an asteroid as a source of iron, I imagine it’s going to be expensive (in terms of both money and energy) to get to the asteroid and get back with the iron ore. What is the environmental impact of building the ship to make the trip? Is it more or less of an impact than mining for iron on Earth?
Actually, agreed. However all of that can make it much easier to establish a colony on Mars, if that is what we desire to do.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that gravity wells are for suckers, and I am more interested in Phobos and Deimos than Mars itself.
You are making the assumption that we would do something like launch a mining ship from the Earth, send it to an asteroid, mine for a while, then bring everything back. That is not how it would be done, because as you noted, that would be very inefficient.
By the time that you would be manufacturing goods in space, you would be using the resources previously gathered from space to expand your mining efforts. There would be no launches from Earth necessary.
The only thing that needs to be sent up are things that are not being manufactured in space, yet. It will probably be quite a while before orbital chip fabs are cranking out CPUs from asteroid material. But the more that can be produced in space, the less needs to be launched. If you can build all you need for a satellite other than a few kilograms of electronics and optics, the rest of the structure being sourced from asteroid material, then you can build hundreds of satellites for the current cost of one.
As industries in space advance, more and more will be made in orbit, and not need to be launched at all. There are even a number of industries that may be created as new manufacturing processes exploit the freefall environment of space.
Getting back is easy. It costs very little energy, especially if it’s something boring like iron ore that you don’t mind waiting a few years to get into Earth orbit. Getting stuff to the surface of the Earth is also pretty easy.
That’s the whole point here, we are at the bottom of a gravity well. Anything that we don’t have to send off of the planet is a benefit.
As someone who very much values scientific discovery, I like robots because they can do 50x more of it than humans can. I would be far more interested in saturating the entire solar system with tens of thousands of long-range robotic probes than in people figuring out new ways to wipe their asses in a cold desert scenario.
The value of deep-space mining is also far from proven. If I get a billion dollars worth of platinum but it took me 2 billion to retrieve it, what value have I created and what part of that return do I get?
While I agree that there can be more exploration done by robots than by man, the entire point of sending people into space is exactly that, to find new ways to wipe our asses. Sending people into space is not economical for any purpose at this time, other than the one thing that can only be done by sending people into space, and that is learning how to keep people alive in space.
Ask next year when your next billion comes rolling in. Then the year after that, another billion, and the next.
And that is assuming that you do not expand your operations using the resources that you are mining.
Do you evaluate the ROI of a mine on Earth based on the cost of digging it vs the value of the first shovel full of ore?
Meteoric iron wouldn’t need a smelter or blast furnace. You could focus the sun’s rays for the same effect. The best book I know on the subject is “Mining the Sky”.
mining the sky - Google Search And the principal market for space resources isn’t on Earth, it’s in space. The economics are a bit different when you’re getting it from up there instead of hauling it up from Earth’s gravity well.
Yes, I understand that very well. I am pointing out that we don’t need people in space, so we don’t need to waste any investments learning how to keep people alive in space.
There’s not going to be another billion unless we invest another 2 billion. All the gullible investors pulled out after the first round of negative ROI.
I don’t agree that we will never have a use for a manned presence in space, and as we get better at it, it becomes more economical and safer.
If your point is to wait until it is economical to start, then we can never get there. If your point is that we should never send people into space, then we’ll have to disagree.
Under a scenario as you posit, then no, obviously it would not be. However, you are simply asserting that your scenario will be the case, forever, no matter how our technology progresses.
I would absolutely agree that sending out a mining ship at this time would be extremely foolhardy and non-economical. However, I do not agree with you that, with incremental progress that that will always be the case.