Suppose we were dead set on mining a crapload of material from a moon in the solar system other than Earth’s moon. Considering how costly it’d be to send tonnes of equipment up there and to launch a return vehicle full of rock, what substance would we have to find to make it worth our while?
I suppose oil isn’t going to cut it. What about an ocean of printer ink? Spider venom? Cut diamonds? What about if I limited it to possible substances, even if they’re known to not exist there?
What moon would be best to look for this stuff and how big of a spaceship (size and money-wise) would we need to go get it?
The value of cut diamonds is only $18 billion a year. That is around the maximum amount of money that you could expect from reasonably expect to get bringing back diamonds from the moon. I don’t think that that is enough to fund moon missions.
You need some expensive per pound thing that has a market of a few hundred billions a year to fund moon mining.
page 22 of this huge pdf document for the sails of cut and polished diamonds.
Most things, even or maybe especially water and oxygen, are substantially more valuable in space than they are on Earth due to the cost of getting them out there. The biggest part of the cost is overcoming Earth’s gravity to get them out there. So if you had a thriving lunar or asteroid colony it might be much cheaper to mine the asteroids or the moons of Jupiter for raw materials like that and bring them to the colony than bringing them from Earth.
Why are we restricting it to moons? Asteroids are much more likely to be profitable, due to the lack of a gravity well to get the material off them. You could build a short magnetic accelerator on the surface, wait until the asteroid is pointing the right direction on each rotation and shoot bundles of processed ore back towards earth orbit. Or even send unprocessed ore, refine it on earth.
This article is about a group of tech billionaires who are already on the case and they are looking for platinum group metals.
It’d also depend on how easy the substance in question is to mine. Diamonds might be worth it, if they’re just laying around on the surface. But if you have to dig extensive mines and sift through tons of tailings for grams of gems, almost certainly not. And even if the moon in question is made out of pure <insert valuable material>, there’s the question of how hard it is, and how much work it takes to break off chunks to ship back.
You answered your own question. Asteroids are too easy and thus no fun.
Presume that the material exists on the surface in plentiful amounts. If we’re talking liquid, just imagine you could drop a bucket into an ocean and ship it back to Earth. I’m sure we could find a valuable-enough substance, but the question is how much it’d take to get it and how much it’d sell for back here.
Take diamonds for example. If you tried to bring those back, you’d have to harvest a lot to make the trip worth it. But bringing that many back at once would collapse the market, defeating the mission. If we only sell $18 billion in diamonds per year, then I guess we can scratch that from the list.
Anyone know how much printer ink the world uses in a year and how much it weighs?
You do realise printer ink is not valuable at all in bulk right? It’s only the proprietary packaging formats that makes it valuable.
Antimatter is my suggestion. Assuming we could figure out a way of extracting it without annihilating it, if we found an asteroid or moon made of antimatter it would be stupidly valuable as a fuel source. At present antimatter costs 62.5 trillion per gram.
ok here you go, there’s anti-particles trapped in the van allen belt and substantially more in the radiation belt of jupiter and here is a proposal to mine them.
I am going to suggest ruthenium. Well maybe in a few years time.
There is some promising research suggesting that Ru could be used as a very effective solar energy converter. I can’t remember if this is a kind of photovoltaic system or an artificial photosynthesis type system where chemical energy is the product. In any case if the tech turns out to be viable then there is a real risk that we will run out of available Ru on earth. If there were nuggets of the stuff lying around on the surface of some mokn somewhere then I think we might be interested in it.
Interesting but I wonder if that is really true. Let’s say that Ru makes solar panels 90% efficient. Is that enough versus current efficiencies to make it worth the trip?
Not necessarily. Fuel costs are likely to rise in the future. To put it into perspective, the total payload sent into orbit since the beginning of the space age is roughly equivalent to the load of a large container ship.