Thread by @bopinion

Asteroids laden with rare metals have people dreaming of space mining.

Just how possible is it? bloom.bg/34xpWes

Space mining has been a key feature in sci-fi:

☄️Ellen Ripley in Alien
☄️Dave Lister in Red Dwarf
☄️Sam Bell in Moon
☄️The Expanse’s Naomi Nagata

Gritty interstellar drama would be bereft if it weren’t for engineers & their mineral-processing operations bloom.bg/34xpWes

It’s such an alluring vision that real money has been put toward it. These high profile figures all invested in space mining startup Planetary Resources Inc.:

🌒Larry Page
🌓Eric Schmidt
🌔James Cameron
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Planetary Resources had a mission to mine high-value minerals from asteroids and refine them into metal foams that could be shot back down to Earth.

Though the company has now been bought out, the idea of a space mining industry has refused to die bloom.bg/34xpWes

One factor rules out most space mining at the outset: gravity.

It guarantees that most of the solar system’s best mineral resources are on Earth. As the largest rocky planet orbiting the sun, the cornucopia of minerals it coalesced will be the richest bloom.bg/34xpWes

Gravity poses a more technical problem, too.

Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive bloom.bg/34xpWes

On SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, transporting a payload to the orbit of Mars is $5,357 per kg — far cheaper than normal.

Still, just lifting a single drilling rig to the asteroid belt would use up the annual exploration budget of a small mining company bloom.bg/34xpWes

Power is another issue. Huge amounts of energy is required to:

⛏Operate rigs
💎Mine and process minerals
🌍Bring materials back to Earth

Japan’s Hayabusa2 satellite spent 6 years and $157 million recovering 1g of material from the asteroid Ryugu bloom.bg/34xpWes

What might you want to mine from space? The most promising options are:

➡️Platinum
➡️Palladium
➡️Gold

These are scarce in the Earth’s crust, yet estimated to be abundant on some asteroids bloom.bg/34xpWes

If such platinum-group metals are going to justify the literally astronomical costs of space mining, they’ll need to count on sustained high prices for the decade or so that would be needed to get such an operation up and running.

That may not happen bloom.bg/34xpWes

When prices of an essential commodity get excessively high:

➡️Chemists get good at finding ways to avoid using it
➡️Scrap merchants improve their recycling rates
➡️Miners discover new deposits

That rebalances prices bloom.bg/34xpWes

That might sound a disappointing prospect to those looking for excuses for humanity to colonize space — but really it should be seen as a tribute to our ingenuity
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