Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining?

Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by mdorazio on Monday May 27, 2019 @01:38AM (#20019689)

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/

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by jobigoud on Monday May 27, 2019 @10:37AM (#20022494)

What happens when a private company makes an error and causes a catastrophe, like an asteroid crashing on a city? The only precedent of that scale I can think of are Nuclear plants accidents. Usually the cost is shared by everyone, even by the people who opposed that particular technology exactly due to these risks.

When a private company takes risks that could negatively impact non customers economically, I feel some of this risk should be reflected in the price, or in taxes, in order to create an accident fund. In many cases this would make the adventure non competitive.

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by lelabo_42 on Monday May 27, 2019 @08:03AM (#20021428)

What if we don't mine asteroids in space? We just change their courses and make them crash on earth. There is a lot of math to be done and we might have to pick an international location as a crashing ground, but it should be easiest and more profitable.

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by rmtech on Monday May 27, 2019 @04:50AM (#20020497)

> 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.

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by mdorazio on Monday May 27, 2019 @10:14AM (#20022361)

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)

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by rmtech on Monday May 27, 2019 @11:22AM (#20022754)

> 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?

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by mdorazio on Monday May 27, 2019 @04:56PM (#20025193)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: What holds back asteroid mining? by rmtech on Monday May 27, 2019 @06:38PM (#20025754)

> 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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