Probably Planetary Resources, this has been talked about for years. Several companies were looking at doing it but the time lines are always like 30 years out or something. Here's and article from 2015 talking about it

https://www.space.com/30213-asteroid-mining-planetary-resour...

The Colorado School of Mines even has a graduate program in it.

https://space.mines.edu/

Gold and diamonds are common enough on earth, we have as much as we need for industry. Articles often talk about rare-earth minerals but don't specify exactly what is desperately needed that can't be found or made on earth cheaper.

There are a ton of industrial applications for which gold or silver would be extremely suitable but are too expensive. Gold has better electrical conductivity than copper at surfaces due to corrosion resistance, and silver has better thermal and electrical conductivity in bulk, so in almost every industrial use of bulk copper it's being used as a cost-compromise over gold-plated silver.

Technological leaps happen when something new or uncommon becomes widely available. How many cost prohibitive applications become possible when the cost of any available raw mineral drops by at least one order of magnitude?

This is a non-sequitur - there's absolutely no expectation that space mining would result in the cost of any available raw mineral dropping by at least one order of magnitude; it's not a solution for "cheap mass mining" solution, it's a solution for very expensive targeted mining of something that we need very much.

The parent post argument is that we can get as much gold as we need on earth with techniques that aren't used because they're too expensive, but even those would still be far cheaper than space mining.

Space mining can be solution to prevent the price of some rare earth material skyrocketing in the future because we're running out of it, or to get something that's very rare and expensive (it's just that nobody has a clear proposal on what it's going to be) but at the moment gold is too common and cheap to justify the expense of mining it in space.

At current costs it would be a waste of money to pick up gold bars orbiting Earth; after (if!) SpaceX Starship cuts down cost of bulk transfers to orbit ten times, then it may become economic to bring down certain exceptional cases of highly concentrated rare materials - but it certainly will not be cheaper than the price of any raw minerals that exist on Earth in reasonable quantities, such as gold ore (alluvium ores, which aren't that valuable by weight due to low concentration in gold)

AFAIK the rare earth metals aren't actually particularly rare, just uneconomical to mine. It will probably eventually be cheaper to mine heavy metals like gold in space to feed manufacturing in space than to send them up from the surface of the Earth.

Yes, mining materials in space to avoid the fuel cost of bringing them up to orbit is a perfectly feasible use of space industry. But it's not going to make any industrial resources cheaper for us down there.

It's partly a geopolitical thing. Chinese businesses control over 80% of the rare-earths market.

Then there's pollution and the constant talk about exploitation of child workers in mines. You won't get pollution on Earth if a robot mines the stuff in deep space, a rocket brings it to lunar orbit where a commodity is manufactured, and then brought back to Earth for consumption.

Yeah why focus on boring luxury stuff that has almost no industrial value? Manufacturing fuel in space by finding water on the moon is a much bigger priority.

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources ? Several similar companies were founded but really the business model is very far from being realistic. Asteroid are very difficult to reach and automated mining is even harder, plus mineral resources on earth are not even actually that scarce.

This is a very silly article, the interesting investment in space right now is in LEO communication satellites and to a lesser extent in launch services.

Using nuclear options to transform ordinary metals to gold should be less pricier than running a gold mining operation on an asteroid flying by, I think.

Do we have anyone as an expert on any of those options?

Your intuition is wrong. Valuable resources are abundant in asteroids for one simple reason: gold and other industrially useful metals heavier than iron sink in magma. When the earth formed, they sank to the core.

Indeed what gold and other rare(-ish) metals we mine today are largely the remains of asteroid impacts which deposited metals into the crust of this planet after formation, then got mixed around by plate tectonics and water cycles. Go to the source and you’ll fine pure, reduced metals at the original concentrations.

Like for example, there are near earth asteroids classified as “non-metal” types that are 1-4% gold and platinum group metals by weight, which would totally make them valuable ores on Earth. Let me emphasize these are the non-metal asteroids.

if gold becomes common, it's value drops, as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already). Ditto with platinum - 'cept may be more valuable than gold for use as catalysts in industry.

I would imagine that asteroids would hold value with rare-earths instead of currency metals.

> as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already)

This is extremely wrong. Gold is the preferred material for a huge variety of industrial applications, it's just not used because it's too expensive.

Silver and platinum are probably even bigger industrial wins though. Platinum is used a lot in industrial chemical reactors, and silver would entirely replace copper in electronics and heat-sinks if it were cheaper.

I think you severely underestimate the usefulness of gold in electronics.

You're ignoring the problem. The electronics industry would love it if they could gold plate every single PCB but for that to happen the price of gold would have to drop. Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices so the electronics industry won't benefit from expensive space gold.

> Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices

There is no reason to make this assumption.

The real value proposition of asteroid mining is the ability to source heavy things (metals, ice) from outside the gravity well, so that you don't have to lift them up. Manufacturing things is space is a pretty important thing in the tech skill-tree.

Yeah this space tourism needs infrastructure and shipping stuff from earth is expensive. So mining water and fertilizers(phosphorous) might be profitable surprising fast.

Not an expert but here is an article on turning lead into gold. Spoiler it's radioactive.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

For the energy cost, you might as well mine bitcoin instead of trying to make gold via nuclear reactions.

Cost is more of a spoiler than radioactivity. At "one quadrillion dollars per ounce" you might as well do isotope separation and only collect stable gold 197. The additional cost of the separation would probably be just a rounding error in the whole thing.

Planetary Resources. They’ve now pivoted into an ethereum-based blockchain startup. No joke. (They were Washington State based, not Silicon Valley, however.)

Yes, Planetary Resources. I remember the announcement.

They folded - asteroid mining is too much of challenge even now.

Their website used to show what kind of skills they were looking for when you applied for a job there [0], I thought it was pretty interesting at the time because of how broad the skill set they were looking for was. So I saved it.

[0] https://pastebin.com/5fGaPZ4H

Yes, that's the one - thank you! I could not remember anything until seeing that name.