Re:The New ‘Gold Rush in Space’
by dodobirdlord on Friday August 14, 2020 @04:38AM
(#24155407)
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.
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)