Re:We Will Never, Ever, Mine the Asteroid Belt
by mechanical_bear on Friday December 24, 2021 @02:17PM
(#29676793)
No one said anything about re-entry. Assuming this level of development, we would also have production capabilities in space.
Re:We Will Never, Ever, Mine the Asteroid Belt
by notahacker on Friday December 24, 2021 @02:42PM
(#29677042)
I'm not sure that multiplying the complexity (do future humans have non-trivial quantities of stuff that needs producing closer to a particular asteroid than planets with the same minerals in much greater quantities? Why?) is much of a counter argument to the basic intuition that it's only economically viable to mine comparatively tiny quantities of commodities in massively dispersed locations far away from human production centres if it's for some reason difficult to get it closer to home.
The base assumption for asteroid mining is that substances like carbon, iron and nickel that asteroids are composed of become so difficult to obtain on Earth that return trips of a few tens or hundreds of million miles including atmospheric reentry are worthwhile to obtain it. Space travel becoming cheaper alone doesn't make it economically viable, unless you assume our ability to mine and transport stuff cheaply on earth goes backwards.