There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining | Hacker News Reader

There’s Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining

visualcapitalist.com

98 pointsbemmu102 comments

> NASA estimates this belt to hold $700 quintillion of bounty. That’s about $100 billion for each person on Earth.

Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x (current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value listed, I'd assume the later. But of course, no one could expect the price of anything to remain stable when you're dumping orders of magnitude greater quantities of it onto the market, so a more realistic analysis of the actual economic opportunity would be helpful.

Realistically I think the result would be a more civil version of the diamond market. Since there are only a couple players who could bring back anything you would just park your supply in orbit and bring it down when it was profitable. You'd still lower the prices but how much you brought home would be ceilinged by the total market demand. You'd probably bankrupt literally every terrestrial mining operation which wouldn't be the worst from an environmental and quality of life standpoint.

Cost probably would depend on the 'moat', i.e. how easy is it for another player to enter the market.

On the other hand, we may get a kind of OPEC of asteroid miners.

The problem with cartels like this is that all it takes is a single person to break to cartel, for the whole thing to come crashing down.

Someone might even do it as a charity operation.

Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's governments.

and considering that if the cartel was blocking you, but you had a few hundred thousand tons of metal in orbit.. you could just send down a bit for free..

Governments these days compete with each other to pander to corporations. The promise of a few jobs and a few political donations is enough to get a government to do just about anything you want.

Yes, you are right. And these governments compete with each other.

For every government supporting cartels there will be a dozen trying to break them, because of how much money you can make by breaking a cartel.

Greed still wins, for the betterment of humans.

Not in the diamond business. A player who won't conform is simply crushed.

Something even better is to reffined and process everything to raw materials in orbit and then bring them on Earth.

But where would you store all of it?

Space is big. I mean, really big.

The orbits that are most useful for our current-day satellites are crowded, of course, but you could stash your asteroid booty anywhere you like. Putting it in orbit around the Moon might not be a bad move.

Earth orbit isn't that crowded. And you don't need to spread out. A cube of 100x100x100 m would store plenty of metal, but would not need more safety margin distance than any other satellite.

It is pretty crowded, actually. We've had satellites literally colliding with each other before. Filling it up with chunks of asteroid isn't the best use of limited room, especially when space farther away is genuinely empty and since you're coming from outside the Earth/Moon system you can put the goods anywhere you want.

Why bother bringing it home at all? Set up orbital factories as well, and ship the finished goods back to Earth via space elevator.

Get rid of mining and dirty manufacturing on earth once and for all.

This book captivated me as a child and explains many interesting possibilities about manufacturing in space: https://www.amazon.com/third-industrial-revolution-Harry-Sti...

All kinds of interesting processes become feasible in weightlessness. For instance, some kinds of alloys just aren't possible on earth because the metals' densities are so different that they don't mix properly. No so in space.

Aren't atmospheric elements required for most refining processes?

Can't you ship it home with a heat shield and a parachute?

Sure. But adding ballistic re-entry to your manufacturing process seems a little scary.

The metals already being in orbit has a value too. Getting metal up in orbit from earth would cost many times the value of materials.

And yet the assumptions (unit price * total units) are made for real estate collateral value, bonds, stocks etc.

Remind me what Google is worth again :-)

By comparison, there's $956 quintillion of platinum in the earth's crust, and similar amounts of other precious metals.

5 ug/kg (incidence of platinum in crust) x 6x10^24 kg (crust size) x 32 USD/g (price of platinum)

Asteroid mining is crazy silly. We're not supply limited for any element on earth, we're demand limited. If the price of platinum rose substantially, so would supply.

It doesn't matter how much of anything is available in space, the only thing that matters is cost. Can it be extracted and brought back to earth for a cost less than the current price on earth? AFAICT, we're not even close to that for anything.

The earth crust is estimated to be in the order of 10^19 kg. The 6x10^24 figure you mention is the mass of the whole earth. So your calculation if off by 5 orders of magnitude.

That's what Wolfram Alpha told me, sorry. But my $956 quintillion number is about as relevant as the article's $700 quintillion number. Even 5 orders of magnitude off, we're still not supply limited. The only number that matters is the $32/gram number.

That's not usually a good attitude to take when you're told you're 5 orders of magnitude off.

Yep, like mining anything asking how much is down there without reference to the cost of extraction is useless. Gold mines exist all over the world with large known deposits but feasibility comes down to whether it's worth it to extract based on current prices.

The whole idea behind investment in asteroid mining is to get capital infrastructure in place to make it cost competitive.

In the past we traveled thousands of miles in boats and caravans to get raw materials that were not easily available locally. Sure, you could grow cloves in France, but investing in and establishing routes to south Asia ended up being an investment that made availability of the cloves easier.

But we're using a lot of the crust. No one will be mining under Atlanta. There are plenty of places we aren't using, but the crust is also thick. A mile down sounds really deep, much less 20 miles.

I mostly agree with you, but it might wind up easier to nab an asteroid than dig a mile under the ocean.

"But we're using a lot of the crust."

39% of the surface area is used by agriculture, and 3% by urban areas. That excludes oceans & Antartica. Including those, the number drops to less than 10%.

Mining takes up less than 0.05% of the surface area of the earth.

I think we're good.

Because it's easy. Digging a hole even a mile deep is hard. It might be worth it, but again, it might be easier to just grab an asteroid.

Is Atlanta rich in rare earth minerals or something, or are you just using a random city as an example? I'm aware of various granite mines around the city (such as where they filmed Walking Dead and Stranger Things), but I wouldn't have imagined Georgia to have disproportionately more minerals than other states in the Southeast.

Additionally, the production cost of most rare metals is very highly correlated with the cost of energy. It seems likely that space mining may have to compete with metals produced at a price an order of magnitude cheaper than the current price because cheap solar energy appears to be coming.

Solar power is going to be way, way cheaper in space than even the most optimistic ground-based solar technologies.

For instance, it'd be practical to build a multi-kilometer diameter mirror out of thin plastic, and just melt the entire asteroid and distill off what you wanted.

To expand a bit: a mirror for a solar furnace on Earth has to be strong enough to hold itself up against the force of gravity and handle wind and precipitation loading. A mirror in space doesn't. It can be one molecule of plastic thick, with a few atoms of thickness of aluminum as a coating.

Plus you don't have to worry about cleaning off dust, bird poop, and whatnot.

You're going to need some station-keeping so a large, flimsy mirror doesn't drift with the solar wind, but even the purest asteroid is going to have some slag that will make dandy propellant.

There's much less high speed objects to puncture the mirror on earth. I think the environment up there is more hostile than you describe

I think you're vastly overestimating the density of such objects. Space is really pretty empty.

Also, small holes won't hurt the mirror to any significant degree.

I'm more worried about kinetic energy than density in this scenario, but younre certainly right that this is low frequency anyway

Your mirror is going to evaporate gas from the asteroid and push it around out of focus?

As I said, you're going to need some station-keeping ability.

Do you have references about this solar mirror refining idea? It sounds fascinating.

I'm almost sure the concept was discussed in Gerard K. O'Neill's 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, but my copy is in storage at the moment so I can't verify that. The idea has been around for at least that long.

You really wouldnt' want to bring it back to the Earth's surface. You would keep in in orbit and make a satellite(s) out of it.

Low Earth Orbit is still fairly close to earth, cost wise. (yay SpaceX). A gram of platinum in LEO is only about 20% more expensive than a gram of platinum on Earth.

It's the stuff that's cheap but bulky like iron, water & rocket fuel ectrolyzed from water that you'll want to mine in space for use in space.

Platinum and other rare metals will simply be waste products that are profitable to ship back to Earth.

edit: my original comment used "titanium" instead of "platinum", which made it nonsensical, since titanium isn't a rare metal.

It looks like titanium costs $4/kg [1], and a SpaceX LEO launch is $2719/kg [2]. I'm not sure how much Ti is in "ferro titanium", but even if it's only 10%, the numbers aren't even close. Am I doing this wrong?

[1] http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/ferro-titani...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_prices

Nope, it's all me. Platinum is $32/g. Titanium is $4/kg. Mixing the two up results in nonsense.

> A gram of titanium in LEO is only about 20% more expensive than a gram of titanium on Earth.

Can you elaborate on that? I can't parse that statement in a way that would make it seem correct, so... What exactly do you mean?

Translation: It cost 20% as much to lift titanium to orbit as it costs to refine in the first place. Which seems very wrong because it costs between $5 and $50 per kilo according to a quick search, and I'm pretty sure it costs a LOT more than that to lift a kilo into orbit.

Right. I wondered if they meant something else, because that doesn't make sense.

Most rare metals have uses beyond just "pretty."

Even if it's present in the crust there's the question of how easy or hard it is to convert into usable bars/wire/films. The first asteroid mining operations will focus on asteroids where you can get huge chunks of ore.

Getting it out of the crust means digging very deep. Asteroids will have higher purity and minerals available on the surface.

Modern platinum mining is mostly done from surface alluvial deposits.

What I've never understood about this: the Outer Space Treaty says "The treaty also states that the exploration of outer space shall be done to benefit all countries and shall be free for exploration and use by all the States.

The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet.[3] Art. II of the Treaty states that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means"."

This basically means that no one can lay claim to stuff in space. But say there is an extremely valuable metal floating around, and company A wants to mine it. They arrive and start to mine it. Now, company B arrives a year later and also wants to mine it but company A is in the way. According to the treaty, company A can't claim the resource so they can't tell company B to go away, and company B can't tell company A to get out of the way. How does this get resolved?

>> How does this get resolved?

Same way it does on earth. Whoever actually controls the resource becomes its owner. Once someone establishes an independent presence is space they will claim independence from earth and such treaties and lay claim to anything they can reasonably defend.

Actually, reading up on this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...

shows that if you mine it, you own the ore but not the site. Although you are right that as long as there's no 'space police' there isn't really a way to effectively enforce policy.

No nation can lay claim to stuff in space. But that does not rule out that companies can, and I guess disputes between them will need to be resolved by international law?

That automatically means no company can lay claim to stuff in space. When you read that Denmark, Russia, Norway etc. are laying claim to the North Pole (and more importantly, the oil underneath it), it pretty much means they are laying claim so they can offer the drilling rights to company X. However, since no one 'owns' space, it is impossible to grant rights. This does not mean that everyone can randomly lay claim to stuff in space, it means no one can. Although since no one can really effectively enforce the 'no-claim' part, there's no one to stop companies from doing so.

It'll get extremely interesting when a company of country A returns an extremely rare very useful element. Country A will of course lay claim to it, but according to the Outer Space Treaty all space exploration is done 'for the benefit of mankind', so other countries would be able to claim this extremely rare element (or its benefits) must be shared. That'd be hell of an interesting international law case.

There is an international agreement that regulates how ownership in space works. This Week In Startups had a guest who explains it.

It somewhat amounts to "whoever got there first wins".

After reading up on this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...

It seems that the current US position (who will probably be the first to start large scale mining) is that the resource site itself will never be owned but that labor attaches ownership to the ore. As said on the site, this still doesn't deal with when a singular deposit of an element exists and how access would be shared.

Another interesting point that's raised is that if an asteroid is entirely consumed by mining, does that count as 'appropriation'?

Man the next 100 years are gonna be a reaaaallly interesting time for lawyers..

>How does this get resolved?

You argue what qualifies as a celestial body, and you argue that it only says you can't claim an entire celestial body.

> That’s because the value of many asteroids are measured in the quintillions of dollars

Doesn't abundance of certain material make it cheaper? So the value isn't necessarily linearly dependent on the amount.

Reminds me "The Laxian Key" by Robert Sheckley[1] (read it, if you haven't yet).

[1]. https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-11/Galaxy_195...

Even after completely saturating the market, a large asteroid would easily fetch tens of trillions over the next hundred years. The first person to bring in a large metal- and ice-rich asteroid would dominate the space production market for decades to come.

Depends on when the second person brings in a similar rock.

Does it? By "bring in", I assume we are talking about placing into a convenient orbit, because I do not see a reasonable way to bring a large asteroid down to the surface in the forseable future.

However, my (non laywer) understanding of space law is that it is prohibited (by treaty) to own celestial objects. You can own samples you minded from them, but not the objects themselves. If this understanding is correct, it means that after you park the asteroid in orbit, you are allowed to mine it, and sell the ore. However, so is everyone else; despite the fact that you invested the money in moving the asteroid.

Law is a high-latency side-chain of authority.

When / if we get to mining asteroids, and generally inhabiting space, either personally or via robots, treaties / laws will be remapped to match the reality of the times.

Hopefully no one will remap them to allow owning planetoids. That would be pretty nasty.

It would probably be based on a homesteading system. In the case of a planet, you'd get what you changed. In the case of an asteroid, if you moved it into a different orbit and set up facilities on it that's probably enough to count as a homestead.

Why not?

Over 200 asteroids are known to be larger than 100 km,[49] and a survey in the infrared wavelengths has shown that the asteroid belt has 0.7–1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more.[1]

The volume of a sphere 1 kilometre in radius 4.19km³. If you can build a mining operation on one of those I don't see any problem with granting you exclusive access. We already do something similar on Earth.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Characteristics

The experience of unowned land and resources on Earth are quite terrible, so I hope for the opposite.

I mean, even if we got a tenth of that value, it would still be a tremendous amount of money and could spur whole new industries on earth, much like the advent of steel production did.

Sure, I'm not saying it's not going to be useful.

What space mining is good for is having construction materials for space ships that don't have to be boosted up out of Earth's gravity well.

The conclusion is broadly correct. There _is_ a lot of money to be made in asteroid mining. The reasoning is completely ridiculous. Imagine giving everyone on the planet a 1000kg ball of gold. It would make it pointless to trade and be a pain to have around, You'd pay people to take it away and dump it.

Asteroid mining _will_ be a massive provider of resources in the future. Industries that use those resources will pay for them. I imagine some truly awesomely huge structures will be manufactured in space in the further future with the vast resources available.

There will be an interesting adjustment to the valuation of metals once the industry develops. The metals most used will drop to around the cost of collecting them (plus some profit for the miners). Metals that have less use than their relative abundance within the asteroids being mined are effectively a waste product where supply would exceed demand. Gold is probably in that category. It's useful for things, but not _that_ useful.

So I wouldn't invest in Gold long term. That might be quite a long term though.

It would be only slightly more valuable than asphalt once we pave the streets with gold.

But where are we going to find a rag team of drillers that we can train to be astronauts to go mine in outer space?

I was always curious if it is possible to land few water ice based comets on the Mars while no one lives there.

The comments on the article by Tom Billings are far more interesting than the article itself was.

Did a bit of research on Tom and seems like he knows his stuff.

Thanks for the pointer, otherwise I wouldn't have checked out the comments section.

This will only be profitable at precise times of the year - depending on what prospected material is needed for that time next year when it's had time to wait till the closest location of the parent planet after its had time to mine in that gravity well and slung back when the parent planet has circled around.

No, you could bring the asteroid into an earth orbit. You can ship down some of the expensive metals to cover your cost right away, but leave the bulk materials in HEO for spaceship construction.

The easiest way to do this is to find an ice-rich asteroid and use a nuclear-thermal engine to vaporize the ice for propellant.

Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing (thanks to our atmosphere).

Crash the asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean, then continue with more conventional mining techniques.

That sounds a bit dramatic. How big would an asteroid need to be for the economics of bringing it to the surface of Earth to make sense.

That meteor that lit up the sky in Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 20m in diameter and weigh around 13,000 tones[1], it exploded in the atmosphere releasing the energy of 500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), about 29 times the energy released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.[1]

Not sure I'd want to be on the planet when you crash your asteroid into a convenient desert or shallow ocean.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

You could make Soyuz sized chunks, strap them with mechanisms that deploy parachutes as it enters earths atmosphere. It wont burn up like a meteor that way.

> Orbit is much more expensive than reentry and landing

The asteroid already has to be going slowly enough to avoid burning up in the atmosphere, and circularizing at HEO is much cheaper than circularizing near LEO. You also probably don't want to crash anything of this size into the earth.

Nearly all the space sims - elite, eve, sc have mining as main feature.

Appeals to the capitalism inside everyone :)

Wild tangent about eve online: it's adopting a free tier on nov. 15! (Join usss)

I guess we're all fascinated by extracting riches from 'the next frontier', for our epoch that's space and I can't wait to see real implementations of this dream of belt mining!

I've grown tired of getting killed by some vastly superior player every time I undock. Otherwise, pretty good game.

You need to team up! SOlo play is unfortunately not very interesting at first. Try to find some friendlies to fly with until you're confident enough to strike out on your own.

how much platinum is there in the earth's core?

$ 100 million per ounce is hardly grounds for a gold rush to the asteroid belt.

The Platinum in the Earth's core is not accessible, not even a little bit, not even with orders of magnitude improvements in technology.

Not with that kind of attitude!

The platinum in the Earth's core and lower crust is inaccessible. The pressures and temperatures down there are much too high. Compare that to a cold, light asteroid, and you'll see the big picture.

The next type of pollution: gravitational pollution. Increasing the earth's gravity.

What do you mean? The earth is venting about 50,000 metric tons of mass per year. The addition of rare materials from space probably wouldn't match that. That's not even considering that the vast majority of materials would be used for space travel itself.

Um, what? If you're thinking about volcanism, I'm pretty sure none of that escapes earth. It doesn't change our total mass.

For comparison, human CO2 emissions are 10 billion metric tons per year. 50,000 tons is such a small amount that they're probably just referencing helium and other gases escaping the atmosphere.

Is it possible that mining activity could accidentally change the orbits of one of these asteroids enough to send it crashing into earth eventually (in a few decades)?

Technically yes. But really, no.

Technically a pigeon in New York could deuce one out mid-flight, and it could catch an updraft and wind up landing on my car in Seattle. Will it ever happen? Those odds are probably better than a rogue asteroid set loose from mining hitting the earth.

It's not economic now but come the singularity we can send the robots up there to get gold diamonds for our palaces. Or something like that.

Reminds me of the Monty Python skit with the price of crotchless panties skyrocketing on Jupiter. It's all about supply and demand.

Just had a meeting with this billionaire & pretty sure his goal is to be a trillionaire.

https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/billionaire-breaking-i...

There's always money in the banana stand.

Or maybe strap rockets to the asteroid and safely drop it in a shallow part of the Ocean, where you can retrieve it at convenience.

First you have to break it into smaller pieces, a regulated implosion or something. Then strapping rockets to it, so you can control its motion in three axes (three rockets, maybe) and remotely guide it to earth. 3/4 ocean is hard to miss.

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