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Comment by jankeymeulen | Hacker News Reader

People keep say astroid mining but I've yet to see a convincing business case...

Planetary Resources just folded up shop and got sold. The new company is liquidating most of the assets from what I can tell. That's a shame. That looked like a really interesting concept.

What are we proposing to mine? The business case for platinum is easy to make if there is a quantity of relatively pure ore. The business case for iron is hard to make. Unfortunately iron is common on earth and on asteroids (I'm confident in making that statement without looking it up so I guess I could be wrong). Platinum is rare on earth and in great demand, and seems to be just as rare in space.

I can come up with other cases, but there is a lot of other technology that needs to be worked on before we are ready to build generation ships heading to other star systems.

Iron in space is worth a lot more than iron on earth. It is expensive to get that iron from earth into space. Possibly cheaper to get it from asteroids to earth orbit, or the moon for building space structures.

Apparently the precious metal content on asteroids is through the roof. Titanium, Nickel, Platinum, etc. One study concluded that there was more than a trillion dollars worth of metal on one asteroid alone.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/07/19/trillion-do...

And there's 0.005 ppm / kg * 5.97219 * 10^24 KG * 29540 $/kg = ~ 1 sextillion dollars worth of platinum in the earth's crust.

There's no case for bringing asteroids to Earth in any reasonable time frame. But on the other hand bringing stuff up Earth's gravity well and even loose rubble could be useful if brought to Earth orbit.

I agree that cheaper launches will not do much to directly change the business of astroid mining. The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

> The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

"Even today". There is an opinion that payloads are so expensive because the launchers are expensive. I.e., you can't send replacements easily, because a launch is expensive, so you have to design the payload so that it wouldn't break, and last 9-s of reliability cost additional 0-s in price.

In other words, if launchers would become cheaper, that would encourage sending more payloads which isn't designed to be as reliable and serve as long. If something happens, just send a replacement. The issue of space junk comes to mind, but if launches are cheaper you can include into the launched mass the active means of dealing with space junk, like fuel for deorbiting.

Asteroid mining would require brand new technology. We cannot crash an entire asteroid into Earth's surface, we would need to do zero g mineral processing, regardless of how the minerals are ultimately used. This is a task no one has ever done before. How do you estimate the cost of doing something like this? I'm not qualified, but I do know if a traditional mining organization decided to mine an asteroid the launch costs would be a small line item in their budget.

The traditional NASA ideology is risk averse. It's way easier for them to spend billions doing all kinds of tests and modelling to ensure mission success on the first try. This looks suspiciously related to unwillingness to do multiple similar missions on the side of the customer - i.e. Congress in this case. Once in 1990-s there was an attempt to do things "faster, better, cheaper", which today could be named "move fast and break things", but with some inevitable failures the approach fell out of favor.

As for asteroid mining, Caterpillar was considering lunar base operation equipment on a previous iteration (G.W.Bush program). You probably right, they'd present a hefty bill, but I somehow doubt they'd offer something truly innovative. Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

> Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

Over time asteroid/moon mining is inevitable. Technology will develop (costs fall), and we'll exhaust the mineral supply of Earth (prices increase). I'm sure, among many other types of organizations, scrappy startups will help us get there.

A simple use case would be mining asteroids for ice and selling it to NASA for use in the ISS.

The ISS isn't a big enough water market to merit this kind of activity. This might be viable if we had 100x more people in space.

also asteroids generally orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, the delta-v needed to take water mined from a main belt asteroid and bring it to LEO, then match it with the inclination of the ISS orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination is non-trivial.

While it's a non-trivial amount of delta-v, if the asteroid has a large amount of water then the water already present on the asteroid can be used to generate the delta-v.

Attempting to put an asteroid into LEO is perhaps the worst risk/reward ratio humanity ever conceived. No way it's going to happen.

Are you thinking of comets? Asteroids are generally closish to the ecliptic. You'd normally want to find easy to reach asteroids rather than randomly choosing asteroids and there are a number you can get to for just 100 m/s beyond Earth escape, though it'll take a while at that speed.

The problem is that nearby asteroids tend to be dry since they're being warmed by the Sun as much as Earth is and lack Earth's gravity well, ozone layer, and magnetic field. You want to go to Jupiter's trojans or so, or maybe just Ceres if you're willing to deal with its gravity well and dig a bit. For Jupiter's orbit you're looking at 3,300 m/s plus escape. Still a lot less than getting to orbit and you can use an ion drive but hardly trivial.

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