We’re Never Going to Mine the Asteroid Belt | Hacker News Reader

We’re Never Going to Mine the Asteroid Belt

bloomberg.com

Stripped of the hyperbole, the article merely points out that space mining will only be profitable if the exercise is largely self-sufficient. If every piece of equipment needs to be launched from Earth's surface, then it's going to be very tough to make it profitable. I don't think the space mining start-ups he's so dismissive of were in any doubt about that.

His fictional example of "Moon" is illustrative. That film was set in a Helium-3 mining facility. Helium-3 simply doesn't exist on Earth. If we get to the point where we need it to power our advanced fusion reactors, then we'll have no alternative but to create a space-based mining industry. Once the infrastructure is in place for that, then lots of other space-mining opportunities will start to look tempting too.

The article makes some good points, and I’d be inclined to agree with its conclusion, but I think what it’s missing is the speed that orbital manufacturing will happen. There will be exotic materials that can only be produced in orbit. This will encourage a lot more extra-planet activity, and bring more and more capabilities off planet. As these capabilities increase there will likely be increasing economic pressure to utilize extra-planet resources further increasing our off planet capabilities. I see a positive feedback loop that is sort of inevitable in the next several hundred years.

"Space stuff is expensive because launching ships from the bottom of earth's gravity well is expensive."

So Don't Do That Then.

In fact, doing practically ANYTHING directly in space is cheaper and easier than trying to launch it out of earths gravity well.

Even just mining and refining fuel from the moon and using that to refuel ships in Low Earth Orbit (which is just about attainable with current technology) would be a big help. Yes, mining fuel on the moon is comparatively cheaper than launching it from earth.

Here's the thing. Having to launch from earth is so ingrained that someone will likely answer: "but mining fuel on the moon is so expensive!" because they unconsciously add the cost of launching from earth. Don't launch from earth.

Sure, maybe you need to do a few launches from earth to get your moon-mining operation going. That's a pretty steep initial investment, I'll grant that too. But after that you are getting fuel from the moon, and that machinery will never need to go back to earth again. You can just keep going from the moon to LEO and back. This saves you from a lot of launches from earth already.

Maybe you're thinking that the fuel cost of flying all the way to the moon and back would still be very expensive. You'd be (relatively) wrong. Nothing is as expensive as launching from Earth's surface to LEO.

Don't launch from Earth's surface to LEO, and suddenly a lot of things become viable.

> One factor rules out most space mining at the outset: gravity. On one hand, it guarantees that most of the solar system’s best mineral resources are to be found under our feet. Earth is the largest rocky planet orbiting the sun. As a result, the cornucopia of minerals the globe attracted as it coalesced is as rich as will be found this side of Alpha Centauri.

Can someone elaborate here? To me this seems like a hypothesis without evidence, and it doesn't seem clear to me at all why this would be true.

What are the odds of Starship working? It seems really complex.

And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling?

SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer.

As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the last 10% of your problem.

Between high speed re-entry, and thermal protections, I wonder how well the Starship design was modeled, to handle hypersonic re-entry speeds. It appears to be a very large spacecraft that’s re-entering the atmosphere at very high speeds.

If it succeeds, then maybe it’ll open up space travel and make it cheaper. If not, then well, nice try. Back to the drawing board.

But maybe, we’ll see results soon enough, with SN9.

This should be obvious, but there is so much wishful thinking out there about this that essentially boils down to praying that we discover a magical propulsion system that doesn't follow physical laws. It's simply not feasible, and a basic understanding of gravity and the rocket equation should disabuse anyone of the notion that we will ever be mining in the solar system. This also applies to anyone suggesting we might leave the solar system at any point, at least while maintaining life on board.

I'm not sure why you postulate a magical propulsion system, pretty much 1960's technology can get you to an asteroid and back (with cargo).

In fact, it has been done already.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/5/22155825/jaxa-hayabusa2-m...

Now to make a commercially viable variant, you may not want to have your starting point be on Earth's surface. That much I'll grant.

As the article points out, Hayabusa "spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material".

What is the plan for commercial scale mining? How do we get the equipment there? How do we get the material back? Scaling up increases the requirements by many orders of magnitude to the point where it becomes unviable.

It's not enough to simply point to launch systems that can put 100 tons into orbit and recover a single gram of material and say "look, it's possible". Scale is what makes it impossible.

The article states: "Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive. "

This is entirely true. The writer has fallen into a classical trap in assuming you must launch your mission from earth.

Never is a very long time though. I'd postulate that sometime between now and "never" we might have some alternative place to launch our fuel from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

https://www.nasa.gov/isru/overview

This gets you your profit margin you need to scale up.

You have (somewhat) covered the fuel requirements by bringing in ISRU. That's fair, but I would remind you that ISRU is a research technology and is not even close to producing enough fuel fast enough to supply a single mission to the Moon, let alone massive commercial mining operations across the solar system. But fuel is not the whole story, is it? You need equipment. That's coming from Earth no matter what way you slice it.

If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology", which is a slightly shorter time-scale.

That said I think that there might almost be a (chicken/egg) commercial demand for an actual lunar mining+fuel processing facility as is. Refueling of earth-orbit satellites could extend their useful lifetimes.

And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth. You can still get a big delta-V savings if you only launch the equipment into LEO, and then transport it onward using fuel mined on the moon. You save the cost of the-fuel-to-launch-the-fuel.

> If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology"

You cannot assume that just because we are researching a technology that it must be possible given enough research. We may do the research and find that it is not.

> And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth.

The problem is that this is already essentially impossible. The mass requirements for a commercial scale mining operation are astronomical compared to the things we have been putting into space so far.

I'll grant that at 13,500 t, a machine like the Bagger 288 might take a few too many Starship launches (at 100t/launch).

However, I'm pretty sure one can attain reasonable turnover from something a bit smaller, especially for high value minerals.

Maybe you wouldn't consider 100 tons of equipment a commercial scale mining operation yet. Which is fair enough.

If you want to scale up to really start making money, of course you'll need to have your refining and construction capabilities in space too.

This is obviously a big bootstrap problem!

I do think that Falcon heavy and/or Starship are starting to make a small initial bootstrap viable, for someone willing to take the risk.

Why propulsion? Why rockets at all?

https://youtu.be/LMbI6sk-62E

"If this pipe dream is too remote, why don't we try this even more ridiculous pipe dream?"

Who said it needs to be soon?

What you've done is taken a hard unsolved problem and replaced it with an even harder unsolved problem, and you think that constitutes solving the problem.

I didn't solve any problem, I just demonstrated that a faster horse is not the only option even though the article presents it as such. The physics of orbital rings are understood well for many decades; it just costs a lot and the economy is not there yet. It might not get there if nobody said rockets aren't the only option.

Real-world engineering realities, tends to throw a wrench at perfect-world physics equations.

Sure, I didn't say it will be easy, or that it's simple.

What physical laws would need to be broken to mine the belt or even other planets? I'm failing to come up with any.

Very, very unscientific article. Seems like no thought at all was given to alternatives to rockets.

Never is an awfully long time

The moon might be a better bet. It's a lot closer with plenty of rocks and very little top soil.

“Never” is a long time.

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