AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission

That seems like a recipe for acquisition by the military? Who needs nukes when you can lob a hunk of iron at a city?

At the surface of Earth, the platinum-group metals are concentrated into metallic nuggets or metallic sulfide crystals, which are very different in density and chemical properties from the surrounding minerals, so they can be separated relatively simply.

On asteroids, these metals are present mostly as minute impurities in iron-nickel-cobalt alloys (i.e. around one part per million). Separating them mechanically is impossible and chemical separation requires great amounts of chemical reactants, e.g. of a strong acid, that would also be very difficult to produce on asteroids, which are depleted in volatile elements. Perhaps one could do some kind of distillation of liquid metals or a differential sublimation in vacuum, which would require a huge amount of energy and a lot of special equipment able to work at very high temperatures. Bringing back the PGE-containing iron alloy is impossible, as its weight is about one million times greater.

At this time there exists no technology that could be used for the extraction of platinum-group metals on asteroids. Developing such a technology is possible, but it is something much more difficult than making a spaceship going to an asteroid and back.

Any credible company that claims that they want to mine asteroids would have to first demonstrate on Earth how to extract the valuable chemical elements from the minerals that can be found on asteroids, and only then solve the simple task of transportation to the asteroids.

There are some celestial bodies where the platinum-group metals are found in forms that are easier to separate from the surrounding minerals, i.e. in the sources of the so-called chondrite meteorites, which are very small bodies that have never coalesced into big asteroids. There the minerals remain as they have condensed at the formation of the Solar System, without having ever been remelted. There much of the platinum-group metals may be in the form of microscopic refractory inclusions in the big mass of common minerals, e.g. inside the so-called calcium-aluminum rich inclusions, instead of being dissolved in iron.

While a survey mission could find such small bodies with a chondrite-like composition, the amount of valuable metals in each such body is very small (a few grams per ton) and the energy consumed with moving from a small body to another would be very large in comparison with the amount of extracted metals.

Moreover, no operations would be possible on such small bodies, the spaceship would have to contain inside the complete metal extraction facility.

What should be easy to make on asteroids is only high-quality iron or nickel or cobalt alloys, for building structures in space, not on Earth.

I figure the odds for these companies, and others engaging in medium-future tech, being 99% loss 1% profit that effectively rounds to "all the money".

It's numbers that effectively break conventional risk reward calculations and are going to require more patience then many investors possess.

It is obvious that you cannot bring back to Earth a thousand tons of iron with the purpose of extracting from it a kilogram of iridium worth only a few thousand $.

Good luck for the extraction in the conditions at the surface of an asteroid of the kilogram of iridium that can be obtained by processing a thousand tons of hard iron alloy.

That would need a really huge amount of energy and processing methods that do not exist yet.

The average concentration of platinum-group metals in the Earth's crust may be lower by more than a thousand times in comparison with asteroids, but here these metals are not dispersed uniformly but they are concentrated in places where their concentration is similar or better than in asteroids.

Moreover in these mining places the platinum-group metals are present as metallic nuggets or as sulfide minerals, which are much heavier and with different chemical properties than the surrounding minerals. Therefore they can be separated cheaply.

Even so, the platinum-group metals are still only seldom separated directly, but usually they are obtained as by-product of extracting other metals, like nickel or copper, because they are more concentrated in the waste products than in the original ore.

At this stage, while the cost of transportation to and from an asteroid can be estimated with a reasonable uncertainty, absolutely nobody is able to estimate the cost in energy and chemical substances for the extraction of plantinum-group metals or of any other valuable elements while on the surface of an asteroid.

Until someone demonstrates on Earth a feasible extraction method, determining thus the amount of energy and of various chemical substances that do not exist on the target asteroid, which are necessary per mass of recovered valuable chemical elements, any commercial company that claims to have the purpose of mining asteroids can only be a scam for investors, because nobody knows if such an activity can become profitable before a remote future, e.g. one hundred years from now, when none of the present investors would remain alive.

I am pretty certain that some time in a not distant future the mining of asteroids will happen, but it will be mostly for substances easy to extract and easy to use in space, like steel for building structures outside Earth, not for bringing anything back to Earth.

I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.

All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life.

The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies.

Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product.

Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals.

In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.

For now, even the cost per kilogram of a payload launched in an Earth orbit is greater than the price of iridium.

The cost of the energy for the round-trip to an asteroid per kilogram of brought back substance would be much greater.

Even this transportation cost would be dwarfed by the cost of the energy and of the chemical reactants needed to extract on the surface of an asteroid one kilogram of iridium from a thousand tons of ore, which would normally consist of iron-nickel-cobalt alloy, which is very hard to process, either mechanically or thermally.