“We will only be able to make deep space viable for humanity when the math makes sense, and at the moment, we’re still working that problem.”
In “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez
I'm not sure I completely understood the economic argument for mining asteroids but the way I understand it, it goes something like this...
Take platinum as an example - currently very rare on Earth. If you can bring back platinum from space and sell it on Earth at a competitive price then it could be lucrative. However the price for this sort of resource varies a lot in response to supply and demand. The act of bringing back just a little bit more platinum has the effect of drastically lowering the price until it is no longer economically feasible to do so. Except, once established, this industry should be self-sustaining. The infrastructure, raw materials and energy needed is all made "up there". A bit like the internet in one respect, the cost of physically hosting (just the web hosting part) a company like Amazon on the web is negligible. That's (one of the reasons) they are able to be so profitable. For an interstellar mining company like Catalyst, even if they are only making a tiny profit on everything they bring back, their overheads should be so small as to be effectively nil. The startup cost for them though would be (ahem) astronomical. This can be recouped though by selling rare resources at a high price at the beginning while they are still "rare".
The same is true of all minerals. They are valuable because they are rare. If I go and get a lump of Nickle the size of Texas and land it on well let’s say Texas... then the price of nickel doesn't just drop by 5 or 10 % the Price of nickel drops to 5 or 10% of its original price so now I just lost 95% of my proposed profit. Beyond that however there comes a point where i just can't sell the nickle at all because all the people who need nickle have bags full of the stuff and nothing to do with it. So massive expense to exploit a large resource leads to a complex economic outcome and so doesn't look viable as a business model.
Having said that, in ten or twenty years there will be thousands of Portuguese bouncing around on't asteroids. No doubt there will also be space police to break up strikes and then a Socialist government to shut the mines down. Washington will say that pirates are taking over space tankers, or whole asteroids with French Tricolors will be swarmed by Galactic Al Qaeda. We'll be told we still need super nukes, and the Portuguese armed forces will be depleted more than uranium. We will have a couple of space drones which we rent from Uncle Sam who will be installing good killer lasers while warning us of nasty Chinese ones. And yes, Justin Bieber will be US president and insist on singing at his own inauguration...
Mining asteroids on the fly likely will have to wait until space travel has matured a great deal from where it is now. However, that isn't the way I think it should or most likely will be done. The best way to mine an asteroid, and the safest way to do so, is to capture it first and place it in a Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon. Then you can mine it at your leisure. Better still, if you mine it from the center out, you can use the non-valuable stuff to build a habitat within it. An asteroid 1 kilometer long by .5 kilometer wide would give a volume of ~452M cubic meters if you left a 50 meter shell. Even if you cut that in half to account for walls and floors, that's a lot of room. Capturing an asteroid would entail meeting it near its closest approach with a swarm of engines to brake and stabilize it. Once maneuvered to its parking spot, mine shafts could be sunk to the most profitable appearing interior sections to begin the process of hollowing it out for pressurized working and living spaces that would eventually connect. At some point the asteroid could be spun to create artificial gravity. To give an idea of how much room there would be, think of it this way: within a volume of 250,000,000 cubic meters, you can fit 500,000 spaces 10mX10mX5m. That's plenty of room for hydroponic farms, living space, factories, hangars, hotels, etc. Ship 3D printers up to make the parts for bigger 3D printers to make tools, equipment and other necessities on site. It occurs to me that shafts could be sunk as a cone, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, say a meter to a millimeter, with mirrored insides to focus sunlight into heating/welding beams for industrial purposes to hold costs down...beyond the initial construction costs, you get free energy, roughly 1K Watts focused in a 1mm beam per tube. Movable mirrors could harness several tubes at once for however much was necessary. Basically, you get a super-sized space station that costs peanuts to build, one that would serve as a base, manufacturing, and launch point for Mars and other solar system expeditions, as well as a research platform (a massive telescope linked with orbital or ground-based scopes should give a nice 3D view of solar system objects), and waystation to a lunar colony. Obviously, from capture to completion you are looking at a generational project, something like 20-30 years from start to finish, perhaps quicker by half with luck and focus.
If you are a hard-SF fan you’ll love this one. It’s got everything. It’s got some shortcomings, but as I read it I went back in time to my own childhood…Not enough character development? Bah! This reminds me of what Martin Amis wrote somewhere in the 60s:
"Science Fiction's no good", they bellow 'til we're deaf. "But this looks good", "Then it's not SF!" It was ever thus. If you love SF-as-it-used-to-be read this one. You won’t regret it. Everyone is guilty of literary snobbery even if self-consciously. Try to avoid it at all costs.
Bottom-line: The cost of bringing Fe, Al, Au into space could be much higher than using the what is already off planet and processing it there. Near zero atmosphere and gravity is difficult to create on earth, but in space it is not so hard, as you can imagine. Ultra-high-vacuum system for wafer manufacture are expensive and limit what can be made. A multi-layer chip made cheaply on planet? Forget it. "Cold welding" on Earth? On planet production of tech items will be as far from slide-rules and abacuses as compared to today. As to transportation costs, drop by parachute, the finished product in the ocean or in an unpopulated area. I do get the point that to initially build a self-sustaining space factory would be very expensive, but once one is built, the resources to build a second one are already there and a few hundred thousand factories and mineral processing facilities later...I’m not sure whether the technique Suarez was an isotope separator, based on the mass spectrograph principle. In space you have energy in abundance, and you need to produce structural components from what you find. Matter is few in space and you want to use all of it and separate elements or even their isotopes to obtain what you want. Also, the technique could be crucial to fully separate reactor waste from a molten-salt breeder reactor. This is the method to start using not just the fissible part of the heavy elements, but the fertile as well. So starting on earth in the energy development, the separator technique can be put into space to help building the first extraterrestrial living space near earth, in the Trojans or on the lunar surface. So one can experiment and build sustainability in space before further venturing into the solar system out of direct emergency help from earth. So to imports... Maybe most important - no one on Earth will finance asteroid mining or any other industry in space that doesn't quickly return a profit on Earth. Yes, NASA or some similar agency might do some small scale stuff, but the funds (and materials) to develop real industrial infrastructure in space will have to come from space. We will build the first habitats to support those industries, not the other way around. After that there's a tipping point, when population and industry are large enough, and then most space resources will be utilized in space. (That's when we can start talking about orbital cities and megastructures.) Eventually the relatively small Earth population and economy will be an unimportant part of human civilization, but the seed money will have to come from Earth, and it will have to turn a steady profit for Earth investors. Without running the numbers, I have to tentatively agree that getting ice-derived fuels and water from near-earth orbital objects would likely be cheaper than hefting it from earth in the long run - especially if we find out that some of those objects are dust-covered ice chunks that don't melt due to their thermomechanics. Imagine bringing into Lagrange or HEO a chunk of ice containing more water than all the Apollo and Orbiter program launch exhaust combined…How would we actually use asteroid material in space? We have to smelt it and purify it, and on earth that means melting it in a big pot, inject other elements like oxygen, molybdenum, carbon, and chromium, and drain it out of the bottom (to avoid slag). And then it is forged and machined it into parts. In space we could easily run out of alloying and doping elements. How would metalworking and machining in space work, especially given that it aims to produce spacecraft, mining, and smelting machines, and fusion reactors, which all require strong, temperature resistant, lightweight alloys? Merlin 1-D rocket nozzles are made of niobium. Fusion reactors require superconductors like yttrium-barium-copper-oxide, machining requires super-hard materials like diamond, aluminum production uses consumable carbon electrodes. Hall-effect thrusters require a boron-nitride anode. Are we expected to get all this stuff from transmutation if we can't get it directly from asteroids? And even then transmuting elements produces a heterogeneous mix of isotopes that probably more difficult to separate than asteroid ore and would require other consumables like concentrated nitric acid. Suarez uses the age old technique of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) as a decisive plot device in his novel, which is not something new and it was also a nice touch, meaning Suarez did his homework. I hope you made it this far in reading this quasi-review of sorts...
NB: Ryugu = water dragon
