Throwback to an ancient thread on Reddit by AdmiralPelleon

It takes 6 BFR launches to put a fully fueled BFS in orbit, going for $7 million/launch. I’ll be generous, and pretend that the BFS making the trip to the asteroid doesn’t lose value along the way (hint: it does).

So let’s plug in the Rocket Equation for a fully-fueled BFS in orbit, let’s see how much fuel we must expend to get the BFS to the asteroid to pick up it’s cargo:

Delta-v to Ryugu (a near-earth asteroid) has $95 billion of minerals on it = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + empty mass)/ (start fuel mass - fuel used + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100+85)/(1100-fuel used + 85))

fuel used = 851.67

So just getting the BFS to the closest near earth object takes up 851,000 kg of fuel! This is before we’ve loaded any minerals on board. To calculate how much payload we can bring back do earth, it’s the same equation except:

Delta-v to Earth = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + payload + empty mass)/ (payload + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100-852+p+85)/(p + 85))

payload = 28.893 metric tons

So that sucks! We go all that way, launch 6 rockets, spend probably years in outer space, and all we get are 29 metric tons of cobalt!?! At current prices, that’s worth ~$899,000. Compare that to the “best case” cost of 6 BFR launches or $42 million.

BUT WAIT!

It’s commonly agreed that some sort of ISRU (creating fuel out of the asteroid itself) will be required for space mining. The asteroid Ryugu probably has water, and while I don’t think it has carbon, amateur scientists like us need not be constrained by such petty laws of chemistry! Let’s assume that, once the ship arrives, it is fully refueled at zero cost. Now our return-payload looks like:

Delta-v to Earth = Raptor Engine ISP * ln( (start fuel mass + payload + empty mass)/ (payload + empty mass) )

OR: 4666 = 3759.81ln((1100+p+85)/(p+ 85))

payload = 345.5 metric tons

The good news is we’ve increased our revenues by an order of magnitude (~$ 10,710,500)! The bad news is we are now at just over 25% of our fixed, “best case” costs. (I’m actually not sure if the BFS could land with that much payload, but at this point it doesn’t really matter does it?)

These numbers can be made to work for elements like Helium 3 and Platinum, due to their super-high cost-per-kg (345.5 metric tons of Platinum is technically worth over $10 billion). However, the world’s yearly supply of platinum is roughly just 243 metric tons, and increasing this significantly would serve to quickly crater the price.

All this is to say that no, asteroid mining is not, and may never be, feasible>

We as a species are not yet capable of doing this.

We can barely land successfully on our moon, we haven’t made it to Mars with humans and many of the robots we did send crashed before becoming operational.

We don’t have the capability to run completely automated mining on Earth, people are so far always needed on site.

If we’re going to mine asteroids, we’ll need to have a lot more capabilities than we currently do.

Note that I’m scratching the surface here, we haven’t yet discussed travel time, keeping humans alive and sane, fuel or Earth resources required to mount the effort.

https://builtin.com/articles/top-space-mining-companies

Investment and systems development/integration. We have all the parts needed, but they’re expensive, and you can’t really just stuff them on a rocket and hope they’ll work. There’s a billion details to get straight before launching, and each detail costs a lot.

Cost efficacy.

You have to understand, as an environment space will kill you and everyone with you.

This isn’t like mining underground or underwater where if you screw up, you die. In space you have to do EVERYTHING right or you die.

Unless we find an asteroid of pure gold/platinum/diamond the risk/reward ratio is too damn high.

Surface-to-intrasolar-space propulsion technology, in its current iteration, to reach escape velocity is prohibitively expensive.

Currently, we use combustion. My instincts tell me that an “electro-gravitic” paradigm in propulsion is next.

Before that, we must have a revolutionary breakthrough or discovery in our fundamental understanding of physics.

Basically, we’re not smart enough and too low on the Kardashev scale to get a decent ROI on such an endeavour.

Hard to call any of the various reasons the biggest. Space travel is an evolving discipline that takes vast amounts of money, step-by-step engineering progress, time to learn through acquire practical experience and learn from it, political commitment, and constantly changing public opinion. In theory we already know how to do space mining, it but in practice we don’t know all the challenges we’ll run into, and therefore have not solved yet. The long-term ROI is unquestionably huge but unknown.

For example, platinum is currently worth almost $1000 USD/oz, while aluminum is about 8 cents. If platinum became as available as aluminum this would radically change. We would discover new uses for platinum that haven’t been imagined yet because it’s so expensive - nobody would think of making pie pans or window frames out of it, but physically it might be far superior. Its properties haven’t been explored nearly as fully as the properties of aluminum, but they would be, and nobody knows the result. Maybe there’s an easy way to do antigravity using platinum. Whatever - the point is we don’t know, and that’s just one specific metal. Opening up whole new realms of possibility always creates progress.

Stupidity, mostly.

Money to get to and bring material back from the asteroid. Japan just recently had success landing a mock mining asset onto an asteroid, so the tech is there for nearby asteroids, at least. Now it’s really just logistics because getting to the Kaiper Belt is a bit more expensive.

Space lacks large groups of impoverished and repressed people whose labour you can exploit to make your mines profitable.

putting shit in space is still too expensive and wastefull for it to be cost-effective and/or profitable.

The same thing that is holding us back from traveling abroad to reach all of those newfound exoplanets we keep discovering.

It’ll be several long lifetimes before we can have the technology to do that.

You’ve been watching Armageddon, have you?