Could asteroid mining be made viable if there were a resource rich asteroid in orbit just beyond the moon?

Question

Two of the biggest issues with asteroid mining is the issue of actually getting materials from the the asteroid in question back to earth, and the relative abundance of resources on earth vs in space. However, how would the economics be changed if there were an asteroid like 16 Psyche in orbit just far enough beyond the moon to have a stable orbit, how would the economics change?

The technology available is largely that of the mid 2010s but with NASA/EPA going through with the solar power satellite program, with the expected rate of 2 new solar power satellites a year built every year between 2000 and 2030. This means the space infrastructure you would expect associate with an undertaking that large underway and launch craft similar to the Rockwell Star Raker and/or Boeing Space Freighter in use and the capability to build more for other uses. This means drastically lower launch costs and an existing in-space market to start off with even if very limited relative to earth.

Crashing the market isn't a concern as how much can be extracted will be monitored by a government agency trying to keep the commodity market on earth intact. The same agency also provides grants and contracts to provide funding to help develop necessary technology.

Answer 1

Depends on the specific resource. Gold, yes, sure. Anything else, no, not really.

The fundamental problem is that transportation capacity from near-Earth orbit down to the surface is severely limited. Let's say you arrange with SpaceX to launch one Super Heavy booster carrying one Starship every day, and each Starship can bring back 100 tonnes of stuff. (It cannot, but let's assume SpaceX continues to refine the design so that it can.) That's 100 tonnes of stuff per day, or 36,500 tonnes per year. Suppose that you pay 50 million US dollars for each mission.

What kind of resource is that which has such a low yearly production rate?

• Iridium! Worldwide production of iridium is some 7 or 8 tonnes per year. Price is about 150,000 US dollars per kg. If you find a market for it, 100 tonnes of iridium would bring you 15 billion dollars. Almost pure profit.

  Unfortunately, the worldwide consumption of iridium is also some 7 tonnes per year. 100 tonnes of iridium would cover the industry needs for about 14 years...

• Gold! Worldwide production of gold is about 3,000 tonnes per year. Price is about 60,000 US dollars per kg. Each Starship bringing 100 tonnes of gold will earn 6 billion US dollars. Almost pure profit.

  Unfortunately, by increasing tenfold the amount of gold availabe per year, the prices will surely crash, down to somewhere near the "natural" price of about 10,000 USD/kg. (Estimated by taking the 35 US dollars per troy ounce stipulated in the Bretton Woods agreement and applying the inflation from 1965 to present.) Still, each Starship with 100 tonnes of gold will net about 1 billion dollars. Not bad.

• Silver? Worldwide production of silver is some 28,000 tonnes per year, comparable with the 36,000 tonnes which can imaginably be brought down by using one SpaceX Starship per day. But unfortunately the price of precious silver is only about 600 US dollars per kg, 600,000 per tonne. Each Starship bringing 100 tonnes of silver will earn a revenue of about 60 million dollars; minus 50 million dollars cost of the mission remains a profit of 10 million dollars. Maybe good enough, maybe not.

• Anything else is not really worth bringing down from orbit...

Answer 2

Ok, yes. But with caveats. Building on AlexP's answer, you can't rely on existing high value, high rarity prices alone. And given the existing rarity of those elements it's unlikely that your asteroid would have tonnes of the materials. But that's fine.

Because we're going to exploit the price difference based on location.

A litre of water in London is worth 2-3 pounds. In a desert... it's somewhat higher. In orbit, the cost is approximately the launch price in 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds. How much is dictated by your allowed tech level.

At which point what you do is mine it and use the material to support your other endeavours... and you start with oxygen.

But, I hear you cry, that's free! To which I say "lol". Most of our current large set of available rockets use liquid oxygen... tonnes and tonnes. Imagine if you only had to make it to a low orbit, not even truly a stable one, and then feed off of a huge tanker full of the stuff. Once you've taken enough, you (and the tanker) move off to somewhere more civilised.

But each tonne has saved you 10-100k pounds.

At this point you've cracked a very, very large part of the Rocket Equation. You have partial refueling - more than half the weight of your propellant is oxygen. This makes everything else you want to do easier, while at the same time giving you free building materials to do something silly. Oh, I don't know, rotating station anyone?

But you're making a "profit" with just the oxygen, which you can guarantee is present on your rock, bound to the metals. Because it's one of the most common elements.

Heck, worst case, sell the iron in the NASA gift shop in the form of plaques. "I visited NASA and all I got was this poxy asteroid"

Answer 3

If: Water Ice.

This might not seem overly impressive at first sight, but think... The cost of getting mass into orbit is impressively high at present and takes many trips to get anything substantially heavy up there. The celestial body doesn't need to be pure ice, but perhaps not far beneath the crust it's to be found.

Rocket-fuel in space - the ice can of course be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen ready for compressing into the fuel tanks of exploratory craft, colonizers - even the asteroid itself could be nudged into a different orbit if thought desirable. Indefinite-stay on a space-laboratory would then become trivial. The moon could be more-easily mined for minerals with having easy access to the essentials, water, oxygen - leading to access to fabricated parts in space; parts for further craft and infrastructure to be built. Lunar tourism might begin. Long-term exploration of the outer solar system might start again.

Answer 4

FRAME CHALLENGE:

If you can grab even one decently-sized asteroid, and somehow tow it from post lunar orbit, to low Earth Orbit, economics no longer matter, because you now hold a tremendous weapon of mass destruction over the entire planet.

The rock that killed the dinosaurs was barely 10 km long, that's a pebble by asteroid standards. The Asteroid belt has beauties in the 200-900 km size range, and uncountable number of asteroids in the dozen-kilometer range. Park any of these baddies on a convenient orbit so that the Earthers can see it on the sky, and you can negotiate any economic treaty you want.

Any kind of "mine the asteroids" scenario where the mining is worth it, becomes "do as we say or the rock drops" scenario pretty easily. In fact, large part of the cost and technological effort would need to be put into not doing it by accident. Sending down 1000 tons of palladium ore down the gravity well would net you nice profit, but not so when the hill-sized palladium chunk hits Baltimore at 20 kilometers per second. That might make people upset with you (albeit briefly).

Answer 5

The dirt-cheap parts are the most valuable ones

So you have a giant chunk of iron and nickel in space. And you want to build big structures (solar sattelites) in high orbit.

I say, forget about rare earth elements, your market is right there, if you manage to refine iron to manufacture structural parts in space and ship it to orbit. Sell a megaton of steel beams directly in geosynchronous orbit rather than a few grams of platinum on earth.

The delta-v required to bring the stuff there should be tiny compared to getting it up there from earth, or getting it from the asteroid belt - which energetically would still be better, but a logistical nightmare to send humans there, or to make it 100% automated from the very start.

A moon distance away however, there it is feasible to send a human crew for initial setup of and later for maintenance.

This could then kickstart an orbital industry that strifes to manufacture more and more complicated parts in orbit to become even less dependent on launching heavy and bulky stuff from earth.

Answer 6

16 Psyche weighs in at 2 x 10^16 tonnes so is not going to be moved by any human intervention any time soon and perhaps ever. So the only option would be set up a facility on or near the surface for mining what is required.

So first gamble how much do you want to invest in new space refining technology? Is it better to simply drill into the asteroid and bring the spoil home to refine on Earth? Or is it better spend even more money to concentrate specific elements from the asteroid?

Second gamble how much will it cost to send ships to the asteroid (including refilling in orbit), set up the mining operation in micro gravity (robotically?) and send the materials back to Earth (and maintain the mining facility)?

Third gamble how profitable would it actually be and how well would it stand up to the vagaries of the markets especially to the sentiments of the gold market (are you feeling lucky?).

Fourth if it is profitable, what's to stop other nations cashing in and ultimately crashing the markets (regardless of what Congress direct).

I doubt that any such operation would be viable currently. The amount of initial investment that would needed and the level of risks involved would be too great. May be come back in 50-100 years and we can review it then.

Answer 7

Absolutely, but not for terrestrial industry, more for having at hand resources to build space infrastructure. There would probably be a race to claim it for one nation or group of nations. It would be a massive savings if we don't have to launch everything up out of our gravity well if the resources are right there already. (still would need to launch material to build the infrastructure for the initial refining and manufacturing)