NASA On Mining Extraterrestrial Sources

FortKnox writes "Looks like something from the game "Homeworld", but NASA discusses mining ore from planets/asteroids or any other source of "Cosmic Dirt"." I remember debating this idea in high school debate - it's a wonderful idea.

Comments

Recent IEEE Spectrum article on Asteroid Mining

[orac2]

I'm some shameless self promotion, /. reader's may be interested to read this article by Mark Ingebretson in August's issue IEEE Spectrum on the topic - he talks about how water, not metal, is the most likely first choice for a mining economy.

Asteroids = $$$$$

[cryptochrome]

I don't know if anyone remembers this earlier slashdot article, which also discussed the matter of mining space. It also mentioned that one near earth asteroid (NEO 3554 Amun, about 2km wide) that was worth about 20 trillion dollars. Mind you that's in today's market, but I'd say there is more than enough economic incentive to go for it. I don't understand why NASA hasn't already - just one rock could solve their many budgetary woes for years to come, would be a tremendously telegenic venture, and would stimulate practical space technologies tremendously...

Uh. No. Re:mine WHAT?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

"I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard."

Actually the costs to LAUNCH is "only" ~$2600/kg. That's $2.6 million/tonne, that's 3 orders of magnitude less than you quoted. And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.

But that's launch. There's many reasons to think that space transport is going to be many times cheaper than that- if you use space resources to move around; IN space, rather than getting INTO space, the costs are much, much lower. For one thing, reusable interplanetary craft are pretty trivial to design- fully reusable launch vehicles are harder.

Incidentally, some materials are 'ungodly' expensive. Check out the price of platinum group materials- they run at over $500/ounce.

Oh yeah, BTW the underlying cost of launching something into space are under $10/kg. That's more than the fuel costs. We're a long way from that at the moment- but from my studies, there's a pretty convincing argument that that's mainly because the launch rate is so low right now (the costs are, surprisingly, roughly fixed, and amortise across the amount of launched mass).

I'm expecting the launch cost to go down by atleast 4x in the next ten years, and to do the same in the ten years after that. That will put Space Tourism in the ballpark of a Concorde flight.