Is Space Mining Feasible?

Roland Piquepaille writes "There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Earth? Space.com says that mining specialists and space engineers, who gathered at the latest Space Resources Roundtable, think the answer is yes. But there are many issues to solve. The first one is to build a permanent base. Then, you have to live on space resources. The article looks at other issues, such as strategic and economic potentials, before examining legal concerns about working conditions and extraterrestrial resource ownership. As the article says about lawyers, it 'turns out you can't leave Earth without them.' This summary contains more details and a rendering of a possible commercial Lunar base."

Comments

Yes

[ErikZ]

But why would you want to? The cost of raw materials on the planet have been getting cheaper and cheaper. The only reason to do space mining is to reduce the costs of getting materials into orbit.

Space mining to get materials for things you want to build in space is fantastic. No more soda can thin walls in your space stations.

new triangle trade

[kippy]

Dr. Robert Zubrin has suggested that there could be a new traingle trade with the astriod belt, Mars and Earth. Since it takes a lot less effort to get to the belt from Mars, a base there makes the most sense.

Earth -> high tech to Mars
Mars -> mining equiptment, low tech goods and food to the belt
Astroid belt -> trillions in materials and H3 to Earth

Yet another good reason to get NASA to make Mars a goal.

Re:Let's make the moon a park

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

Better idea: Let's move all the dirty, polluting, carcinogenous crap to orbit and to the Moon, and make the Earth a park.

Moon mining no, asteroid mining yes

[amightywind]

Mining the moon or Mars makes a lot less sense than mining asteroids for lots of reasons.

• Near earth asteroids have widely varying compositions. Some are entirely metallic with high concentrations of valuable strategic metals. The moon and Mars have relatively metal poor surfaces in comparison.
• Asteroids are accessable. IT requires far less energy to travel to and from Earth and an asteroid that the moon or mars. This should make it less expensive to transport mined materials back to earth.
• Polical reasons. If China unilaterally set up shop on the moon for mining, the rest of the world would be rightly up in arms. If they grabbed an asteroid who would care? (It might even assuage their anger over losing Taiwan!)
• There are lots of asteroids but 1 moon and 1 Mars. You can trash thousands of asteroids and no one would care. Because of the lack of significant erosion on the Moon or Mars any mining activity will quickly and irreversably mar the surface. I would argue that the scientific and aesthetic value of a minimally disturbed planetary surface would be worth more in the long run.

Economics, Economics, Economics

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Folks we are all forgetting supply and demand.

If we suddenly truck in tons of precious metals from space, and whet our appetite for them, the cease becomming precious. Whoever mines space will have a momentary blip of profit before the costs of spacetravel exceed the newly lowered price of the materials.

The reason we don't use the gold standard anymore is in part to prevent booms and busts in our currency caused by people flooding the market with new sources of gold. (The american dollar took a bath after the California and the Yukon gold rushes.)

So just forget about any long-term sustainable industries built on dragging what are presently exotic materials to Earth from space.