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John S. Lewis On the Space Commodities Market
John S. Lewis -- Deep Space Industries' chief scientist, author, and University of Arizona professor -- speaks in an interview with Air & Space magazine about the practicalities and possibilities of deep-space mining, a topic on which he is unapologetically bullish. He points out, though, that some of the artist's-conception version of space mining skips over some of the economic realities of getting back to Earth metals that are scarce here. From the interview: But—and here’s the big conditional—if we develop an industrial capability in space such that we’re processing large amounts of metals to make solar-powered satellites, for example, then as a byproduct, we would have very substantial quantities of platinum-group metals, which are extremely valuable. So if you have a market for the iron and the nickel in space, that would liberate the precious metals to be brought back to Earth. So the scheme is not based on the idea of retrieving platinum-group metals—that is simply gravy."
One of the reasons metals from the Platinum Group are precious is that they're scarce. If we recover as much of those elements as he's talking about, they won't be scarce any longer, which means that they won't be that precious. Of course, that's not a bad thing because there are lots and lots of other uses for them besides jewelry.
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We don't, not without encasing the equipment in some sort of unobtanium hull to protect from the temperature and pressure. Mining at any depth on Earth is *hard*. The appeal of asteroid mining is that they appear to be conglomerations of relatively pure ores needing minimal refining to be useful - far easier (in principle) than refining Earth-based ores. It's only that pesky industry in a zero-G vacuum thing that we don't have any experience with slowing us down.
Asteroid mining isn't a question of not having resources on Earth - the combined mass of the entire asteroid belt is estimated at only 5% of that of the Moon. It's a question of having resources available outside a deep gravity well that will allow us to expand beyond our planet. As they said, the platinum and other "valuable" materials are just gravy that help make the early "bootstrapping" stages of development more economically appealing - it's primarily the bulk construction elements such as iron, silicon, carbon, etc. that are truly valuable in space.
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> The appeal of asteroid mining is that they appear to be conglomerations of relatively pure ores
For Platinum-group metals, relatively pure means ~15 ppm in asteroids. On Earth, the vast majority of these metals sank to the core, because they are "iron-loving" (mix well with Iron), and that's where the Iron went. Metallic asteroids are the result of protoplanets large enough to *also* develop iron cores, but later collisions broke them up and exposed the core bits, where you can reach them.
Nonetheless, when you do the math, 15 parts per million is frosting on the value of asteroid rock. Most of it is in the bulk elements you can use in space directly. Space is already a $323 billion industry, so there is a lot of value in not having to launch stuff at great expense.