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klystron t1_j60tmyp wrote

>Space is the place, as Sun Ra famously said, and it most certainly has plenty to offer, including rare-earth metals like platinum, gold, iridium, palladium, and osmium, among other minerals.

According to the Wikipedia article on rare-earth elements, and this article in Tech Metals Research, none of those metals are rare-earth elements.

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psychothumbs OP t1_j60umi3 wrote

People are so endlessly confused that "rare earth" elements are not really that rare, while the actually rare elements are not "rare earth". Seems like this author is trying to say "metals that are rare on earth" but put it in a jargony way that they did not really understand.

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klystron t1_j60xkot wrote

We live in a world that is increasingly dominated by science and technology, but journalists seem to think it is beneath them to learn anything concerning the subjects they are writing about.

I did some web searching on the author of this article, George Dvorsky, and couldn't find any scientific qualifications other than "bioethicist".

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psychothumbs OP t1_j61qejo wrote

Plus copy editing standards have gone through the floor for both fact checking and simple spelling and grammar errors.

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PreFalconPunchDray t1_j61cnd0 wrote

I'm guessing they are hoping to find gigantic pure nuggets of these 'rare' earth elements so to sidestep and corner markets on earth. But then if something like that happens, then we immediately become a post-scarcity society wrt to those metals. Then what? I think that's the point - they find these 'nugget's of pure metals (as pure as something like that can be ok< I have no idea>) and if they find a large enough chunk, then now they have a lotta things they can pull off - all sorts of 'secondary' things they can now build since the rare earths are now cheaper than water.

You want a solid platinum car? go nuts. etc etc. All those metals are still useful, but we'd have to settle with them being too cheap to sell direclty, but the since they are not worth it in a pure form, doesn't they aren't useful.

Meh, just how I've mused about it.

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Sweezy_McSqueezy t1_j62jrko wrote

You make some good points, but I want to nit pick one thing: 'post scarcity' is not a real thing, and basically never will be. When expensive things fall in price dramatically, we generally increase our consumption of them dramatically. But, efforts are still made to use it efficiently at the margins.

One example would be screws. Screws used to be very expensive at all levels (the materials, the labor input, etc.) but are now extremely abundant and cheap (at least 1000x cheaper, maybe 1000000x). But, as a mechanical engineer, I can tell you that we definitely still try to use them economically. We try to use fewer of them in designs, we try to standardize them, and choose ones that are less expensive.

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Galmir_it t1_j63huft wrote

Ah yes, my beratnas finally gonya behave like a real beltalowda.

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Asakari t1_j61gcbg wrote

A majority of the first asteroid mining(s) should be used to gather and sell water for fuel, space infrastructure, and manufacturing.

The other materials coming as a bonus, possibly used to contain the water in transport.

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dentalstudent t1_j620038 wrote

There's a fiction book delta V where the first manned asteroid mining mission is to mine a bunch of materials and fuels shipped back to earth orbit to sell in space to other space startups

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danielravennest t1_j65c0xr wrote

There is no need to send people to mine asteroids, it is not like they are going to be wielding a pick-axe. The two sample missions we sent to nearby asteroids Bennu and Ryugu found they were "rubble piles" rather than a solid chunk of rock or metal. Just a big pile of rocks loosely held by gravity.

So "mining" consists of sending a robotic probe to an asteroid of this type, slipping a sturdy bag around a suitable sized rock, pulling the drawstring tight, and flying away. The bag is to prevent loose bits from falling off and possibly damaging the probe.

My math shows a 10 ton probe with 26 tons of propellant can haul 1000 tons back from a nearby asteroid. Since some asteroid types have up to 20% carbon compounds and water, which can be turned into more propellant, the mining process can be self-fueling after the first trip.

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dentalstudent t1_j65rkx7 wrote

I agree there's no point in sending humans, that was just the plot. I think what it got right was the idea that it's best to use the mining products in space since there is no point to shipping them planetside

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PandaEven3982 t1_j61hbys wrote

Possible. But umless needed, it might get cracked into O2 and propellant. You can always recombine, the energy is probably gonna be really cheap. I've always thought smelting on the earth crossing returning orbit would be profitable, but certainly not now at bootstrap time.

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Kubrick_Fan t1_j643ynr wrote

I used to do social media work for Planetary Resources. Had their kickstarter cube sat not been destroyed during the Antares launch in 2014 I'd still be working with them and they would like have been launching this year for testing

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danielravennest t1_j65cdda wrote

If you can show there is a market for the products, existing mining companies have more than enough funds to finance such projects.

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danielravennest t1_j65aq9k wrote

Aside from collectibles and science, the point of asteroid mining isn't to bring stuff back to Earth. It is to replace the high cost of launching stuff from Earth.

Let's say the Starship rocket works as intended and can fly for $20 million a launch. It takes about five tanker flights plus the cargo launch to get ~120 tons to the Moon's neighborhood. So $120 million for 120 tons is $1 million per ton. If you can mine usable products from asteroids for less than this, you come out ahead.

Metallic asteroids contain about 15-50 parts per million of the "Platinum group metals" (the ones below iron, cobalt, and nickel on the Periodic Table). Parts per million is the same as grams per ton, so 15-50 grams per ton. Average PGM price is around $50/gram, so market value is $750-2500/ton.

They are alloyed with the three base metals as ~90% iron, 1% cobalt, and 9% nickel (the proportions vary by sample). So first, you have to extract the PGMs from a chunk of iron alloy, and second a little added carbon turns the iron alloy into a decent steel alloy. There are other asteroid types (the carbonaceous ones) with carbon, so that's not hard.

Now your ton of metallic asteroid is worth $1 million for structural steel in space, because that's the launch cost you avoid for not launching structural parts from Earth. The value as structural metal is worth way way more than the small amount of precious metals in it.

You can try to separate out the PGMs before leaving the asteroid, or afterwards so you can use both the iron alloy and the PGMs, but I highly doubt you can process it in space for the $750-2500/ton market value. For comparison, the price of hot-rolled ordinary steel on Earth is $775/ton right now.

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SailingNaked t1_j65dsfv wrote

Great explanation, but with an oligopsony market, is that structural steel really worth $1m/ton?

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danielravennest t1_j65fya5 wrote

NASA is like 1/16th of the space market. It is much more diverse than most people realize, and most of it is services, not launch and building satellites.

I used the steel as an example, because it is the same place you would extract the Platinum Group Metals. The first space-mined products are likely to be (a) bulk rock for shielding, and (b) water and carbon compounds for propellants and life support.

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SailingNaked t1_j65hx8p wrote

I agree.

My question was more of the economics of leaving the market in space instead of back to earth. There are very few buyers that have the capabilities of using material produced in space, and none of them have anything in space currently that can utilize that material.

If you make structural steel in space, you can't price it at what it would cost to send it up. There's no manufacturing in space yet. You'd have to price it below what it would cost to send up and build said manufacturing capabilities than it would just sending up the finished product.

The issue still remains, the only profitable market is on earth... for now.

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danielravennest t1_j68ueh8 wrote

> There are very few buyers that have the capabilities of using material produced in space, ... There's no manufacturing in space yet. ... build said manufacturing capabilities

Well, I'm working on that. Check the "view history" tab on any page of that book to see who wrote it.

All your words that I quoted above are correct. Aside from robot arms and a 3D printer on the ISS, there is essentially no industrial capacity in space yet. Factories of the kind we build on Earth are too heavy to launch into space. So how do you get started?

A "seed factory", as I describe in that unfinished book, is a starter set of machines and tools that are used to make more machines to expand itself. This is where asteroid metal and carbon come in. Iron is by far the most important industrial metal, and 98% goes into making steel (iron with added carbon). Metallic asteroids are already in native form. They don't have to have the oxygen removed like iron ore on Earth.

The added machines are first to increase scale from the starter set, and second to make machines that work with other materials (glass, aluminum, etc.). You will still have to deliver some materials and parts from Earth while you bootstrap, but a lot less than if you tried to bring everything from Earth.

The starter machines can be as light as 20 kg, so certainly a single 100 ton Starship payload should be able to deliver a functioning machine shop with usable capacity.

You wouldn't jump into this without doing some R&D. We need to fly some asteroid retrieval missions in the ton rather than ~1 kg range coming back on the Osiris-REX mission. Ideally you want several different asteroid type samples. Then you feed those materials into pilot-scale processing machines and figure out what works and what doesn't.

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[deleted] t1_j62udqn wrote

Limited supply on earth keeps theses prices up, bringing these resources down the well will impact prices. Hmmm

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DeepSpaceNebulae t1_j63om9e wrote

Which is why when new deposits are discovered, no one makes any money…. Wait

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OkProof136 t1_j63qvli wrote

Of you control enough of something you make the price

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SailingNaked t1_j63s15c wrote

Only works for precious things... the market's normal supply and demand determines the price of commodity.

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OkProof136 t1_j63sjdo wrote

Supply is determined by what is availible for purchase. If whatever was harvested was only sold a bit at a time, the price might not crash all that hard

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SailingNaked t1_j63uimy wrote

I'm not disagreeing with you. If you controlled your supply of precious space material z, yes you could control the price of "space material z."

But if you pull space iron and try to control the supply, you're going to have a hard sell of your space iron. It's not special or precious. There might be the odd ball billionaire that might want to make a stupid "truck" from "space iron," but that's your only market.

If you're a cinema, you say no outside food or drink. Sure some people buy the $15 popcorn, but pretty much everyone sneaks in their own candies and drink.

Long story short - fettered markets are an exception to supply and demand.

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Oh_ffs_seriously t1_j668baq wrote

Hope they're going to fsre better than Planetary Resources or Deep Space Industries.

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Decronym t1_j63tvpy wrote

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CLPS|Commercial Lunar Payload Services| |GEO|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |NET|No Earlier Than|

|Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |Starlink|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|

^(4 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 26 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8487 for this sub, first seen 27th Jan 2023, 14:57]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

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akuma_colossus t1_j63wftx wrote

Love to see this the day deadspace remake is released haha

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Crankin_And_Spankin t1_j61itpd wrote

I applaud the ambition…However, anyone can “plan” a mission and secure some VC funding. At the end of the day, the only commercial space company launching anything past GEO anytime soon is SpaceX so…Yeah I think asteroid mining is a little ways away.

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zeeblecroid t1_j61sb2c wrote

You should probably read the article before posting comments like that.

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ERROR_396 t1_j61q45j wrote

I would actually have to disagree since Rocket lab is sending two photon spacecraft to Mars next year

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ChefExellence t1_j63j6vb wrote

The article literally says that they're launching in October with a CLPS Lander as a ride-share.

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grounded_astronut t1_j643wtb wrote

SpaceX has no interest in building anything other than transportation and information architecture. Musk has spoken about how the company won't operate any bases on Mars or the moon, but will be happy to sell rides. ... And they have done just that by selling two rides to this company AstroForge for their asteroid mining development and exploration missions.

Musk talks a lot though. If Gwen Shotwell starts talking about SpaceX developing any new products or mission profiles, you can have much more confidence in it. She sticks to the "SpaceX is a transportation company" line.

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danielravennest t1_j65d7ci wrote

> She sticks to the "SpaceX is a transportation company" line.

Thousands of Starlink internet satellites are making them an Internet provider more than a rocket company. I expect them to chase any business that their launch cost advantage makes profitable.

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