Just a couple of years ago, it seemed that space mining was inevitable. Analysts, tech visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that space mining was going to be big business. Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries backed by the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to take advantage of the predicted payoff. After all, the holy grail of asteroids, known as 16 Psyche, had an estimated worth of $10,000 quadrillion. But fast forward to 2022, and humanity has yet to commercially mine even a single asteroid. CNBC spoke to two California startups, AstroForge and TransAstra, about how they are trying to make space mining a reality and the challenges they face.
Chapters:
01:42 – Burst of the space-mining bubble
4:43 – A new understanding of space mining
7:15 – TransAstra
10:34 – AstroForge
13:47 – Challenges
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What Happened To Space Mining?
29 Comments
Now, can they use this tech to clean up space junk so that we aren't trapped in our own atmosphere?
The heartbreaking thought is, space should have been for the benefit of the world not just a single country.
I know that sounds crazy but if we could avoid the crazy arguments for ownership it would be something different. I highly doubt that there would be a great push to mine anything from space.
Imagine the possibilities and progress we'd have as a planet if we strictly kept outer space as neural ground.
SO government thinks they own the entire universe!!? Pure overreach and socialism.
As you see, the main problems companies that want to engage in asteroid mining are :
1) Identifying which asteroids have the materials: water, Helium, nickel- iron, platinum, that Earth industries desire;
2) developing the means to get to these asteroids and the system to mine them in a Zero-G environment; and
3) Working out an statutes with the present nation partnership that prohibit any company/government from declaring proprietary ownership of an asteroid it mines, even though they own the materials they gather from it.
Great overview of space mining.
I will be honest. This is as stupid as it sounds.
Space mining? Raw materials are cheap. Like really cheap. Do you know how much effort to extract things from below the ground? How about exploration? Transportation?
Damn. The more i think about this, the stupider this topic becomes
To make space mining reality, we must first make space truly accessible.
Imagine starting up a modern mining project without having trucks and trains. Right now space mining attempts would be like "hiking 2 weeks in wilderness to pick up a handful of pebbles and then hiking another 2 weeks to bring those pebbles home".
First we need cheap transportation, then space infrastructure. Only after that space mining can truly beging.
Once the asteriod is on earth can I can study for mircobe activities and how this foreign rocks interacts with our were own microbes.
Elon Musk makes more money selling futuristic idea, keeping up with the new fashions and promising inviable projects than getting actual good financial reports from Tesla in the last trimester.
Yes Tesla is doing fine, but Toyota makes more than three times the revenue and worths 12 times less.
Without this strategy to get into every single "new paradigm" adventure, Tesla and Musk would have never get the same fame and market value.
Do you remember Hyperloop?, the same big promises but a total failure.
Reality hit. We are decades away at best.
Proof that humans are increasingly more gullible and stupid. On earth Mining takes heavy machinery and advanced technology. Not to mention trained humans to operate the machinery. The cost to ship heavy machinery into space would be astronomical, and no human could survive the mission. And how would you get the heavy minerals back to earth down the gravity well. It's just plain insanity. Capture an asteroid in a bag? What drugs is that guy on. Those asteroids are travelling really fast and there's no sci-fi technology that comes anywhere close to being able to capture one. Its sheer fantasy. All these guys with way out there ideas are just trying to scam in investor money. Once they collect a ton of cash from the gullible, they'll scurry away into the night never to be seen from again.
All i have to say is Bahahahahaha.
Commercially viable space mining is a couple hundred years away, like nuclear fusion.
Space mining is meaningful only for in-space space industry. The reason for that is inherent cost of sending materials form Earth gravitational potential well up. So, for it to make wealth on Earth, first, space has to create equivalent value FOR Earth, but delivering high volume of anything from space to Earth has prohibitive costs. So it seems almost like a solution in search of a problem. Well, not quite, but it is a matter of scale. Right now, Earth has a defined demand for communication and sensing satellites in its orbit. Is this demand large enough to warrant making a large scale, autonomous, self sustaining space-based industry? What could be added to the list of services space provides to Earth?
(Clean) energy harvesting and beaming down comes to mind first. Abundance of affordable energy would allow us to solve our need for materials through now impractical energy-intensive methods (e.g. total recycling of waste, or extraction of elements from seawater).
Planetary defense from large impacts is not priority at the moment (based on our experience so far), but one day if it becomes priority we could be very grateful that we decided to build it back then.
Space industry (as client and provider of space mining) would shift limitations of scale of systems we can install and maintain throughout our solar system, including Earth's orbit.
In short, we can't use space mining because we are too thrifty customer, we don't dream big enough, we have limited wants, or we just haven't got enough value to offer in exchange, or in other words we don't want to give anyone any more advantage over us.
It would not be worth that much if it's all mined now would it🤔🤔🤔
7:48. "Our solar reflectors …" STOP – are you kidding me? Did this company do its homework? These asteroids are hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. What little sunlight anyone can capture at that distance is moot point. It would be ludicrous to suggest there's enough power there to drill/pulverize/chemically process space rocks. No, the only economically feasible energy source would be nuclear. But I do agree WATER would likely be the most valuable mineral to harvest in the early years of Space Mining. This would be the catalyst required to fuel the various spacecraft in far-ranging SM missions.
I miss Makenzie Sigalos
This would be cool but I don’t see this happening anytime soon. At least 30 years out minimum
I was thinking that asteroid mining isn't going to happen until we have a space based refinery
It sounds like he's thinking of building on an asteroid, but I was thinking more the moon. We could do a satellite as well and it might be more flexible as for the ability to move it around. But a large refinery would be difficult as its own stand alone satellite. The moon would give partial gravity, without so much that it would be difficult to lift off to go mine asteroids. It would also allow for a much larger case than what you might be able to build on an asteroid or satellite. The issue with size is that different materials have to be refined differently, so it would make more sense to build a large base on the moon that could refine multiple types of ores. I.E. a steel mill can not easily process gold or silver or even aluminum without shutting down to make major changes to the equipment
You need moon base to sustain space mining.. earth has strong gravity and atmosphere very hard to bring all those equipment in space…
dude mine the moon
This should be a 2 second video. Second One: What happened to Space Mining? Second two: They were 40 years too early. Fin.
Welcome to science fiction.
Rock and Stone to the bone.
Mine an asteroid and then return the metals back down to the Earth ?
Are you nuts ? It's obvious that the first thing that should be done is to build the infrastructure to process and refine what is mined at a Space Orbiting Refinery (S.O.R.)
The resulting product would be much more valuable for orbital construction because it is already in orbit. No need to spend millions of dollars launching it back up to orbit. Also, once a Space Orbiting Refinery (S.O.R.) is established, then all the clutter in Low Earth Orbit (L.E.O.) is no longer space junk. Now it is gold ripe for mining and refining into a product used for orbital construction. Why don't these supposedly brilliant people think of the obvious, with dollar signs staring them in the face.
So would it be a good idea to start buying shares in so space mining start ups for my grand kids??
The ultimate goal of start up in USA is to sell out to Big Businesses. The ultimate goal of the BB is to take these companies public and make ungodly amount of money through IPOs. Why go through the trouble to mine space rocks for profit when the bank underwriting your IPO can make projections out of thin air?
why not moon?
There's a reason diamond companies artificially limit supply. As soon as you flood the market with that much supply the value would take a huge drop. The projections may only be considering the value at the current going rate. After the market asjusts the value would be a small fraction of what it is now. They would basically have to do only a single mining mission and then be careful to trickle in supply to keep demand from plummeting.