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While many still see space mining as science fiction, news about steps towards the creation of a resources industry and manufacturing supply chain out off-Earth continues to grab headlines.
The latest news come from global recruitment expert Fircroft, which specializes in the oil and gas industry, and which recently put together a telling infographic outlining the main facts and figures that make space mining way more than a pipe dream:
8 Comments
MiniBulk Inc.
Broken image link, folks.
MINING.com Editors
Thanks! It should be fixed now.
LAMB
And we are to believe this from an Oil & Gas outfit – the last time an Oil & Gas company got involved in MINING, they failed dismally. Lets hear from real MINING COMPANIES .
Kevin J Ashley
All of these “discussions” about asteroid mining conveniently leave out processing of the ore to achieve a saleable product. For example, these asteroids might have a lot of platinum, but they are not pure platinum. Somehow the material must be beneficiated/concentrated/smelted/refined. Try doing that without the air, water, power, gravity, explosives, lubricants, etc. used here on Earth. While there are some reasonable flowsheets for recovering water and gases from the lunar soil in the lunar environment, I have yet to see any proposed flowsheet for processing metallic ores on asteroids. (And hauling an asteroid back to Earth for processing begs the question of how do you get it down to the surface without a catastrophic event ensuing.)
Mark Harder
It won’t solve all problems, of course, but would it be feasible to truck the stuff to the moon for processing there? I would think that with the moon’s lower gravity, landing an asteroid and shipping the concentrate to Earth would make for a more efficient in energy budget. I can’t come up with a metallurgical process for PGM refining in the absence of gravity and water, as Kevin mentioned. You could generate magnetism, even high temperature supermagnetism using solar power. Electrolytic methods are possible as long as you have enough water that you can recover quantitatively. But, please, please don’t take this opportunity to trash the place at will.
James Orsulak
Leaving platinum processing out is not an industry mistake, it’s just not necessary at this point. Platinum from asteroids garners a lot of attention because it is a high value precious metal. However platinum is not the primary target, and will not be for many years. Water is the ore of interest for asteroid miners (mentioned in the infographic above). Water for human consumption (e.g. the ISS), Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen are the the primary saleable products. The latter is high value rocket propellant and has an existing (and growing) market in space today for lifting payloads from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) where most communications satellites live. There are proposed methods for extracting metals in zero G, but is all academic and obviously unproven at this point. When the industry does reach the point of processing metallic components, the saleable product will be feedstocks for orbital 3D printers which are building large structures in space. Returning material to the surface return to the surface of the Earth may never actually happen. Although if it does, there are some interesting ideas on how to do it…. Final point – the $1B cost figure in the info graphic is misleading. OsirisREX is a flagship (read: EXPENSIVE) scientific NASA mission and is not focused on cost-effective extraction of product (water). Quoting the cost of NASA missions as an analog for privately funded missions to source water from asteroids makes little sense. These are two very different animals, with very different cost structures and mission design parameters.
WSMCR
These things will take time, and up front for sure it will be expensive, but once the hurtle is overcome it will be a true bonanza. Robotics will allow for at site synthesis and at site extraction much improving the economy of the situation. (Also reason water and other volatile organics have great value). We believe in the future there will be a new breed a miner, but only if we affirm the right.
Visit http://www.WSMCR.org to learn more about what we would like to do. Thanks for your time.
Ricky Rogers
someone needs to layoff the Space Engineers game for a while… cant beat my spaceship on youtube anyways (space caddy)