Deep sea mining

only iridium and platinum group metals are worth the expense. a single falcon 9 launch and dragon capsule can bring back enough metal to profit in the millions.

so it is a matter of moving a sufficient asteroid to LEO. then automating the mining and refining in orbit. spreading the cost of the asteroid movement and mining out over decades.

Space mining is more likely to simply massively devalue "rare" metals.

rare earths aren't that rare. they just require a lot of cost to extract them from other ores.

China's control of the market keeps anyone else from starting up profitable rare earth refining.

Which means electronics production stays in China or china friendly nations.

more importantly, their refinement is dirty as fuck. we can pollute space all we want and it doesn't really matter. thats the one real benefit of a lunar or mars industry base.

It may be more profitable to bring back less, or to sequester what is brought back to achieve market control, a la the diamond cartel De Beers

If it was profitable to search for and mine rare earths then people would be doing that on the planet

Asteroid mining is a meme by people who don't understand delta-v costs or travel time in space.

Iridium, rare on earth, a lot less so in space. Used in a lot of modern electronics.

Robots and orbital facilities.
cheaper iridium from space means people will find more uses for iridium, driving up demand. prices will go back up some, but to the pre space mining level.

You would need a team to rocket it, use the probe, have a bunch of scientists study for YEARS of scans, then finally fire another rocket to robotically mine the asteroid AND return safely with a profitable payload worth reinvesting in multiple flights. Oil rigs are low maintenance overall given the amount of goods a single one can produce with relative ease.

you move the asteroid to earth orbit. using the same automated refinery to process the ore.

right now on land mining is cheaper
but offshore mining could be good for the environment, no digging necessary
metals accumulate on ocean ridges in nodules
it's just a matter of going down there and picking them up

i have money invested in a couple mining companies in Alaska that look like they are going to get their EPA permit holds lifted

That assumes
>you find something big enough with enough ore
>spend enough time to get it into a safe orbit
>get the world to agree slinging a meteor towards earth is a good idea
>figure out a way to cheaply and safely mine it

It's just not profitable with the current supplies more easily and cheaply obtained on earth

I think you replied to the wrong person

None of these rare earth metals exist in true scarcity

10 years ago the prices were rock bottom due to an oversupply of iridium

Asteroid mining is a meme, even for rare earths, unless some magic near earth asteroid is found we won't be doing any mining of asteroids.

The sort of mass space launch needed for doing space industries will also reduce the cost of launch to something similar to the cost of an intercontinental plane flight.

>similar to the cost of an intercontinental plane flight
youtube.com/watch?v=J1MAg0UAAHg

Giant multi-billion dollar constructions are the last thing needed for cheap space flight

You build a rocket designed to fly every day, just like a plane, using the cheapest fuel(methane & LOX), thats enough

Next step is some sort of beamed power augmenting conventional rocketry

the whole point of those constructions are to be the equivalent of an airport
You can't just fly a jumbo jet off the highway, you need a damn good runway to do it
same with space, just more infrastructure to put down, compared to airports, but same thing when you look at it

While it'd be wonderful to get those cheap rockets, the numbers are not in our favour, thus we need to build the megastructures that will ease them as much as possible
Flying through the atmosphere drives those costs up, The point of the launch loop is to give you orbital velocity as well as bringing you above the atmosphere, making fuel costs being just a little bit for that last bit, and what you use in space proper
Unless we get something like metallic hydrogen available, or something of similar power, we'll need to use a launch assist method

>more profitable and easier to mine somewhere else
So prove it fagot. Go mine some ass show me how easy and profitable it is. Meanwhile, back on earth, there are rednecks mucking sand off the bearing sea making millions from gold flakes.

ok, gib some industry to work with an a few dozen rockets
It'll make good money, as there's trillions of tons of everything up there, the startup costs are just a bitch

>you need a damn good runway to do it
The runway is the least cost, you could run jumbo jets off rivers and lakes and ocean harbors if you wanted to(same with rockets)

Any sort of flat real estate works.
A launch pad for a rocket is the same situation, there is no law of nature that says it has to be expensive. Nor that it can't be used multiple times a day.

Nothing involved in space infrastructure NEEDS to be as expensive as it is.

Governments spend big money on airports as pork programs, not as necessary costs.

>Flying through the atmosphere drives those costs up,
The fuel costs of taking a payload to orbit are negligible
So you need something like 20 times your weight in fuel to reach orbit, when you are paying 100 bucks a ton, thats pretty cheap.

Says the potato who does not understand what a mass driver is or how it could be used to return shit to earth nearly for free.

Mining the moon or mars would come well before any complex asteriod mining. Trying to track down asteriods and harvest them would be silly and overly complex given the limitations facing it currently

are you being dense on purpose

the runway example was not the fucking runway itself, it was the concept that infrastructure is a good thing to have when you want to do a thing

The launch loop video in question had a price tag of roughly 2 billion, which is hilariously tiny compared to the spending of any space age government, and is good enough at what it does to do it many times, like an airport does

and the rocket costs are not just fuel, but the multiple stages of rocket that you lose, even if you're saving the first stage and reusing it
the whole bloody point was to turn that 20 times your weight in fuel into 5 times, or even less, by taking a hard part, getting up to speed through air drag, out of the equation entirely

Less fuel needed = More payload sent = same amount of launches does leagues more

We don't have such a mass driver on earth today, but it'll be so easy to send it 1 year away in space, to be operated all remotely

>rare earth metals from deep sea mining
Fucking why? Why do something so extremely expensive when there's plenty of good locations in the US on land?

PS: The reason why neither will happen is because such deposits are associated with thorium, which is currently regulated as nuclear waste in the US, which is insane.

You don't NEED to lose any stage of a rocket

You don't spend billions trying to save on a negligible part of the cost of something.
Launch loops are a fucking meme that can't even physically be built

It would be easier to develop effect deep sea mining for rare metal deposits than ever trying to get shit from space

there are no "rare metal deposits"
thats the whole problem of rare metals

Deep sea mining will poison huge swaths of the ocean too

thank you sir for confirming that you are retarded and do not actually understand how these things work

First your full of shit, second your retarded, third your wrong.

youtube.com/watch?v=i737rM6FxqE

We can already get spectral data of asteroids. What we really need are actual physical samples to figure out what the spectra corresponds to.

Only one mission has done this, and two are on the way. Trouble is transit times to asteroids are rather long.

you studied a plant/fish/whatever, the engineer designed and orchestrated the construction of a useful actual thing in the real world.

not sure why you think yours was better.

on the other hand we should save the coral reefs and stuff too.

Whatever the Titanic is pretty much sunk as it is, the worlds screwed, not much anyone can do about it anymore.

Mine the landfills. The older the better, absolutely no recycling. Has all the atoms humanity needs in just the right proportion. Being green makes green. Trump that Trump.

>Any sort of flat real estate works.

I studied a plant/fish/whatever when I was a toddler. Now I research ecosystems.
>useful
>real world
Naive utilitarian pls go
>screwed, not much anyone can do about it anymore.
That's false. There is plenty to do and we are not doing it, unironically because of capitalism.

This has been looked into before.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule#Proposed_Mining
It's only bad for deep sea ecosystems. I wonder how the environmental impact of this compares to current mining methods. I know mines on land can create highly acidic environments.

>only bad for deep see ecosystems
Ecosystems are abstract objects with arbitrarily defined boundaries. The deep sea is highly connected to the entire ocean.
It would make me cry

But don't we already drag giant nets across the seafloor to catch fish en masse?
This is just a more intense version of that.

Yes, we do.
I've been crying about that since I was 13.

Greiving is a better word than crying

Ass hurt is a better word than grieving.
>I've been ass hurt about that since I was 13.

brb, dumping some mercury into salmon spawning streams

savage