alt Hacker NewsOne of the points of space economy is that rocket needs to leave earth only once. After that the equipment would just be mining and sending stuff back using pretty unlimited solar and nuclear energy thus the amortized cost of the mined material would be going down to pretty much 0 which in the long run may work even for iron.
Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally. The same thing will be with mining as the cost structure - absence of environmental, regulatory and political costs in particular and much cheaper energy (solar and nuclear) - is much better in the space than on earth. Also scale - you can easily find asteroids where you can have a mining operation 10x or even 100x the largest earth operation - and scale drives cost down. The earth based operations will just lose the competition.
>You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)
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"Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally"
Actually people do see the madness in this, hence all the "produce local" initiatives instead.
The only reason it made sense, was not caring about external costs from fossil fuels and bad worker conditions in china.
"You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)"
Not hard. What do you think recycling smelters do?
It just does not make economical sense to melt and separate any rock and purify the elements. You use the ones you know have already high amounts of iron, copper, .. and you seperate them before as much as possible as smelting is energy intense and handling molten elements is hard and therefore expensive.
And the other point, yes, if there is a automated space industry, that can produce cheap reentry vehicles, some space mining might make sense. But if we would have that tech, we might as well use it on earth. Because you cannot just point a lump of iron towards earth. That would be called a asteroid and would be a weapon of mass destruction. You need spaceships. Going down .. and then up again, unless you use throwable spaceships?
If you're sending stuff back you need reentry vehicles. Even allowing for reusability, it's hard to imagine the cost of building and launching them being less than the value of iron they contain (current value around $1 per kg for the higher grades and a fraction of that for scrap) and you're going to have to deal with regulators to land them. Even if the asteroid material solves the problem of all the propellant needed as reaction mass for transit to and from the asteroid belt, the unit economics of return only make sense to bring back the highly valued elements, and only if the rare elements aren't actually ones where the terrestrial supply monopolist can ramp up production rates once they face competition.