asteroid mining

[ludwig]

I'm no expert, but it sounds ridiculous. Surely the costs involved make it a complete non-starter? Why are seemingly sensible people talking about it as a serious possibility?

http://www.foxnews.co...eeks-asteroid-miners/

[Zacs-Master]

Publicity stunt for his company.

[Old_Geezer]

I suspect you are right about it being uneconomic at the moment, I don't have access to the figures and could not be bothered to go through them if I had; but as a future investment in knowledge/experience and getting into position to be first in the market when it does become viable, that has to be worth something.

I wonder if after the inital outlay what the costs are for continuous operation. There are a lot of astroids in the belt, a lot of resource just waiting to be harveted. At some point it will be worth doing.

[LazyGun]

Publicity, for those high profile investors. Maybe coupled with a bit of romance about the whole idea of space exploration/ utilization.

I do not know enough about the composition of small asteroids to know whether they contain significantly large reserves of precious metal ore etc, but it does not sound economically viable at the moment anyway...

[wildwood]

It would have to be a very fast craft, something capable of... like... 25km per second.

IF this somehow became possible and a known rare mineral fortune was found it would drop the commodity price of that mineral like a stone.

[Answerprancer]

Sounds like a euphamism for nose-picking !

[naomi24]

This was on the news the other night - and the first thing that occurred to me was exactly what Wildwood has said. Precious metals wouldn't be so precious any more.

[EDDIE51]

The cost of recovery would ensure that the mineral price remained high, if the price dropped it would no longer be viable.
That said I think the cost for the foreseeable future would be several orders of magnitude too high anyway. Remember Gold has very little practical use it is just for decoration and Jewellery. Copper on the other hand is absolutely vital for any technologically advanced civilisation , there is simply no substitute for it in electrical use. Without Copper we would have no electrical power of any kind and never would have . One third of all the known Copper deposits in the world have already been used !If you want to make a fortune in the next 50 years or so buy Copper mine shares or even the metal itself.

[DTCwordfan]

If there is so much precious metal out there, maybe the Co could dispatch Gordon Brown to go and dig some up and replace the damage that he did to our national reserves.

[d9f1c7]

Easy, just give Bruce Willis a call!

[ludwig]

If this somehow became possible and a known rare mineral fortune was found it would drop the commodity price of that mineral like a stone.

Not really, because whatever rare mineral they brought back would be controlled entirely by them, and they could demand whatever price they wanted for it. A bit like how OPEC controls the oil price.

No - surely the obvious thing is that it would cost so many billions of billions to mount such an operation, that it would never be commercially viable, no matter what they came back with and how much it was worth.

[EDDIE51]

I agree with you ludwig the cost is so high it would need to be something that was so vital it was literally priceless.