[AR] Re: asteroid mining (was Re: This is cool.)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2020 02:02:01 -0400 (EDT)
On Sat, 15 Aug 2020, William Claybaugh wrote:
Henry:
Are you—or anyone else here—aware of any careful economic analysis of
asteroid mining for Earth markets?
There have been occasional first attempts at it, I think, but I haven't
paid careful attention.
To me it seems pretty obvious that if you assume a conventional sort of
mission design -- out and back by Hohmann-ish transfer, chemical fuels
only, all hardware and fuel lifted from Earth's surface at today's launch
prices, like Osiris-Rex only with a much bigger return payload and some
simple beneficiation first -- there is no Earth market today or in the
reasonably foreseeable future that will pay well enough to justify it.
Lowering costs enough to make it profitable requires much cheaper launch,
much better propulsion, or big changes to the mission design -- preferably
all three. All three are possible. Whether they can be done well enough
in the immediate future to make it profitable, is a harder question that I
don't have a solid answer for at the moment. Maybe, given cleverness and
creativity and a healthy distrust of numbers coming out of parametric
models. Business-as-usual definitely can't.
Do I have some ideas about how parts of that could be addressed? Yeah,
but I want to, at least, work them out in a bit more detail before talking
about them.
... transport costs—at any price chemical rockets can ever reach—make
asteroid resources far too costly to compete with Earth mining.
I'm deeply wary of phrases like "any price chemical rockets can ever
reach", because the underlying assumptions -- when they're properly
documented at all -- often seem to me to be far too pessimistic.
Henry
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