Asteroid Mining

The potential profit from an asteroid mining operation are mind boggling. Consider that an average 1 kilometer wide asteroid contains 2X more iron-nickel ore than all of the iron ore mined in 2004. In addition that very same asteroid contains many other materials as well, that same 1 km wide asteroid would contain approximately $150,000,000,000.00 in platinum. Yes $150 Billion dollars in platinum from a single asteroid!

Consider for a moment that the average drillship for offshore oil exploration costs around $535 million dollars to build. In the first 4 years of the 1980's when oil was below $35 a barrel over $12 billion dollars was spent building offshore oil rigs.

While spacecraft my seem expensive to you and me, for example using a Falcon 9 Heavy Lift booster to send a large craft into a Geosynchronous Transitory Orbit (GTO) is $78 million just for the launch. Development and constuction of an asteroid miner may be well over $100 million. The costs from the perspective of major industries on earth is trivial. The costs of space commerce are in the Millions, the benefits are in the Billions. Could asteroid mining have a return on investment of over 1000%, I think the answer is a definite yes.

$12 billion dollars is defintely enough to build and launch a profitable robotic miner into the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. All the craft would really have to do would be to "grab" a particular asteroid and begin ferrying it back to earth. By which time a processing facility may be built as well as a means of transporting large quantities of either refined ore or processed metals to Earth's surface.

Getting the material from space back to Earth is where I see the main challenge. How do you get several hundred tons of metal safely to Earth's surface for further processing? I doubt that anyone would just let it rain to the surface although this would be simple and cost effective.Ferrying craft like a Soyuz type lander could very well be cost prohibitive. Would it be possible to transform the metals into a shape that could be flown down to Earth itself? Could a processed asteroid be constructed into a simple kind of descent glider to transport the valuable materials to Earth safely?

Asteroid mining is how the my future in space is really going to get its start. I just need to convince people that it really isn't impossible. Not only that, it's actually relatively simple.