It would take 30 years of heavy investment which capitalist would never do because of how capitalism is structured. If some billionaires donated to the public sector so collaboration governments could create an efficient space hook for exiting orbit but even then asteroid mining ships equipped with robots and 3d printing technology would be a bigger investment.
Exactly I don't think any of THESE People will be able to get the job Done..BUT they will plan out and take the first steps that Future generations will use to achieve this.
One aspect not mentioned...when the prices on formerly rare and expensive resources drop, new markets and product categories open up or are created due to the sudden availability and low cost. This expansion of products and markets, consequently, drives up the consumption of these new resources, thus driving up the overall demand to mine more. It will come down to which companies can survive the transition while these new markets anchor themselves and grow big enough to support the mining. This cycle is seen over and over.
Yeah but as the moon is a disk which is very clear to any half intelligent person how do you mine a holographic disk that they have been recording the fact that with great regularity stars are clearly seen through the moon. Thus why no matter howler away or close and what ever angle the exact same angular perspective is seen by everyone but this is my thinking this last bit the Nth Skies see a mirror image as its translucent thus giving the illusion its a Nth-Sth issue which it is not ...well not spherically speaking! British Astrological Society I believe records these events and has for 200 years I believe! Like mining a rice cracker don't you think...one that no one has landed on obviously! Damn right you got a problem Houston! Stop hogging all the Helium!
Yeah, they always gripe about it crashing the price of e.g. gold, yet electrum , a 50/50 mix of gold and silver, makes excellent electrical wire. its resistance is so low its practically a superconductor and would be great for hose wiring. But only if the cost gets down to that of copper.
Reality bites!! I actually enjoy these 'after all the hype dies down' videos more than I do the original hype balloons. They are somehow more sober, honest.
It was always hype and delusion and largely still is. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing.
@@tonywilson4713 when they say mining they also mean redirecting big rocks floating in space towards earth where they can the mining (these rocks can contain very valuable materials like gold and diamond...)
It's always the ignorant loud group who think they know better. The smarter ones are the not so vocal group because they know, they act first and talk later.
@@onsokumaru4663 Very well put. There was a great British TV Series called _"Hustle"_ about a team of conmen, who do complex lomg cons like the one done in the film _"the Sting."_ At the very end of the very last episode they talk to the audience about NOT GETTING conned. The make the point that honest people can't be conned. People looking for the easy way or people who cheat can be conned. Its right here at 49:50 ruclips.net/video/OMisS2AjnYA/видео.html
Mining on Earth only makes economic sense for as long as there's easy to access materials, once those are used up, then it'll become increasingly costly. Mining asteroids, the moon and Mars makes sense in the long run
@@Fido-vm9zi If we put a flag on it becomes ours then right? Either way, I would rather put all the damaging mining and manufacturing on lifeless planets and asteroids than here on Earth
If I should summarize my main problem with current industry, is that companies who made advertising and marketing are more rewarded then people who actually made product and those who own company and making rules and have more income and wealth then workers who do job for you. It's all about economic and power structure who owns what and who is making decisions. At the end you can just present yourself with tons of promises for service or product where people believe all stupid non sense you say with zero effort, then you just grab the money of investors you're gone. There are dozens of examples of this from just from Silicon valley.
Glass Air whent self owned, but when hard times hit no one had any money to reinvest so it went belly up. Most people spend what they make and if they saved they would not want to reinvest when 90% of the other employees didn't. They would want more ownership and you are back to some owning and making more than others. Your idea is pure communist!
You know that adage "If product is free, than you are the product". Well, that is not entirely true: even if product's price is not zero, you are the product. Those who are more rewarded in the chain of production are ones who mine you, the customer, because you are harder to produce than material product is. Material production is streamlined and mature, hunting customers is (hopefully) not that predictable and certain.
I used to work in the commercial space industry, and it is rife with inequality. The people who actually do the work of making rockets and supporting the systems, make way less than business "leaders" who's actual involvement in the projects is negligible.
My thought is that asteroid mining won’t take off in a big way until we start building space habitats. It’s a lot easier to mine and refine a million tons of steel in space than it is to launch it out of earth orbit. Iron and silicon are going to be the two most critical minerals mined in space, with oxygen and copper being the follow ups.
@@Trigger200284 water’s actually hella cheap if you’re mining oxygen since hydrogen is super light weight. I have a feeling if capturing water is challenging it’ll end up being a lower priority since oxygen is super common.
Space habitats yes. But humans won't live in space permanently until it will be "safe", with less risks to health. Moon is the first and only option for a long time. Mars is a lost cause as long as there isn't any fast enough spacecraft to maintain sustainable transport back and forth. Asteroid mining will take off earlier than space tourism to Mars. We need energy from the sun. And for that, you need resources from asteroids to build the infrastructure around orbit.
@@Max.J.H. Completely disagree. There will almost certainly be a million people living on Mars this century, I don’t expect we’ll have a million people in space habitats for at least another hundred and fifty years.
@@mynameismatt2010 What makes you think there will be so many people there? Mars is dead. There's no reason to live there yet. You need to send a lot of reasources and robots in advance, which can develop infrastructure for colonists. To reach a milion in 2100, we should send 14k a year starting from 2030. That's quite a number. Imposible to reach before 2050. Habitats on the Moon are far less demanding and a lot easier to sustain.
Mining in space for space makes more sense. Because it cost alot more to bring materials from earth because of earth's gravity. The cost of anything also depends on transportation it doesn't matter if it is on earth or space. The higher the transportation the higher the material cost. Then because of the new technologies once those technologies are in space it makes it easier to build in space. For instance if you build a large spaceships with gravity in space. Once you have the infrastructure on the moon it would cost less to build these ships in moon orbit than earth orbit. On the moon there is titanium and aluminum which can make very strong alloys. You could launch those materials in orbit with a electro magnetic rail. Large ships like this would make us a interplanetary civilization it would be able to go anywhere in our solar system.
@@KRYMauL I agree but the people in charge think too small. They gear everything to chemical propulsion and small ships with out gravity. The larger ships built in space that never land atomic power could transport people and supplies anywhere in our solar system in comfort.
@@KRYMauL The cycler ships don't need as much delta v. They start in orbit and increase delta v to get to where they are going and use gravitational bodies to help. Larger reactors could be used the energy buffered super cooled condensers. Then use large vasmir engines. The buffers can recharge in orbit and on the way to location. The vasmir is variable specific impulse which is the most efficient. It is like gears in a car. You use the same power out put but decrease the mass of the propelant as you get to higher speed. This well give you higher specific impulse.
Space mining (basic formula): asteroid mining drone, transporting drone, processing drone, and SpaceX interstellar cargo rocket drones to transport resources back to earth.
Here's a better question: What happened to patience? People have become so jaded to technological advances that if something doesn't happen right away they consider it vaporware.
@@godofnothing520 Or until some country dominates the production just for their own nation only. China is very Hyper nationalistic when it comes to resources they covet for their own.
The trick will be finding asteroids that are actually worth mining. Not every asteroid will be of value, and they're not exactly just a few meters apart; they could be millions of miles apart, so you'll need a robotic spaceship with a lot of fuel and the ability to locate and navigate to numerous sites without refueling and maintenance needs. If you do score a huge chunk of platinum or gold or neodymium, you'll need to insert it into Earth orbit for retrieval by a Falcon 9 or Soyuz, or some kind of specialized orbital drone that can bring the metal safely down. Eventually most of the metals mined in space will never reach the Earth's surface; they'll be used for deep space construction projects. Robots will build orbital structures and spacecraft for less cost than to fly the materials and structures into space from Earth.
I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing and can barley comprehend how anyone can believe them.
@@tonywilson4713 Are you suggesting that asteroid/moon mining is impractical at our current level of technology? What if we set up a mining station in fixed orbit, and bring asteroids to that station for processing? Could use massive solar arrays or nuclear power, and have centripetal gravity if needed for extraction purposes.
@@ChickensAndGardening Not suggesting but stating it for a fact. The idea you could just move an asteroid from where they are to Low Earth Orbit is nothing but Star Trek fantasy. Here's something I tell people who go on about this nonsense. Jeff Bezos has claimed he wants to move the heavy industries like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit where there's lots of sun light 24/7 to use and you don't have to worry about pollution. One of the iron ore mines I once worked on has a capacity of about 20 million tons a year. Its a good example because the math is very easy. At about 70% iron by weight that produces about 14 million tons of raw iron a year ready to make stuff out of. The Space Shuttle could bring back from LEO 14 tons of payload which was about 13-1/2 tons more than anything else. So if you want to bring back those 14 million tons of iron ore from LEO it would take about 1 million Space Shuttle flights. Australia in total produces about 815 million tons of iron ore a year which would require over 40 million Space Shuttle Flights. Even if we made a new magic rocket that was 100 times better than the Space Shuttle that's still 400,000 flights a year. And so you know Australia produces less that 1/3rd of the worlds iron ore. Sorry but its 99.99% space fantasy nonsense. The other 0.01% is however very interesting. There are some very rare materials available from places like the moon where for those very rare substances the option of mining them in space is plausible. World Platinum production is about 215 tons a year and our needs there have been growing. If we can get a rocket that makes the logistics practical then that's plausible. If Helium-3 were to become the main fuel for nuclear fusion that needs about 5-9 Space Shuttle Flights to power the entire planet each year. But the issue there is nobody yet has a power station that runs on Helium-3. At the end of the day its just guys selling visions of the future.
It’s not about costs it’s about materials. It doesn’t fully matter if it costs a billion dollars to get 10 thousand dollars of platinum or whatever, earth has limited platinum and there are asteroids with more materials than we have on earth anymore, of course people are looking to gain money from this but for humanity as a whole it’s important to get this going as an extra precaution
Being a fan of Sci-fi space themed TV series like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargate, I can see space mining being a thing. My original mental image of Space mining with current technology I pictured something like attaching thrusters to asteroid to move it closer to earth (just outside the moons orbital path) then build a space station around the asteroid. Send up linkable tube sections with mining type extension arms that would wrap around the asteroid then u can mine the asteroid at whatever pace u want.
Or crash the asteroid on the Moon and mine it there. Potentially very dangerous. Difficult (or maybe impossible) to get international political support for such a procedure. In theory extremely lucrative, since the Moon is relatively close and will have a lot of supporting/synergistic infrastructure soon.
@@clementvining2487 the asteroid that Elon Musk has his eye on moves around within the Asteroid belt. In 2026 its orbit will lead it to outside the belt close to Mars. Because it's an asteroid in the belt, attaching thrusters to the asteroid to move it out of the belt to safely mine it without the fear of other objects colliding into your operation.
Just the idea of “bringing” an asteroid ANYWHERE near earth is just dangerous. If taken to its logical conclusion then earth’s orbit will be filled with asteroids, a little too crowded for my taste.
Neither musk nor bezos have the technology to mine asteroids. Also, they're not investing their billions in space mining. Musk is more focused on mars, bezos is more towards the space tourism.
@@ChickensAndGardening When Elon directed some of his effort to SpaceX, people said the same. It takes time to do real work. But you gotta start - that's where Blue Origin is currently.
Let me point this out for you 8$ a month x 300million potential customers + a 300$ startup cost then realize 50$ alone and how far that would compete with the rest of the country Waymo is in 30 states and 6 countries we can automate production down to energy production and transportation down to nothing with the right battery and solar alone slowly fueling all of Americas needs which we have been we have factories out in the middle of nowhere doing just this New Mexico grows how many pounds of fish in a desert that isnt polluted with all that microplastic and 100% done in aquaponics some states are smart with there infrastructure and then when your a republican state full of morons who constantly show what hypocrisy looks like and what failures to capitalism looks like i mean look at new mexico if you need a good reference republicans get in all they build is clubs and wastes of money democrat gets in hospitals and food water security boom republican gets in reverts alot of those achievements for man
WRONG!!! Bezos's Blue Origin is NOT up there, except by law suits, political gifts and getting government money for his own sub orbital toys while SpaceX is the one, and only one, that is up there! There is no comparison!
Most of these startup ventures are driven by profit. Space mining in its current stage is anything but profitable. It took the combined might of a nation and a decade to put the first man on the Moon. SpaceX almost went bankrupt trying to develop a reusable rocket. The current breed of space mining investors probably won’t have the stomach for the amount of technical hurdles that will need to be overcome in order for this thing to work out.
I'd rather have NASA hire these guys as engineers, and everyone's expertise is put together, under one roof, for the benefit of all. All the new technology invented, all the best of everyone coming together. You know, like we used to? But no...we'd rather be greedy and compete against each other, while giving government money to individual companies because they have great lobbyists... No one wants to share. We want to OWN! And of course, with no treaty, they'd never think that unscrupulous corporations or government bodies might attack those "honey bees" and steal the resources for themselves, since you're ONLY thinking of profit? o_O (15:26)
Julius Caesar built two walls encircling the city of Alesia and defending their wall from an outside attack from over 300,000 Gallic soldiers. Anything can be done with the right plan and support.
@@praetorianstride5948 President Kennedy also rallied the nation to send man to the Moon in just ten years time. The issue at hand isn’t whether something can or cannot be done.
i think china will have the stomach the capitalists wont. for them its about securing rare earth mineral supply, practically forever. not about selling it. when you bring such extreme amounts of supply, the value will go to zero. there is no profit incentive.
People have mentioned the problems with getting the resources mined back to earth, how expensive it will be to mine them in the first place, and that you have to compete with mining here on earth. What i didnt hear mentioned is the crapload of resources you will need to build things in space and how much cheaper it would likely be in the long run to mine resources close to where they are needed. I mean, if you are going to start building stuff on the moon or mars would it not be cheaper to mine and process resources nearby than to send resources there from earth?.
The expensive part are taking the miners out to space and succesfully landing those materials back to earth and transporting them to where they'll be sold, since you have to land them in the oceans. Mining them and transporting them to a moon base or an space platform, say we build a platform orbitting mars which is the closest to the asteroid belt, we could easily explore Mars or create whatever we want to make there and it'd be extremely cheap, and probably done mostly by AI excluding the humans that'd probably be at the platform, since you need next to nothing in fuel to propulse spaceships at incredibly high speeds in space. So yes, asteroid mining is definitely the future, but it's not the type of future people expect of bringing those materials down to earth, but rather to build and manufacture stuff out there for usage outside our planet. It's the future of humanity, providing we stop our society's self destruction and we stop feeding media and their bs, abusing human emotions to make money out of biased news and we start focusing more on the future rather than short-term profit and changes.
@@williamnguyen2411 I'm thinking the same thing, like they talk about platinum for example, OK if we still have platinum in the soil, i understand that it is not appealing to go mine it in space, but what about the other ressource? like, i dunno, let me use the shield in marvel that is suppose to be "the entire planet reserve in that one shield" (because i don't have anything else that come to mind for the example) well, mining in space would make that finite ressource into an infinite ressource, allowing us to build more of them than what we can at the current time.... Another example would be paladium, we have a finite amount of it on earth, there is not a lot of mine of it and it is pretty rare, we cannot build a lot of thing that require paladium so much that the junkyard where all our electronic go, there is scavenger looking for it because we don't have more, if we find an asteroid with paladium in it, we could start manufacturing more stuff that we could ever right now because right now we are running out of it...
Precisely. Giant moon bases and space ships will only happen when the materials needed to build those things dont have to expensively escape earths gravity well. Space mining is the only way to have a true human presence in space.
This is awesome. That worker bee could essentially function as an off world worker. Using easily mined resources to power itself. Genius. I think its very possible.
This is very good coverage of the topic. However, I cringe when I see the graphics of "asteroid fields", which are displayed unrealistically. Most asteroids are too far from neighboring asteroids for a person to see one asteroid from another. This mistake is the most common mistake in solar system graphics, best I can tell.
Mining in space IS a good idea, but it's time has not come yet. You MUST have very cheap heavy lift first. Until either New Glenn or Starship start flying, all this stuff about commercial space stations, and space mining are just PowerPoint presentations.
If no one ever told you yet. Thank you CNBC for educating us with these videos. Your every video teaches us about all the aspects of society step by step. Just continue on this path
there is no disagreement that it is possible. just that if it will be a free market profit incentive venture or tax-paid "good for mankind" venture, like china.
Imo, it's primarily 2 things: A) It's been about 5-7 years since the hype of Planetary Resources. In that time, launch costs have come down but not enough that we're getting infrastructure up into orbit (and beyond). I'd give it another 5 years _after_ Starship is up & running before really wondering why mining hasn't begun. It's akin to wondering why oil wasn't being mined in California when the Mayflower has barely landed. B) Tied into this is simply the lack of that aforementioned infra. Not only the refueling service it seems TransAstra is aiming to fulfill, but also manufacturing that a gen 3 or 4 Varda Space might eventually do. Launching things from the ground here on Earth is *always* going to be way more expensive than just constructing and fueling the probe up in space. Again, this infra should fill out in the 10 to 20 yrs post-Starship and heading back to the moon.
The cost to get a mineral to and from an asteroid has to be extreme. Then, we are talking about greatly increasing the supply of many of these rare elements. So, to summarize, it costs a lot and it would upset the market places of these elements. To bring down the costs, we’ll have to have engines that are way better than what we currently have. We are decades away from that.
This is human stupidity, it wont change. Some of us realize that, but we cant speak up because we dont have the voice. The only thing that can wake us up is a global catastrophe, i cabt think of other way, no movement will rise up because they care and say money is the biggest problem humanity faces.
Money is just a simpler way of determining the value of someone's efforts and products than bartering sheep for clothing for water for cooking oil for weapons for prostitutes for drugs, etc. People have always been bad at setting fair value, it is just more obvious in a monetary system than in a barter system. In a barter system, the con-man leaves the rube feeling good about his trade. In a monetary system, the con-man tells the rube what to do all day while playing on Facebook and makes 3x the money, so it is more obviously unfair.
@@kylesmith8128 Money is a human invention. The universe doesn’t care how much money you have. The resources are there for the taking. They are basically infinite. Value, ie “Supply and demand” no longer makes sense when the supply is infinite.
1) Space mining for use on Earth makes little sense. It's far easier and cheaper to mine virtually anything on Earth than in space. Space mining for use IN space makes sense but it requires a pre-existing in-space economy. 2) Mining water ice for rocket propellant makes little sense. The lunar south pole is often mentioned as a good location for this. But it requires mining and storage equipment to be landed at the bottom of deep craters that never see any sunlight. Furthermore, hydrogen is the smallest atom and is notoriously difficult to handle. It readily escapes any containment vessel. It also needs to be chilled to just 20 degrees above absolute zero before it turns into a liquid, and even then its density is so low that it requires much larger storage tanks than a comparable mass of other liquids, such as liquid oxygen. 3) Mining for oxygen on the Moon makes much more sense than for water. The lunar surface is 43% oxygen by mass, locked up in various kinds of oxides. You can land virtually anywhere - on an easily accessed flat plain in lower latitudes, instead of the pitch-black bottom of a deep polar crater. You have a number of different oxides to choose from. Oxygen also represents the majority of the mass for rocket propellant. A methane-oxygen propellant combo is 80% oxygen. Liquid methane is also much closer to the temperature of liquid oxygen, simplifying your cryogenic storage infrastructure, compared to liquid hydrogen. Mine the oxygen virtually anywhere on the lunar surface, combine it with methane brought from Earth, and you have a viable off-earth propellant production system.
Really funny how both companies have two different goals, one is working to make more money while the other is hoping to use these materials to better the lives of others.
Profitable space mining requires two things to be accomplished before true operations begin (operations other than bringing a select few minerals back): - Colonies stationed on Mars and either Phobos or Deimos (the moons around Mars) - Manufacturing and processing plants on said colonies The moon colonies are basically drop off points for the manufacturing plants. The plants are self-evident. Ideally, the overall logistics is to have those colonies since they are closer to the asteroid belt and can launch much easier than from Earth. Once the minerals are brought back, they are then processed and then shipped to our moon (Luna). After that, they are then redistributed to where they need to go, either back to Earth or to near-Earth habitats and space stations - or to the construction companies building said habitats and stations. Finding and categorizing asteroids for mining is trivial with just off the shelf imaging and orbital prospecting satellites that are currently in use today combined with other sensors to measure the asteroid's density. A bouy-type system that consists of an RTG for power and a radio signal that broadcasts the owner's information and position would be enough to claim it. International laws and standards would need to be implemented, of course, which would also include the amount of time the claim is active.
Sounds pretty good. People like the previous poster would steal claims in the darkness of space, that is why they say it won't work. But most people can read and write and follow directions, so it could work. We are centuries away from making it commercially viable, and it will take investments at a global level as well as a cessation of silly terrestrial wars that benefit the few while costing the many. Space terrorism/war would be relatively cheap for the aggressor and expensive for the victim and losses would be hard to replace.
@MegOh! Businesses well people only 120 years ago would laugh you out of the room if you said that in 20 years time there would be reliable heavier than air flight sooooooo
@@FinGeek4now Research alone isn't enough. For one those things you mentioned is true. But it is more efficient to mine and process the ore where it is. On earth there are these large fishing factories that fish and process and can the fish on the ship. Then when it is full they bring it where it needs to go. They get more for the finished goods. Anyway if you build large mining ships in orbit with gravity powered by liquid fuel molten salt reactors you can take the byproduct (thorium)from mining processed ore and use for fuel for the reactors. Use water for air water and propelant. It well be self maintained until full and get a enormous amount more for the goods. All metal could be on very large spools for 3d printing to deliver anywhere needed. Or another ship could take delivery. A ship like this would have enough power for processing in space the main way of construction in space and findly on earth well be 3d printing. These spools of metal well be very valuable compared to the ore.
The hype phase was interesting but no substantive talks about how to get it done had ever really occurred that indicated they had a working plan, making general space access cost effective hadn't even been accomplished yet.
There's a reason diamond companies artificially limit supply. As soon as you flood the market with that much supply the value would take a huge drop. The projections may only be considering the value at the current going rate. After the market asjusts the value would be a small fraction of what it is now. They would basically have to do only a single mining mission and then be careful to trickle in supply to keep demand from plummeting.
@@a_person5660 For sure, but even on Earth the cost of extracting and processing REEs is high, then add to that the cost of engineering a sophisticated and risky space mission. Not sure the economics really work out that well. Still would be interesting to see. I think deep-sea mining is more likely to happen any time soon.
That argument is an over simplification of the economics. The price is determined by how much the demander is willing to pay to have something and how much the supplier is willing to to be payed to provide their ressources. And this is influenced by a combination of the number of suppliers, the number of demanders and the cost of production. If you have a small number of demanders and a high number of suppliers, the demander are the ones that drive prices, this is what we observe with farmer and retail the farmers have almost no bargaining power. If you have a large number of demanders and a small number of supplier it's the opposite and is what we observe with as you noted the diamond industry but also the oil industry. And finally if the cost of production is higher than the selling point well without some form of aid the suppliers will go out of business. If you are the one flooding the market then you have control over the price.
I'm not sure I trust this Trans Astra. Sounds to me like they're trying to spin pretty stories to get not only venture capital, but also government money to run their "business." They haven't produced a thing, except pretty stories. Maybe we should leave this to NASA to try out for the next few decades, before we start giving companies all our money on future prospects that never pan out? Even the spokesman realizes he's spinning a line. (8:18) "Just look at OUR projections. We guarantee, you'll make money." Never heard that one before... Any company can be "revenue positive" with government money. "5-7 year time frame." Right...
For the people that always ask why they didn't sent another mission to the moon in 50 years. The answer is the Apollo mission costed the US 150 billion dollars in today's equivalent money. So it was always gonna be a one time thing until technology caught up and it was financially viable.
Have we as a species not learned anything?... Cause and effect.. Lets say we mine it... Now for some reason it is headed straight towards earth and kills us all...greed will be our downfall!
The mind-boggling elephant in the room is physics. Chris Dreyer hit a home run. Mining for the return usage on Earth faces the reentry problem. One ton of Platinum is still one ton. And one ton needs to be slowed down from the orbital speed, to ground speed. Not very cost-effective with current tech.
for this reason i believe in the future mining in space will be more useful when we have the means to process said material in space and build with it in space. Would allow for space colonies to be much more self sustainable and allow us to build much, much larger more efficient spacecraft because you don't have that little atmosphere or earth's gravity problem. Sad it will most likely not happen in our lifetimes
@@nick123nak6 Well surprise we have the technology to build large space ships now with gravity. We also have the technology to power them for over half a century. But the people who control the money don't want it. The technology is disruptive and would put them out of power.
To make space mining reality, we must first make space truly accessible. Imagine starting up a modern mining project without having trucks and trains. Right now space mining attempts would be like "hiking 2 weeks in wilderness to pick up a handful of pebbles and then hiking another 2 weeks to bring those pebbles home". First we need cheap transportation, then space infrastructure. Only after that space mining can truly beging.
This has the potential to be a serious dollar mine for whatever companies manage to mine space. I hope that policy catches up to them, and taxes them appropriately. Under-taxation of resource extraction on earth is already commonplace. The notion that this could happen with space mining as well really makes my skin crawl.
@@Puzzoozoo Any country that has the highest possible tax rates, royalties, and the best social safety net would be the best country to emulate. You need a way to collect the money, then distribute that money in order for it to bring a widespread benefit to the economy.
the opposite... it only crashes the rare earth mineral market... but it enables other markets to soar now that they actually have a future when rare earth minerals are in forever abundance..you just need to sell your rare earth mineral-related stocks and buy new ones.
When it becomes a need,people will start taking all the wealth of the universe thats out there (or at least a very small part of it) Resources on Earth are still plentiful enough to avoid going to space and do something serious.
Even if you could bring a rock back with 1000 times the platinum of the entire market, you can't assume you'll be able to sell it for $1024/ounce. You've entirely blown up the supply/demand curve by blowing up supply and the cost per ounce will drop through the floor.
You pretty much have to try and keep it quiet? How much you have and then severely limit the amount you release to keep prices high..much like the diamond trade
i have a question people. Even if they managed to get to an asteroid and capture its precious metals or water in tons, wouldn't this additional mass demand much more thrust power from the mining vehicle to ever land in earth due to gravitational pull from the earth?
Not more thrust but more fuel yes but the plan is probably to produce fuel insitu. Once you are orbital the amount of thrust is much less important than when taking off. This is because when you are taking off you need to produce more thrust than the weight of your vehicles but once you are in orbit your weight is 0. Having higher thrust is still helpful as it allows you for shorter burn limiting gravity drag but these gain are almost nothing compared to using a more efficient engine and their are mitigating methods like simply doing multiple burns at the optimal orbital point. This is what we see at 9:02, that orbit is what we would observe by doing multiple boost burn at perigee..
@@gavinkemp7920 thank you for replying back. I fully get what you wrote, but you are talking about the orbit. If the mining vehicle would have to return to earth to sell the materials, then wouldn’t the vehicle require additional thrust during the landing process to earth considering it would have the original mass minus burned fuel plus the mined materials?
@@nickiogr well you would need a very good reason to return the mining vehicle. it would make more sense to leave it their as it could continue mining will the ship is bringing the ressources back to earth. As for landing that will depend on how you are landing but it will involve the use of an aerobreak, baring a massive breakthrough in propulsion technology. as such you need little fuel to land assuming you choose propulsive landing rather than parachutes. For example if we take starship as an example it needs about 1200 tons of propellant to reach orbit (and that is ignoring super heavy) but only 29 tons to land. so even full of valuable ores the returning starship will be much lighter than when it took off.
Question why can't we use a old shuttle and a crusher which doesn't need air to crush bringing the fragments into the shuttle or booster tubes to be able to withstand re entry
I think the economics of space mining only works out when you keep the materials in space, for example to build orbital structures. It's currently too expensive to bring materials back to the Earth's surface, even if you don't need to worry about oxygen and cabin temperatures (within reason). Some day when we have figured out a "sky hook" or "space elevator" which lets you cheaply send things and people up and down the gravity well, though even then, tons of mined lithium or iron are going to be problematic.
The Space Shuttle was not capable of that. It was designed for missions in low earth orbit, not interplanetary travel. Just because something can reach low earth orbit doesn't mean that it can go into deep space and back. Leaving Earth, then stopping at an asteroid, then accelerating back again with cargo requires such a high fuel-to-payload-ratio that it is barely possible at all as long as we use chemical rockets.
I like this idea, but a sudden introduction of resources into our system would create inflation. My example of this is when the Spanish Empire discovered a entire mountain made of silver. Potosí in south America. The production of massive amounts of silver, suddenly introduce into their financial system had an inflationary effect. It watered down their currency, to the point its value was gone.
Not quite. A sudden introduction of materials in a system creates DEFLATION, which is good! The reason the Spanish example happened as it did was they based their currency itself on gold and silver, so when silver prices collapsed, so did the currency. Today currency is not tethered to a metal, which is good, introduces its own problems, but not this one
You’d need a structure that can get freight to and from low earth orbit using energy more efficient than a rocket. The kiper belt can be a great resource that could greatly maintain and expand humanity for centuries.
What should be built are automated space mining and manufacturing. As one commenter said "Mining in space for space makes more sense." My mind can imagine huge manufacturing factories in space and on large asteroids that will churn out products for Mars, Earth, and space colonies. Today there are factory ships that harvest fish in the oceans and process them onboard for eventual human consumption. Imagine something similar in space among the mineral rich asteroids. My only regret is that I won't live long enough to see it.
Automated asteroid mining would definitely be good, moreso for a Martian colony. The mining of hundreds of tons of water ice from asteroids for delivery to Mars would be extremely good, especially with advances in new types of propulsion. I think as it stands right now, asteroid mining for Earth cities/businesses isn't feasible, because things that we require on Earth are always on Earth. For colonies on celestial bodies, however, it's definitely more feasible and maybe even their only option.
We have to look more at progress than profit. Money will have no meaning in the future. There are multiple ways to make it happen, but upgrading humanity itself and everything around us, will make it so we don't need or use things the same way we do now. With our evolutions and adaptations, we will be able to do anything, but not need to. I'd love to always keep getting better and helping beings throughout this and other universes and dimensions.
Currently the most expensive metal is a ton of steel raised to an Earth orbit. A much cheaper metal would be a ton of steel make in orbit from an iron ore satellite.
I love how people ignore some information which conflicts with desires and goals. Space junk is going to be a major problem soon due to the orbital cascade (space junk hits other space junk which creates a cloud of debris) that would make space orbital travel hazardous if not impossible. Was surprised to hear that they are going full bore with more satellites and space mining. We need to start cleaning up first or we may just trap ourselves here. Space mining won't mean anything if we can't get there.
The sad thing is that if they brought back a whole asteroid of diamonds it would still cost a fortune to buy a diamond for your girl. It's because of the monopoly that Debeers has on it. They have had a huge monopoly on them for many decades.
If another company brought down the space diamonds, obviously De Beers no longer has a monopoly. And many diamonds are artificially made today anyways, far cheaper.
@@TheBooban that shows that you have no clue of what is really going on they would still have a monopoly on it for sure. Diamonds right now as it is or so plentiful that they could sell a 1 carat diamond for $100 and still make a nice profit but they don't let people know about that they keep it a secret.
Short answer to the question. A) Mining off world will not be viable before we have matured space infrastructure, ie: Living facilities, economical transport of goods and people. B) Living off world will be dangerous untill we find a medical solution to living in low gravity. C) Transportation will be economicaly viable when the costs are reduced. D) For humanity to expand and survive, mining off world is inevitable.
The western world is realizing that oil and gas are two sources we cannot depend upon.. mainly because of the evil forces selling them (Russia & countries in Middle East). Therefore, it is more likely that Europe (at least) focuses on other sources of energy.. probably renewable because it's able to be produced domestically. A single Saudi Arabian person will not be the first trillionaire lol actually once oil becomes obsolete, they'll be poor.
One thing to consider is whether it would become a national security issue. The CCP controls the largest share of rare earth metals, so if the CCP became more volatile it may force Western countries (who already have space programs) to invest and develop asteroid mining as a way of staying afloat.
This is something we must do. When enough materials are sequestered in space and don't need to expensively escape earths gravity well, an exponential industry can take off that would eventually make mining on earth obsolete, cheaper, and far far far friendlier to earths environment.
Sounds like asteroids would make a better target than mars as a colonization target. there are asteroids the size of moons, and nobody will complain when you slam multiple into each other to congregate the resources you want.
That industry is in full swing. The reports on this activity however are and have been stifled. The age of information bears the biggest cross of silence
Space mining is still inevitable. its just expensive to get there and people have short lives so they are very near sighted and still focused on grasping easy fast money instead
My 'timetable' remains unchanged after some five years: The launch of a commercial mission to mine an asteroid, before the end of the decade. The failure to take space law seriously, by the relevant governments, invites disputes and hostilities. I, personally think space belongs to all of us and while, it should be fine for space-mining companies, to make a hefty profit, the material benefits, should be shared equally, but regardless the outcome, laws are required and fast.
start with moon mining then youll be able to convince investors to mine asteroids.. they need moon mining for the moon base that is an essential jumping point to all other space related endeavors..
Sounds pretty clear to me, what ever resource you mine you own, you just can't claim an entire asteroid if someone is mining it as well. Basically saying share the big ones with who ever lands there.
Space mining is just space mining. However the business is in space metallurgy. Metallurgy in vacuum and low gravity in many applications is very useful
What are they talking about with it being too costly to go out there? All I've been hearing the past few years is that the commercial sector with companies like SpaceX have been making it WAY cheaper to do that.
Matt, the only way to access more of these 11:20 [without running into an environmental catastrophe down here] is to establish a sustainable closed-cycle economy! This way of thinking really goes into a completely wrong direction. Space resources have to stay in space. Earth has more than enough resources if they get managed in a sustainable way and products get designed in a way that they can easily be recycled and repaired!
I'm under the "Finders Keepers" rule for all mined materials from space. No ownership of the asteroid itself, unless it is 100% captured, but if you remove resources they are yours.
One way to satisfy the "for benefit of all mankind" proviso of Outer Space Treaty would be to invest the money earned from sales in something akin to Norway's sovereign fund that could be used to, well, fund future space missions or other science projects (e.g. a cure for ebola or cancer, or longevity/healthspan projects, or CO2 extraction from air...)
As you see, the main problems companies that want to engage in asteroid mining are : 1) Identifying which asteroids have the materials: water, Helium, nickel- iron, platinum, that Earth industries desire; 2) developing the means to get to these asteroids and the system to mine them in a Zero-G environment; and 3) Working out an statutes with the present nation partnership that prohibit any company/government from declaring proprietary ownership of an asteroid it mines, even though they own the materials they gather from it.
people like you and the other comment who posted about 'worth mining' asteroids. in space _everything_ is worth mining even the 'trash' as it can be used for radiation shielding but go on tell us how only a few small scraps are worth going after
Good video, but why mine in deep space? There is roughly 9,000 tons of estimated space junk in orbit. Focus on collecting that and reforging for use in orbitable 3D Printers for Orbital Construction. The pay off is selling the materials and construction in orbit to nations, etc.
It is inevitable, just on a longer time-scale than most people thought.
It would take 30 years of heavy investment which capitalist would never do because of how capitalism is structured.
If some billionaires donated to the public sector so collaboration governments could create an efficient space hook for exiting orbit but even then asteroid mining ships equipped with robots and 3d printing technology would be a bigger investment.
@@richardlyman2961 he already did the best part, he cut the cost of a rocket building to the companys. thats enough
@@kuroitenshi1632 true, so let him screw around with twitter I guess. He’s kinda earned it, just hope he doesn’t bankrupt himself
Given Earth's population is declining, there is no point for "space mining". Because mineral cost is only getting cheaper as human population collapse
Exactly I don't think any of THESE People will be able to get the job Done..BUT they will plan out and take the first steps that Future generations will use to achieve this.
One aspect not mentioned...when the prices on formerly rare and expensive resources drop, new markets and product categories open up or are created due to the sudden availability and low cost. This expansion of products and markets, consequently, drives up the consumption of these new resources, thus driving up the overall demand to mine more. It will come down to which companies can survive the transition while these new markets anchor themselves and grow big enough to support the mining. This cycle is seen over and over.
Have you seen the killer asteroid coming
Yeah but as the moon is a disk which is very clear to any half intelligent person how do you mine a holographic disk that they have been recording the fact that with great regularity stars are clearly seen through the moon. Thus why no matter howler away or close and what ever angle the exact same angular perspective is seen by everyone but this is my thinking this last bit the Nth Skies see a mirror image as its translucent thus giving the illusion its a Nth-Sth issue which it is not ...well not spherically speaking! British Astrological Society I believe records these events and has for 200 years I believe!
Like mining a rice cracker don't you think...one that no one has landed on obviously! Damn right you got a problem Houston! Stop hogging all the Helium!
Good explenation..
Are you an Economist?
Fantastic analysis. That's such a great point..Who knows what the world could look like if platinum were as affordable as copper.
Yeah, they always gripe about it crashing the price of e.g. gold, yet electrum , a 50/50 mix of gold and silver, makes excellent electrical wire. its resistance is so low its practically a superconductor and would be great for hose wiring. But only if the cost gets down to that of copper.
Reality bites!!
I actually enjoy these 'after all the hype dies down' videos more than I do the original hype balloons. They are somehow more sober, honest.
It was always hype and delusion and largely still is.
I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials.
What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water.
I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing.
@@tonywilson4713 when they say mining they also mean redirecting big rocks floating in space towards earth where they can the mining (these rocks can contain very valuable materials like gold and diamond...)
It's always the ignorant loud group who think they know better. The smarter ones are the not so vocal group because they know, they act first and talk later.
@@onsokumaru4663 Very well put.
There was a great British TV Series called _"Hustle"_ about a team of conmen, who do complex lomg cons like the one done in the film _"the Sting."_
At the very end of the very last episode they talk to the audience about NOT GETTING conned. The make the point that honest people can't be conned. People looking for the easy way or people who cheat can be conned.
Its right here at 49:50
ruclips.net/video/OMisS2AjnYA/видео.html
😆👽👊
Mining on Earth only makes economic sense for as long as there's easy to access materials, once those are used up, then it'll become increasingly costly. Mining asteroids, the moon and Mars makes sense in the long run
Ruin more places that don't belong to humanity. Disgusting 🤢
@@Fido-vm9zi If we put a flag on it becomes ours then right?
Either way, I would rather put all the damaging mining and manufacturing on lifeless planets and asteroids than here on Earth
Moon especially, first and foremost
If I should summarize my main problem with current industry, is that companies who made advertising and marketing are more rewarded then people who actually made product and those who own company and making rules and have more income and wealth then workers who do job for you. It's all about economic and power structure who owns what and who is making decisions. At the end you can just present yourself with tons of promises for service or product where people believe all stupid non sense you say with zero effort, then you just grab the money of investors you're gone. There are dozens of examples of this from just from Silicon valley.
Glass Air whent self owned, but when hard times hit no one had any money to reinvest so it went belly up. Most people spend what they make and if they saved they would not want to reinvest when 90% of the other employees didn't. They would want more ownership and you are back to some owning and making more than others. Your idea is pure communist!
You know that adage "If product is free, than you are the product". Well, that is not entirely true: even if product's price is not zero, you are the product. Those who are more rewarded in the chain of production are ones who mine you, the customer, because you are harder to produce than material product is. Material production is streamlined and mature, hunting customers is (hopefully) not that predictable and certain.
I used to work in the commercial space industry, and it is rife with inequality. The people who actually do the work of making rockets and supporting the systems, make way less than business "leaders" who's actual involvement in the projects is negligible.
@@Shredderbox so true
All those helium balloons I ran around with as a kid...
"What's taking so long ?" Dude it's only been 7 years ! Most countries I can name can't even build a sizable infrastructure project in less than 10 !
My thought is that asteroid mining won’t take off in a big way until we start building space habitats. It’s a lot easier to mine and refine a million tons of steel in space than it is to launch it out of earth orbit.
Iron and silicon are going to be the two most critical minerals mined in space, with oxygen and copper being the follow ups.
water...
@@Trigger200284 water’s actually hella cheap if you’re mining oxygen since hydrogen is super light weight. I have a feeling if capturing water is challenging it’ll end up being a lower priority since oxygen is super common.
Space habitats yes. But humans won't live in space permanently until it will be "safe", with less risks to health. Moon is the first and only option for a long time. Mars is a lost cause as long as there isn't any fast enough spacecraft to maintain sustainable transport back and forth.
Asteroid mining will take off earlier than space tourism to Mars. We need energy from the sun. And for that, you need resources from asteroids to build the infrastructure around orbit.
@@Max.J.H. Completely disagree. There will almost certainly be a million people living on Mars this century, I don’t expect we’ll have a million people in space habitats for at least another hundred and fifty years.
@@mynameismatt2010 What makes you think there will be so many people there? Mars is dead. There's no reason to live there yet. You need to send a lot of reasources and robots in advance, which can develop infrastructure for colonists. To reach a milion in 2100, we should send 14k a year starting from 2030. That's quite a number. Imposible to reach before 2050.
Habitats on the Moon are far less demanding and a lot easier to sustain.
20 years ago: Oh my god is a asteroid we all gonna die!
20 years in the future: Don’t let it get away!!
😂😂😂 oh no, you let it get away!!
Astroid: oooo... A planet with life. PREPARE TO DIE!!!💥
Astroid Miner's: oooo... RESOURCES! GET HIM!!!⛏️🤑
Astroid: Oh...Noooooo....🫤
"Sir, its getting away!!"
"PREPARE FOR RAMMING SPEED!'
☄️- PLEASE, I JUST HAVE SOME MILLIONS OF YEARS! IM TOO YOUNG TO BE CONSUMED, NOOOOOO
👷⛏️- yummy, some tons of gold
Mining in space for space makes more sense. Because it cost alot more to bring materials from earth because of earth's gravity. The cost of anything also depends on transportation it doesn't matter if it is on earth or space. The higher the transportation the higher the material cost. Then because of the new technologies once those technologies are in space it makes it easier to build in space. For instance if you build a large spaceships with gravity in space. Once you have the infrastructure on the moon it would cost less to build these ships in moon orbit than earth orbit. On the moon there is titanium and aluminum which can make very strong alloys. You could launch those materials in orbit with a electro magnetic rail. Large ships like this would make us a interplanetary civilization it would be able to go anywhere in our solar system.
I mean we could use that to our advantage and effectively just drop things from orbit using Aldrin cyclers.
@@KRYMauL I agree but the people in charge think too small. They gear everything to chemical propulsion and small ships with out gravity. The larger ships built in space that never land atomic power could transport people and supplies anywhere in our solar system in comfort.
@@KRYMauL The cycler ships don't need as much delta v. They start in orbit and increase delta v to get to where they are going and use gravitational bodies to help. Larger reactors could be used the energy buffered super cooled condensers. Then use large vasmir engines. The buffers can recharge in orbit and on the way to location. The vasmir is variable specific impulse which is the most efficient. It is like gears in a car. You use the same power out put but decrease the mass of the propelant as you get to higher speed. This well give you higher specific impulse.
Except WHY should we go up there in the first place? Unless space benefits us down here, there is no reason to go up there.
Space mining (basic formula): asteroid mining drone, transporting drone, processing drone, and SpaceX interstellar cargo rocket drones to transport resources back to earth.
Here's a better question: What happened to patience? People have become so jaded to technological advances that if something doesn't happen right away they consider it vaporware.
Amen🙏
Lol true 😂
The first "SPACE MINE" will be the moon mined for its top soil rich in rare H3 which can be easily fusion-ed into electric power.
easily is a strong word
Until we run out of the moon.
@@godofnothing520 Or until some country dominates the production just for their own nation only. China is very Hyper nationalistic when it comes to resources they covet for their own.
@@godofnothing520
Yeah. How long should that take? A million years?
Yes, because arrogant humans, who think everything belongs to a few, need to destroy the moon next.
The trick will be finding asteroids that are actually worth mining. Not every asteroid will be of value, and they're not exactly just a few meters apart; they could be millions of miles apart, so you'll need a robotic spaceship with a lot of fuel and the ability to locate and navigate to numerous sites without refueling and maintenance needs. If you do score a huge chunk of platinum or gold or neodymium, you'll need to insert it into Earth orbit for retrieval by a Falcon 9 or Soyuz, or some kind of specialized orbital drone that can bring the metal safely down. Eventually most of the metals mined in space will never reach the Earth's surface; they'll be used for deep space construction projects. Robots will build orbital structures and spacecraft for less cost than to fly the materials and structures into space from Earth.
I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials.
What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water.
I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing and can barley comprehend how anyone can believe them.
@@tonywilson4713 Are you suggesting that asteroid/moon mining is impractical at our current level of technology? What if we set up a mining station in fixed orbit, and bring asteroids to that station for processing? Could use massive solar arrays or nuclear power, and have centripetal gravity if needed for extraction purposes.
@@ChickensAndGardening Not suggesting but stating it for a fact.
The idea you could just move an asteroid from where they are to Low Earth Orbit is nothing but Star Trek fantasy.
Here's something I tell people who go on about this nonsense. Jeff Bezos has claimed he wants to move the heavy industries like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit where there's lots of sun light 24/7 to use and you don't have to worry about pollution.
One of the iron ore mines I once worked on has a capacity of about 20 million tons a year. Its a good example because the math is very easy.
At about 70% iron by weight that produces about 14 million tons of raw iron a year ready to make stuff out of. The Space Shuttle could bring back from LEO 14 tons of payload which was about 13-1/2 tons more than anything else. So if you want to bring back those 14 million tons of iron ore from LEO it would take about 1 million Space Shuttle flights.
Australia in total produces about 815 million tons of iron ore a year which would require over 40 million Space Shuttle Flights. Even if we made a new magic rocket that was 100 times better than the Space Shuttle that's still 400,000 flights a year. And so you know Australia produces less that 1/3rd of the worlds iron ore.
Sorry but its 99.99% space fantasy nonsense.
The other 0.01% is however very interesting. There are some very rare materials available from places like the moon where for those very rare substances the option of mining them in space is plausible.
World Platinum production is about 215 tons a year and our needs there have been growing. If we can get a rocket that makes the logistics practical then that's plausible. If Helium-3 were to become the main fuel for nuclear fusion that needs about 5-9 Space Shuttle Flights to power the entire planet each year. But the issue there is nobody yet has a power station that runs on Helium-3.
At the end of the day its just guys selling visions of the future.
I agree.
@@tonywilson4713 Mining for earth use is not worth it in most cases. But mining in space for space is.
It’s not about costs it’s about materials.
It doesn’t fully matter if it costs a billion dollars to get 10 thousand dollars of platinum or whatever, earth has limited platinum and there are asteroids with more materials than we have on earth anymore, of course people are looking to gain money from this but for humanity as a whole it’s important to get this going as an extra precaution
Being a fan of Sci-fi space themed TV series like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargate, I can see space mining being a thing. My original mental image of Space mining with current technology I pictured something like attaching thrusters to asteroid to move it closer to earth (just outside the moons orbital path) then build a space station around the asteroid. Send up linkable tube sections with mining type extension arms that would wrap around the asteroid then u can mine the asteroid at whatever pace u want.
Or crash the asteroid on the Moon and mine it there. Potentially very dangerous. Difficult (or maybe impossible) to get international political support for such a procedure. In theory extremely lucrative, since the Moon is relatively close and will have a lot of supporting/synergistic infrastructure soon.
Attaching thrusters to a asteroid makes no sense at all. You mine and process it where it is. With a large ship built in orbit with gravity.
@@clementvining2487 the asteroid that Elon Musk has his eye on moves around within the Asteroid belt. In 2026 its orbit will lead it to outside the belt close to Mars. Because it's an asteroid in the belt, attaching thrusters to the asteroid to move it out of the belt to safely mine it without the fear of other objects colliding into your operation.
@@Christopher-tz3mr Bad idea it may come apart and take too much power.
Just the idea of “bringing” an asteroid ANYWHERE near earth is just dangerous. If taken to its logical conclusion then earth’s orbit will be filled with asteroids, a little too crowded for my taste.
Neil is right though. Jeff and musk are both up there ($200b) and both have their own space programs.
Bezos's Blue Origin company is a vanity project. Whereas, Musk's SpaceX is a real space ship doing real work.
Neither musk nor bezos have the technology to mine asteroids.
Also, they're not investing their billions in space mining.
Musk is more focused on mars, bezos is more towards the space tourism.
@@ChickensAndGardening When Elon directed some of his effort to SpaceX, people said the same. It takes time to do real work. But you gotta start - that's where Blue Origin is currently.
Let me point this out for you 8$ a month x 300million potential customers + a 300$ startup cost then realize 50$ alone and how far that would compete with the rest of the country
Waymo is in 30 states and 6 countries we can automate production down to energy production and transportation down to nothing with the right battery and solar alone slowly fueling all of Americas needs which we have been we have factories out in the middle of nowhere doing just this
New Mexico grows how many pounds of fish in a desert that isnt polluted with all that microplastic and 100% done in aquaponics some states are smart with there infrastructure and then when your a republican state full of morons who constantly show what hypocrisy looks like and what failures to capitalism looks like i mean look at new mexico if you need a good reference republicans get in all they build is clubs and wastes of money democrat gets in hospitals and food water security boom republican gets in reverts alot of those achievements for man
WRONG!!! Bezos's Blue Origin is NOT up there, except by law suits, political gifts and getting government money for his own sub orbital toys while SpaceX is the one, and only one, that is up there! There is no comparison!
Most of these startup ventures are driven by profit. Space mining in its current stage is anything but profitable. It took the combined might of a nation and a decade to put the first man on the Moon. SpaceX almost went bankrupt trying to develop a reusable rocket. The current breed of space mining investors probably won’t have the stomach for the amount of technical hurdles that will need to be overcome in order for this thing to work out.
I'd rather have NASA hire these guys as engineers, and everyone's expertise is put together, under one roof, for the benefit of all. All the new technology invented, all the best of everyone coming together. You know, like we used to? But no...we'd rather be greedy and compete against each other, while giving government money to individual companies because they have great lobbyists... No one wants to share. We want to OWN! And of course, with no treaty, they'd never think that unscrupulous corporations or government bodies might attack those "honey bees" and steal the resources for themselves, since you're ONLY thinking of profit? o_O (15:26)
Julius Caesar built two walls encircling the city of Alesia and defending their wall from an outside attack from over 300,000 Gallic soldiers. Anything can be done with the right plan and support.
@@praetorianstride5948 President Kennedy also rallied the nation to send man to the Moon in just ten years time. The issue at hand isn’t whether something can or cannot be done.
@@williamyoung9401 *Soviet Anthem start playing in the background*
i think china will have the stomach the capitalists wont. for them its about securing rare earth mineral supply, practically forever. not about selling it. when you bring such extreme amounts of supply, the value will go to zero. there is no profit incentive.
People have mentioned the problems with getting the resources mined back to earth, how expensive it will be to mine them in the first place, and that you have to compete with mining here on earth. What i didnt hear mentioned is the crapload of resources you will need to build things in space and how much cheaper it would likely be in the long run to mine resources close to where they are needed. I mean, if you are going to start building stuff on the moon or mars would it not be cheaper to mine and process resources nearby than to send resources there from earth?.
We don’t have unlimited resources, maybe that’s the problem space mining solves.
The expensive part are taking the miners out to space and succesfully landing those materials back to earth and transporting them to where they'll be sold, since you have to land them in the oceans.
Mining them and transporting them to a moon base or an space platform, say we build a platform orbitting mars which is the closest to the asteroid belt, we could easily explore Mars or create whatever we want to make there and it'd be extremely cheap, and probably done mostly by AI excluding the humans that'd probably be at the platform, since you need next to nothing in fuel to propulse spaceships at incredibly high speeds in space.
So yes, asteroid mining is definitely the future, but it's not the type of future people expect of bringing those materials down to earth, but rather to build and manufacture stuff out there for usage outside our planet. It's the future of humanity, providing we stop our society's self destruction and we stop feeding media and their bs, abusing human emotions to make money out of biased news and we start focusing more on the future rather than short-term profit and changes.
@@williamnguyen2411 I'm thinking the same thing, like they talk about platinum for example, OK if we still have platinum in the soil, i understand that it is not appealing to go mine it in space, but what about the other ressource? like, i dunno, let me use the shield in marvel that is suppose to be "the entire planet reserve in that one shield" (because i don't have anything else that come to mind for the example) well, mining in space would make that finite ressource into an infinite ressource, allowing us to build more of them than what we can at the current time.... Another example would be paladium, we have a finite amount of it on earth, there is not a lot of mine of it and it is pretty rare, we cannot build a lot of thing that require paladium so much that the junkyard where all our electronic go, there is scavenger looking for it because we don't have more, if we find an asteroid with paladium in it, we could start manufacturing more stuff that we could ever right now because right now we are running out of it...
Precisely. Giant moon bases and space ships will only happen when the materials needed to build those things dont have to expensively escape earths gravity well. Space mining is the only way to have a true human presence in space.
The fact they expect us to be mining by now shows they dont realize how mich time it takes to conceive and execute a design
imagine if every country dropped their military budget to support this for mankind.
This is awesome. That worker bee could essentially function as an off world worker. Using easily mined resources to power itself. Genius. I think its very possible.
It's not ...sorry!
@@kevt6151 Why dont you think so sir?
@@Dr.Cr0w Because he just enjoys trolling.
This is very good coverage of the topic. However, I cringe when I see the graphics of "asteroid fields", which are displayed unrealistically. Most asteroids are too far from neighboring asteroids for a person to see one asteroid from another. This mistake is the most common mistake in solar system graphics, best I can tell.
Good ‘ole Neil “deGrassee” Tyson.
I think they named a Canadian Junior High after him 😄
Kind of undercuts the authority of the speaker when she doesn't know how to pronounce the name of the world's most famous astrophysicist, lol.
Hey, he's an astrophysicist; not an economist, lol.
Mining in space IS a good idea, but it's time has not come yet. You MUST have very cheap heavy lift first. Until either New Glenn or Starship start flying, all this stuff about commercial space stations, and space mining are just PowerPoint presentations.
Or maybe if we build the infrastructure to get into space a lot cheaper like sky hooks.
If no one ever told you yet. Thank you CNBC for educating us with these videos. Your every video teaches us about all the aspects of society step by step. Just continue on this path
@MegOh! Businesses yeah, not so much of a book guy; make a video about that book, im all ears; educational enough for me meghan.
I didn't know we started space mining
Same 😂
Cardassian lies
Great overview of space mining.
If anyone wants to understand how this actually would work read “the high frontier” by Gerard O’Neil
there is no disagreement that it is possible. just that if it will be a free market profit incentive venture or tax-paid "good for mankind" venture, like china.
Imo, it's primarily 2 things:
A) It's been about 5-7 years since the hype of Planetary Resources. In that time, launch costs have come down but not enough that we're getting infrastructure up into orbit (and beyond). I'd give it another 5 years _after_ Starship is up & running before really wondering why mining hasn't begun. It's akin to wondering why oil wasn't being mined in California when the Mayflower has barely landed.
B) Tied into this is simply the lack of that aforementioned infra. Not only the refueling service it seems TransAstra is aiming to fulfill, but also manufacturing that a gen 3 or 4 Varda Space might eventually do. Launching things from the ground here on Earth is *always* going to be way more expensive than just constructing and fueling the probe up in space. Again, this infra should fill out in the 10 to 20 yrs post-Starship and heading back to the moon.
Interesting and it’s possible . But when our space industry is ready .. still not sure
Was anyone else looking forward to the comments than the video itself? 😅
Yeah skipped the video (which I assume was poorly researched and full of laughable mistakes) and am reading like you. Hehe.
Yep. Musk fanboys who know everything, average age 12, who know everything and have been brainwashed from birth!
Yes. Because I ♥ imagining thoughts.
My goodness this is a biggest risk and yet challenging i'll been looking forward to, keep up the good work.
The cost to get a mineral to and from an asteroid has to be extreme. Then, we are talking about greatly increasing the supply of many of these rare elements. So, to summarize, it costs a lot and it would upset the market places of these elements.
To bring down the costs, we’ll have to have engines that are way better than what we currently have. We are decades away from that.
Once we realize that money is only a hinderance to our capabilities, we shall truly be free, and the Universe will be the only limit.
This is human stupidity, it wont change.
Some of us realize that, but we cant speak up because we dont have the voice.
The only thing that can wake us up is a global catastrophe, i cabt think of other way, no movement will rise up because they care and say money is the biggest problem humanity faces.
@MegOh! Businesses youre the living proof of human stupidity, not even a joke
Money is just a simpler way of determining the value of someone's efforts and products than bartering sheep for clothing for water for cooking oil for weapons for prostitutes for drugs, etc. People have always been bad at setting fair value, it is just more obvious in a monetary system than in a barter system.
In a barter system, the con-man leaves the rube feeling good about his trade.
In a monetary system, the con-man tells the rube what to do all day while playing on Facebook and makes 3x the money, so it is more obviously unfair.
@@kylesmith8128 Money is a human invention. The universe doesn’t care how much money you have. The resources are there for the taking. They are basically infinite. Value, ie “Supply and demand” no longer makes sense when the supply is infinite.
@@oregonsbragia So what are the slaves going to produce with these resources?
1) Space mining for use on Earth makes little sense. It's far easier and cheaper to mine virtually anything on Earth than in space. Space mining for use IN space makes sense but it requires a pre-existing in-space economy.
2) Mining water ice for rocket propellant makes little sense. The lunar south pole is often mentioned as a good location for this. But it requires mining and storage equipment to be landed at the bottom of deep craters that never see any sunlight. Furthermore, hydrogen is the smallest atom and is notoriously difficult to handle. It readily escapes any containment vessel. It also needs to be chilled to just 20 degrees above absolute zero before it turns into a liquid, and even then its density is so low that it requires much larger storage tanks than a comparable mass of other liquids, such as liquid oxygen.
3) Mining for oxygen on the Moon makes much more sense than for water. The lunar surface is 43% oxygen by mass, locked up in various kinds of oxides. You can land virtually anywhere - on an easily accessed flat plain in lower latitudes, instead of the pitch-black bottom of a deep polar crater. You have a number of different oxides to choose from. Oxygen also represents the majority of the mass for rocket propellant. A methane-oxygen propellant combo is 80% oxygen. Liquid methane is also much closer to the temperature of liquid oxygen, simplifying your cryogenic storage infrastructure, compared to liquid hydrogen. Mine the oxygen virtually anywhere on the lunar surface, combine it with methane brought from Earth, and you have a viable off-earth propellant production system.
Really funny how both companies have two different goals, one is working to make more money while the other is hoping to use these materials to better the lives of others.
Nah, they have same goals, just one has a better spokesperson.
😡 😡 😡
Pokroky ve vědě jsou skvělé
Profitable space mining requires two things to be accomplished before true operations begin (operations other than bringing a select few minerals back):
- Colonies stationed on Mars and either Phobos or Deimos (the moons around Mars)
- Manufacturing and processing plants on said colonies
The moon colonies are basically drop off points for the manufacturing plants. The plants are self-evident. Ideally, the overall logistics is to have those colonies since they are closer to the asteroid belt and can launch much easier than from Earth. Once the minerals are brought back, they are then processed and then shipped to our moon (Luna). After that, they are then redistributed to where they need to go, either back to Earth or to near-Earth habitats and space stations - or to the construction companies building said habitats and stations.
Finding and categorizing asteroids for mining is trivial with just off the shelf imaging and orbital prospecting satellites that are currently in use today combined with other sensors to measure the asteroid's density. A bouy-type system that consists of an RTG for power and a radio signal that broadcasts the owner's information and position would be enough to claim it. International laws and standards would need to be implemented, of course, which would also include the amount of time the claim is active.
@MegOh! Businesses I'd love to hear what exactly wouldn't work in reality as I've done countless hours of research on this topic.
Sounds pretty good. People like the previous poster would steal claims in the darkness of space, that is why they say it won't work. But most people can read and write and follow directions, so it could work.
We are centuries away from making it commercially viable, and it will take investments at a global level as well as a cessation of silly terrestrial wars that benefit the few while costing the many. Space terrorism/war would be relatively cheap for the aggressor and expensive for the victim and losses would be hard to replace.
@MegOh! Businesses well people only 120 years ago would laugh you out of the room if you said that in 20 years time there would be reliable heavier than air flight sooooooo
@MegOh! Businesses Yes, yes. The Earth is flat, what was I thinking.
@@FinGeek4now Research alone isn't enough. For one those things you mentioned is true. But it is more efficient to mine and process the ore where it is. On earth there are these large fishing factories that fish and process and can the fish on the ship. Then when it is full they bring it where it needs to go. They get more for the finished goods.
Anyway if you build large mining ships in orbit with gravity powered by liquid fuel molten salt reactors you can take the byproduct (thorium)from mining processed ore and use for fuel for the reactors. Use water for air water and propelant. It well be self maintained until full and get a enormous amount more for the goods. All metal could be on very large spools for 3d printing to deliver anywhere needed. Or another ship could take delivery. A ship like this would have enough power for processing in space the main way of construction in space and findly on earth well be 3d printing. These spools of metal well be very valuable compared to the ore.
The hype phase was interesting but no substantive talks about how to get it done had ever really occurred that indicated they had a working plan, making general space access cost effective hadn't even been accomplished yet.
There's a reason diamond companies artificially limit supply. As soon as you flood the market with that much supply the value would take a huge drop. The projections may only be considering the value at the current going rate. After the market asjusts the value would be a small fraction of what it is now. They would basically have to do only a single mining mission and then be careful to trickle in supply to keep demand from plummeting.
but instantly becoming the largest supplier of rare elements would probably make you pretty rich.
@@a_person5660 For sure, but even on Earth the cost of extracting and processing REEs is high, then add to that the cost of engineering a sophisticated and risky space mission. Not sure the economics really work out that well. Still would be interesting to see. I think deep-sea mining is more likely to happen any time soon.
Yeah but the price of platinum, cobalt, uranium, etc isn't artificial
That argument is an over simplification of the economics. The price is determined by how much the demander is willing to pay to have something and how much the supplier is willing to to be payed to provide their ressources. And this is influenced by a combination of the number of suppliers, the number of demanders and the cost of production. If you have a small number of demanders and a high number of suppliers, the demander are the ones that drive prices, this is what we observe with farmer and retail the farmers have almost no bargaining power. If you have a large number of demanders and a small number of supplier it's the opposite and is what we observe with as you noted the diamond industry but also the oil industry. And finally if the cost of production is higher than the selling point well without some form of aid the suppliers will go out of business.
If you are the one flooding the market then you have control over the price.
You’re comparing something that is a luxury item to things arhat are needed in everyday products. Not a good comparison.
I used to be a space miner, then we settled on Earth, now I am disabled waiting for a good job, that would be worth doing
10:18 That's the first time I've ever heard the phrase revenue positive 😂😂. Just make sure you don't confuse that with profitable.
I'm not sure I trust this Trans Astra. Sounds to me like they're trying to spin pretty stories to get not only venture capital, but also government money to run their "business." They haven't produced a thing, except pretty stories. Maybe we should leave this to NASA to try out for the next few decades, before we start giving companies all our money on future prospects that never pan out? Even the spokesman realizes he's spinning a line. (8:18) "Just look at OUR projections. We guarantee, you'll make money." Never heard that one before... Any company can be "revenue positive" with government money. "5-7 year time frame." Right...
For the people that always ask why they didn't sent another mission to the moon in 50 years. The answer is the Apollo mission costed the US 150 billion dollars in today's equivalent money. So it was always gonna be a one time thing until technology caught up and it was financially viable.
USG Ishimura
I hope planetcracking is a thing in future lol
@@technofanable and I hope there are no markers XD
Have we as a species not learned anything?... Cause and effect.. Lets say we mine it... Now for some reason it is headed straight towards earth and kills us all...greed will be our downfall!
The mind-boggling elephant in the room is physics. Chris Dreyer hit a home run. Mining for the return usage on Earth faces the reentry problem. One ton of Platinum is still one ton. And one ton needs to be slowed down from the orbital speed, to ground speed. Not very cost-effective with current tech.
for this reason i believe in the future mining in space will be more useful when we have the means to process said material in space and build with it in space. Would allow for space colonies to be much more self sustainable and allow us to build much, much larger more efficient spacecraft because you don't have that little atmosphere or earth's gravity problem. Sad it will most likely not happen in our lifetimes
@@nick123nak6 .. Depends on how old you are.
Currect technology is not the problem it is how we use current technologies. The applied physics and engineering is there but used the wrong way.
@@nick123nak6 Well surprise we have the technology to build large space ships now with gravity. We also have the technology to power them for over half a century. But the people who control the money don't want it. The technology is disruptive and would put them out of power.
@@clementvining2487 .. Please explain.
To make space mining reality, we must first make space truly accessible.
Imagine starting up a modern mining project without having trucks and trains. Right now space mining attempts would be like "hiking 2 weeks in wilderness to pick up a handful of pebbles and then hiking another 2 weeks to bring those pebbles home".
First we need cheap transportation, then space infrastructure. Only after that space mining can truly beging.
Make sense
CNBC video in 300 years.
"The rise of the OPA"
hehe. Damn belters always griping about poor working conditions. ;)
If I had a large oil or mining company, I'd be salivating at the chance to take it offworld.
Can't believe it's just the little upstarts.
This has the potential to be a serious dollar mine for whatever companies manage to mine space. I hope that policy catches up to them, and taxes them appropriately. Under-taxation of resource extraction on earth is already commonplace. The notion that this could happen with space mining as well really makes my skin crawl.
no! don't tax them for space mining. its way better for the environment then earth mining
@@Wyatt125 Space is infinite. Therefore, the potential profits of exploiting space are infinite, and must be taxed.
@@firefox39693 Which countries tax rates are you referring to? Country A has high taxes for stuff, but Country B has low taxes.
@@Puzzoozoo We need an international way to tax the rich, like private jets and stuff.
@@Puzzoozoo Any country that has the highest possible tax rates, royalties, and the best social safety net would be the best country to emulate. You need a way to collect the money, then distribute that money in order for it to bring a widespread benefit to the economy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson will study space mining with Bornwell.
Let's not talk about how endless resources would crash the markets.
That’s the part we don’t care about, it’s only about the money.
That’s not how it works and the “resources” are far from endless. Its essentially just a mine but in space rather then underground.
the opposite... it only crashes the rare earth mineral market... but it enables other markets to soar now that they actually have a future when rare earth minerals are in forever abundance..you just need to sell your rare earth mineral-related stocks and buy new ones.
Thanks for the quality material and indicator settings. I couldn't figure it out before.
This would be cool but I don’t see this happening anytime soon. At least 30 years out minimum
only after humanity starts running out of some rare earth minerals. id wager at least 100 years.
When it becomes a need,people will start taking all the wealth of the universe thats out there (or at least a very small part of it)
Resources on Earth are still plentiful enough to avoid going to space and do something serious.
Even if you could bring a rock back with 1000 times the platinum of the entire market, you can't assume you'll be able to sell it for $1024/ounce. You've entirely blown up the supply/demand curve by blowing up supply and the cost per ounce will drop through the floor.
You pretty much have to try and keep it quiet? How much you have and then severely limit the amount you release to keep prices high..much like the diamond trade
this will save humanity
i have a question people. Even if they managed to get to an asteroid and capture its precious metals or water in tons, wouldn't this additional mass demand much more thrust power from the mining vehicle to ever land in earth due to gravitational pull from the earth?
Not more thrust but more fuel yes but the plan is probably to produce fuel insitu. Once you are orbital the amount of thrust is much less important than when taking off. This is because when you are taking off you need to produce more thrust than the weight of your vehicles but once you are in orbit your weight is 0. Having higher thrust is still helpful as it allows you for shorter burn limiting gravity drag but these gain are almost nothing compared to using a more efficient engine and their are mitigating methods like simply doing multiple burns at the optimal orbital point. This is what we see at 9:02, that orbit is what we would observe by doing multiple boost burn at perigee..
@@gavinkemp7920 thank you for replying back. I fully get what you wrote, but you are talking about the orbit. If the mining vehicle would have to return to earth to sell the materials, then wouldn’t the vehicle require additional thrust during the landing process to earth considering it would have the original mass minus burned fuel plus the mined materials?
@@nickiogr well you would need a very good reason to return the mining vehicle. it would make more sense to leave it their as it could continue mining will the ship is bringing the ressources back to earth.
As for landing that will depend on how you are landing but it will involve the use of an aerobreak, baring a massive breakthrough in propulsion technology. as such you need little fuel to land assuming you choose propulsive landing rather than parachutes.
For example if we take starship as an example it needs about 1200 tons of propellant to reach orbit (and that is ignoring super heavy) but only 29 tons to land. so even full of valuable ores the returning starship will be much lighter than when it took off.
The metals can be returned ballistically, so you just need the additional fuel to get you back to earth orbit.
@@gavinkemp7920 There is a better way.
Neil's voice immediately send me back to childhood when I'm watching space documentaries
I don't think he is professional
@@Tacticalerth What do you mean? I didn't say anything about him being professional. He voiced other space documentaries back then for people too
AYE LOONY TOONS
This should be a 2 second video. Second One: What happened to Space Mining? Second two: They were 40 years too early. Fin.
whatever you do, DON’T LOOK UP
Question why can't we use a old shuttle and a crusher which doesn't need air to crush bringing the fragments into the shuttle or booster tubes to be able to withstand re entry
I think the economics of space mining only works out when you keep the materials in space, for example to build orbital structures. It's currently too expensive to bring materials back to the Earth's surface, even if you don't need to worry about oxygen and cabin temperatures (within reason). Some day when we have figured out a "sky hook" or "space elevator" which lets you cheaply send things and people up and down the gravity well, though even then, tons of mined lithium or iron are going to be problematic.
WHAT!?!! A OLD SHUTTLE YOU SAY!?!!! Are you serious?! You don't know much about the shuttle, do you? I don't think you thought this through!
The Space Shuttle was not capable of that. It was designed for missions in low earth orbit, not interplanetary travel.
Just because something can reach low earth orbit doesn't mean that it can go into deep space and back. Leaving Earth, then stopping at an asteroid, then accelerating back again with cargo requires such a high fuel-to-payload-ratio that it is barely possible at all as long as we use chemical rockets.
I like this idea, but a sudden introduction of resources into our system would create inflation. My example of this is when the Spanish Empire discovered a entire mountain made of silver. Potosí in south America. The production of massive amounts of silver, suddenly introduce into their financial system had an inflationary effect. It watered down their currency, to the point its value was gone.
Not quite. A sudden introduction of materials in a system creates DEFLATION, which is good! The reason the Spanish example happened as it did was they based their currency itself on gold and silver, so when silver prices collapsed, so did the currency.
Today currency is not tethered to a metal, which is good, introduces its own problems, but not this one
@@akashgarg9776 interesting, thanks for the reply
You’d need a structure that can get freight to and from low earth orbit using energy more efficient than a rocket. The kiper belt can be a great resource that could greatly maintain and expand humanity for centuries.
What should be built are automated space mining and manufacturing. As one commenter said "Mining in space for space makes more sense." My mind can imagine huge manufacturing factories in space and on large asteroids that will churn out products for Mars, Earth, and space colonies. Today there are factory ships that harvest fish in the oceans and process them onboard for eventual human consumption. Imagine something similar in space among the mineral rich asteroids. My only regret is that I won't live long enough to see it.
Why are you old?
Automated asteroid mining would definitely be good, moreso for a Martian colony. The mining of hundreds of tons of water ice from asteroids for delivery to Mars would be extremely good, especially with advances in new types of propulsion.
I think as it stands right now, asteroid mining for Earth cities/businesses isn't feasible, because things that we require on Earth are always on Earth. For colonies on celestial bodies, however, it's definitely more feasible and maybe even their only option.
My thoughts also, and at 65 I to will never live long enough to see it happen. Hope the next world gives me a ring side sea to go with immortality. :)
Right...they would need some kind of space force to protect mines......oh wait....
We have to look more at progress than profit. Money will have no meaning in the future. There are multiple ways to make it happen, but upgrading humanity itself and everything around us, will make it so we don't need or use things the same way we do now. With our evolutions and adaptations, we will be able to do anything, but not need to. I'd love to always keep getting better and helping beings throughout this and other universes and dimensions.
The world should be more worried about space junck.. it's a hasserd for the future of space traveling
Neil 💫Degrassi💫 Tyson
She must be white
Currently the most expensive metal is a ton of steel raised to an Earth orbit. A much cheaper metal would be a ton of steel make in orbit from an iron ore satellite.
Amazing! Now you know why China has been so interested in the Moon - H3!
exactly. btw it's also known as tritium
Not a good idea to mess with the moon
I love how people ignore some information which conflicts with desires and goals. Space junk is going to be a major problem soon due to the orbital cascade (space junk hits other space junk which creates a cloud of debris) that would make space orbital travel hazardous if not impossible. Was surprised to hear that they are going full bore with more satellites and space mining. We need to start cleaning up first or we may just trap ourselves here. Space mining won't mean anything if we can't get there.
The sad thing is that if they brought back a whole asteroid of diamonds it would still cost a fortune to buy a diamond for your girl. It's because of the monopoly that Debeers has on it. They have had a huge monopoly on them for many decades.
If another company brought down the space diamonds, obviously De Beers no longer has a monopoly. And many diamonds are artificially made today anyways, far cheaper.
@@TheBooban that shows that you have no clue of what is really going on they would still have a monopoly on it for sure. Diamonds right now as it is or so plentiful that they could sell a 1 carat diamond for $100 and still make a nice profit but they don't let people know about that they keep it a secret.
Short answer to the question.
A) Mining off world will not be viable before we have matured space infrastructure, ie: Living facilities, economical transport of goods and people.
B) Living off world will be dangerous untill we find a medical solution to living in low gravity.
C) Transportation will be economicaly viable when the costs are reduced.
D) For humanity to expand and survive, mining off world is inevitable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: The first trillionaire they will ever be, is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids.
Saudis: Hold my oil
The western world is realizing that oil and gas are two sources we cannot depend upon.. mainly because of the evil forces selling them (Russia & countries in Middle East).
Therefore, it is more likely that Europe (at least) focuses on other sources of energy.. probably renewable because it's able to be produced domestically. A single Saudi Arabian person will not be the first trillionaire lol actually once oil becomes obsolete, they'll be poor.
Saudis will run out of money before they run out of oil.
My sister works for Anglo American in the Science and Technology division, and they're actively working on asteroidal mining.
Perhaps it’s because mining your pocket is much more lucrative.
One thing to consider is whether it would become a national security issue. The CCP controls the largest share of rare earth metals, so if the CCP became more volatile it may force Western countries (who already have space programs) to invest and develop asteroid mining as a way of staying afloat.
This is something we must do. When enough materials are sequestered in space and don't need to expensively escape earths gravity well, an exponential industry can take off that would eventually make mining on earth obsolete, cheaper, and far far far friendlier to earths environment.
Sounds like asteroids would make a better target than mars as a colonization target. there are asteroids the size of moons, and nobody will complain when you slam multiple into each other to congregate the resources you want.
It's the future, plain and simple.
It's good to see _The_ _Transporter_ branching out from his terrestrial business ventures.
Beautiful video 🎉🎉❤❤
That industry is in full swing. The reports on this activity however are and have been stifled. The age of information bears the biggest cross of silence
Space mining is still inevitable. its just expensive to get there and people have short lives so they are very near sighted and still focused on grasping easy fast money instead
My 'timetable' remains unchanged after some five years: The launch of a commercial mission to mine an asteroid, before the end of the decade. The failure to take space law seriously, by the relevant governments, invites disputes and hostilities. I, personally think space belongs to all of us and while, it should be fine for space-mining companies, to make a hefty profit, the material benefits, should be shared equally, but regardless the outcome, laws are required and fast.
No government on earth can ever make a law that will apply in space. Or should.
It's Neil De-Grass...
Using space materials in space to further space travel and colonization makes the most economic sense.
Thanks for this news
start with moon mining then youll be able to convince investors to mine asteroids.. they need moon mining for the moon base that is an essential jumping point to all other space related endeavors..
Sounds pretty clear to me, what ever resource you mine you own, you just can't claim an entire asteroid if someone is mining it as well. Basically saying share the big ones with who ever lands there.
What we should be doing first, is recovering the space junk we've abandoned over the years rather than exploiting space further.
Imagine material in that stuff
Space mining is just space mining. However the business is in space metallurgy. Metallurgy in vacuum and low gravity in many applications is very useful
What are they talking about with it being too costly to go out there? All I've been hearing the past few years is that the commercial sector with companies like SpaceX have been making it WAY cheaper to do that.
Matt, the only way to access more of these 11:20 [without running into an environmental catastrophe down here] is to establish a sustainable closed-cycle economy! This way of thinking really goes into a completely wrong direction. Space resources have to stay in space. Earth has more than enough resources if they get managed in a sustainable way and products get designed in a way that they can easily be recycled and repaired!
Excellent stuff bro
"What Happened To Space Mining?"
uhh, nothing? it always was just a science fiction concept, not a practical thing in current time.
I'm under the "Finders Keepers" rule for all mined materials from space.
No ownership of the asteroid itself, unless it is 100% captured, but if you remove resources they are yours.
but what about space pirates? bet you didn't think about that one
One way to satisfy the "for benefit of all mankind" proviso of Outer Space Treaty would be to invest the money earned from sales in something akin to Norway's sovereign fund that could be used to, well, fund future space missions or other science projects (e.g. a cure for ebola or cancer, or longevity/healthspan projects, or CO2 extraction from air...)
As you see, the main problems companies that want to engage in asteroid mining are :
1) Identifying which asteroids have the materials: water, Helium, nickel- iron, platinum, that Earth industries desire;
2) developing the means to get to these asteroids and the system to mine them in a Zero-G environment; and
3) Working out an statutes with the present nation partnership that prohibit any company/government from declaring proprietary ownership of an asteroid it mines, even though they own the materials they gather from it.
people like you and the other comment who posted about 'worth mining' asteroids. in space _everything_ is worth mining even the 'trash' as it can be used for radiation shielding but go on tell us how only a few small scraps are worth going after
for earth to heal we must make space mining a reality
Good video, but why mine in deep space? There is roughly 9,000 tons of estimated space junk in orbit. Focus on collecting that and reforging for use in orbitable 3D Printers for Orbital Construction. The pay off is selling the materials and construction in orbit to nations, etc.