Asteroid mining

So that's the interstellar object story.

But what about our own stellar population of objects? Regular listeners will be aware that Cheap Astronomy wants to crash a lot of them onto the Moon, but what other ideas are out there? Dear Cheap Astronomy, what else is going on in the asteroid mining space? Well, good question.

There have been a number of attempts to create an asteroid mining industry despite the obvious lack of access or technological solutions.

Such attempts or startups have been largely built on venture capital.

That is, the support of investors willing to take a gamble on investing in a venture that's unlikely to deliver a profit anytime soon.

Asteroid mining was a focus of the high-profile deep space industry startup, launched in twenty thirteen, which developed various ideas for utilization of off-world resources, including designs for purpose-built spacecraft and an orbiting platform for the collection and processing of off-world water for rocket fuel production.

But nothing ever got off the ground, and the venture, largely a think tank, was bought out in twenty nineteen.

Another well-known startup, Planetary Resources, launched in twenty twelve, made a bigger thing of asteroid mining, establishing a conceptual pathway based on implementing space telescopes which would initially be put into Earth orbit and then later roam interplanetary space to gain closer views of asteroids for prospecting purposes.

The Rockefellers of the 21st century may be less like the internet and tech moguls of the 20th century and more like the old school oil barons of the 19th.

But asteroid mining isn't the same as drilling a hole and hoping black gold spurts out.

It will take years of work by dedicated engineers and scientists and billions of dollars to extract the first dollars worth of useful asteroid material.

So will it happen? Can it happen? To answer this question, we need to learn a bit about asteroids.

Asteroids are literal goldmines for stuff we want to bring back to Earth.

But they also contain materials useful for the mining process itself.

Raw materials like iron, nickel, aluminum, and titanium are not cost-effective to bring back to Earth, but they can go towards building infrastructure in space, including more asteroid mining facilities.

But even more important is water.

You can't have space pirates today because no one's building a spaceship in their backyard.

Perfect time to do it, like, right when asteroid mining is beginning as well.

Because there wouldn't be fa-

There's no such thing as stealth in space.

But looking at, like, some realistic situations of how piracy would work, I think a big one would be basically intersecting shipments of goods between two bodies.

Right.

Or intersecting things like claimed asteroids because my idea of asteroid mining is I think mostly what you would do is you would go find an asteroid, lay claim to it, put some markers on it, and then put that asteroid on a ballistic trajectory back to some mining center, whether that's around Earth or the outer solar system.

Then it would be processed.