Value of an Asteroid

[Airbrush]

This question came to me reading about "Worth of the sun?".

It is possible that we could discover an asteroid nearby that is very rich in valuable metals.  It could be so valuable that a mission might be sent to the asteroid to attach rockets to it to move it closer to Earth.  Then it could be mined in Earth orbit for decades or hundreds of years.  Suppose it is worth quadrillions of US dollars worth of rare earth metals, gold, silver, uranium, you name it.  According to supply and demand, the value of such precious metals will plummet to a lower value.  But it could still be worth Trillions of dollars after deducting the costs of moving the asteroid and mining operations, right?

 

[Janus]

The present cost of gold, for instance, is ~$43,000 per kg.  The present cost per kg to just reach LEO is ~$20,200 per kg.    To go out and capture an asteroid, mine it, and return the mined product to Earth is going to cost more than twice that per kg.  At the present level of technology,  it will cost more to get the gold than the gold is worth, even if the asteroid was pure 24k gold.

[Sensei]

50 minutes ago, Airbrush said:

This question came to me reading about "Worth of the sun?".

It is possible that we could discover an asteroid nearby that is very rich in valuable metals.  It could be so valuable that a mission might be sent to the asteroid to attach rockets to it to move it closer to Earth.  Then it could be mined in Earth orbit for decades or hundreds of years.  Suppose it is worth quadrillions of US dollars worth of rare earth metals, gold, silver, uranium, you name it.  According to supply and demand, the value of such precious metals will plummet to a lower value.  But it could still be worth Trillions of dollars after deducting the costs of moving the asteroid and mining operations, right?

 

Money does not exist. They are just bits on computer disk.

Rare metals are interesting to have here on Earth (they would stop being "rare"), depending on their usefulness for human kind.

I don't see a problem in having abundance of f.e. Gold (from Gold-asteroid), it could be used to protect against cosmic radiation.

(jewelry industry would not agree with me )

 

If human will survive the next few years without nuclear war etc. etc. I think such journey for asteroid will be inevitable.. It does not have to have precious/rare metals to be worthwhile to bring it near Earth. Simply it will be source of fuel for rockets (Hydrogen and Oxygen) on far orbit.

 

Edited September 15, 2017 by Sensei

[Phi for All]

If you keep the asteroid in space and use it there, even the iron is worth a fortune compared to lifting it from Earth. 

[swansont]

47 minutes ago, Janus said:

The present cost of gold, for instance, is ~$43,000 per kg.  The present cost per kg to just reach LEO is ~$20,200 per kg.    To go out and capture an asteroid, mine it, and return the mined product to Earth is going to cost more than twice that per kg.  At the present level of technology,  it will cost more to get the gold than the gold is worth, even if the asteroid was pure 24k gold.

I'm missing something. Why is the launch cost relevant as a comparison? You launch an empty cargo vessel, and fill it with whatever you've mined and return it to earth. The launch cost informs you (along with other costs) of how big the cargo vessel has to be. You could launch a 100 kg capsule but fill it with 1000kg of material.

[Janus]

3 hours ago, swansont said:

I'm missing something. Why is the launch cost relevant as a comparison? You launch an empty cargo vessel, and fill it with whatever you've mined and return it to earth. The launch cost informs you (along with other costs) of how big the cargo vessel has to be. You could launch a 100 kg capsule but fill it with 1000kg of material.

I was using it as a base comparison.  The scheme here is to go out, attach enough rockets to an asteroid to bring it into rendezvous with the Earth. Then you would have to insert it into Earth orbit in order to properly mine it.   This in itself is likely to take more delta V than  getting something into orbit.   Neither is it cost free to bring something in from orbit, as you have to counter its orbital velocity to drop it in towards the Earth. If you are starting from a high orbit, you are going to have to reduce velocity again if you don't want a hunk of metal smacking into the Earth like a large meteorite.  Unless you've already have a spaced based industry, everything, including the fuel needed to do all this will have to be lifted from the Earth to begin with.

[Area54]

15 hours ago, Janus said:

Unless you've already have a spaced based industry, everything, including the fuel needed to do all this will have to be lifted from the Earth to begin with.

Fuel can be derived from the asteroid, either as volatiles, or simply reaction mass for a railgun "Stone chucker".

[iNow]

My sense is that's implicit in Janus' point about needing to have an existing / established industry, but he's far more capable than me of explaining the dynamics involved and resources required. 

[Raider5678]

19 hours ago, Phi for All said:

If you keep the asteroid in space and use it there, even the iron is worth a fortune compared to lifting it from Earth. 

I'm a kid, so I play video games. And while I'm certain it's far from real life, there's a game I play where you design rockets and launch them into orbit and all that or basically whatever you want to do. One of the problems is fuel, because by the time you get to orbit, even at the most efficient and lowest orbit you can be at(around 70km) you've usually used most of your Fuel. 

In the game though, you're capable of bringing asteroids into a more stable orbit. You simply attach a rocket to it via a drilling mechanism and set it to full thrust. This can alter the course of the rocket and put it in orbit. Once there, you can send up a mining operation section by section. 

But from then on, if you simply engineer a docking port into your rocket, you can refuel at that fuel station. This allows much easier interplanetary travel.

Saving you trillions of dollars in game. The cost of launching up the rocket first, then docking with it 3 fuel tanks, and then launching up engines.

It get's expensive quickly. Now this is obviously a game, but it's designed to mimic real space travel and problems, and was used in an astronomy class once. I just bought the game after the class was over. The asteroid doesn't need gold or iron or silver to make it valuable. Oxygen and Hyrdogen, as someone mentioned, could by worth trillions more, and for hundreds of times longer. With the average cost of moving the asteroid reaching close to 15 trillion if you use a huge one, and as little at 5 trillion if you use a small but still useful one.

[Area54]

2 hours ago, iNow said:

My sense is that's implicit in Janus' point about needing to have an existing / established industry, but he's far more capable than me of explaining the dynamics involved and resources required. 

I considered that, but the specific mention of the fuel that is specifically not necessary led me to (specifically) reject that possiblity. I hope Janus will comment either way.

[Airbrush]

From the posts above, it seems like the best use of a suitable asteroid would be to build spaceships or space stations, either in Earth orbit, or near a useful asteroid, or in the asteroid belt.  The most valuable materials would be water-ice, to make water, air, and fuel, and metals to use in building spaceships and space stations.  Therefore, the most valuable asteroids would be those that are BOTH rich in water-ice and useful metals!

[TheRadiochemist]

On 9/15/2017 at 11:06 AM, Airbrush said:

This question came to me reading about "Worth of the sun?".

It is possible that we could discover an asteroid nearby that is very rich in valuable metals.  It could be so valuable that a mission might be sent to the asteroid to attach rockets to it to move it closer to Earth.  Then it could be mined in Earth orbit for decades or hundreds of years.  Suppose it is worth quadrillions of US dollars worth of rare earth metals, gold, silver, uranium, you name it.  According to supply and demand, the value of such precious metals will plummet to a lower value.  But it could still be worth Trillions of dollars after deducting the costs of moving the asteroid and mining operations, right?

 

Asteroids are also unusually rich in iridium, and all of the iridium on earth was deposited by asteroids. A tiny chunk of iridium is incredibly expensive, and since most asteroids that contain metal contain about 50% iridium, imagine a thick 1-ton asteroid made of 1,000 pounds of iridium and 1,000 pounds of other stuff. It would be worth 15.5 million dollars on today's market price.

[Janus]

5 hours ago, Area54 said:

Fuel can be derived from the asteroid, either as volatiles, or simply reaction mass for a railgun "Stone chucker".

Assuming an ISP in the order of Our best present day rockets,  and a typical relative velocity for a near-Earth asteroid,  Your asteroid would have to have ~3/4 of its mass to be made up of volatiles capable of being used as fuel.   An asteroid with that high a volatile percentage make-up is unlikely to contain a great deal of precious metals.   Rail guns need power to run, which would most likely be Solar, which would require building huge solar farms on the asteroid.  And the amount of asteroid you would need to "chuck" away would depend on much power you can generate for your rail gun.    For any of this to be anyway feasible or economically viable, we would need to have a much greater space presence than we have now or are expected to have in the foreseeable future. 

1 hour ago, TheRadiochemist said:

Asteroids are also unusually rich in iridium, and all of the iridium on earth was deposited by asteroids. A tiny chunk of iridium is incredibly expensive, and since most asteroids that contain metal contain about 50% iridium, imagine a thick 1-ton asteroid made of 1,000 pounds of iridium and 1,000 pounds of other stuff. It would be worth 15.5 million dollars on today's market price.

I don't know where you got that 50% figure from, as the typical iridium content is in the order of 0.5 ppm (parts per million).  This is relatively rich compared to the Earth's crust, but still fairly rare.

[Raider5678]

18 hours ago, Janus said:

I was using it as a base comparison.  The scheme here is to go out, attach enough rockets to an asteroid to bring it into rendezvous with the Earth. Then you would have to insert it into Earth orbit in order to properly mine it.   This in itself is likely to take more delta V than  getting something into orbit.   Neither is it cost free to bring something in from orbit, as you have to counter its orbital velocity to drop it in towards the Earth. If you are starting from a high orbit, you are going to have to reduce velocity again if you don't want a hunk of metal smacking into the Earth like a large meteorite.  Unless you've already have a spaced based industry, everything, including the fuel needed to do all this will have to be lifted from the Earth to begin with.

How much Delta V do you think is required?

 

I mean, if you can find an asteroid weighing 1 kilotons, and attached a rocket to it, you'd need a certain amount of delta V to move it into orbit around earth.

Now getting it from the asteroid belt seems like a bad idea to me because the Delta V required to get to there and then back to earth would be more then what it takes to get to the moon.

Now, the interesting part about this is that the rocket will change in delta V as soon as it grabs the asteroid. SO you'd need to calculate how much Delta v is required to get the asteroid back before calculating how much you need to get there.

For getting the asteroid back, if you disregard the billion or so people who will be really pissed with you for almost destroying life as we know it if you accidentally mess up, you could potentially use areobreaking to slow down the asteroid to help get it into orbit. That would reduce delta V required. Once you know how much delta V you need to return with the rocket, you then have to calculate how big of a rocket would be required to get to that asteroid, how much fuel it needs, etc.

So the "payload" would have to be the rocket capable of moving the asteroid. Now it doesn't make sense to me to send this as one giant mission for a few reasons.

1. The size of the rocket goes up exponentially with the payload size.

2. Maneuverability will decrease if you only have 1 rocket in the back, compared to 6 different smaller rockets at strategic points.

 

Now I think about 20 different rocket engines launched in maybe 10 launches would be much more helpful as I don't feel like asteroids are symmetrically inclined to work with rockets. So a lot of them would be required to control it.

Now the problem with so many launches, is that the total cost of each launch will increase the price of the the system*.

 

Additionally, at the end of that we'd have to build some kind of mining operation on the asteroid in orbit.

But. If we did this with a big enough rocket we could potentially have enough water on the asteroid to make fuel for hundreds of years. We'd have to see though.

In any event, having a refueling station in orbit means we could launch dry rockets into orbit and then refuel them. Meaning it will cost less then launching it as one big rocket.

Additionally, in an emergency asteroid situation, we have more technology at our disposal.

 

*Unless Elon Musk get's his butt moving on those reusable boosters. Then we can cut this cost down considerably. Simply change whats on the other end of the docking mechanism.

 

 

[HB of CJ]

Raider5678:  I like that earth to the solar system required energy "subway map" and thank you.  We will mine the asteroids.  Give us another couple hundred to five hundred years.  The tech does not yet exist but it eventually will.  Related:   History tells us lots of brave sailors died going down to the sea in ships.  We learned to build better stronger faster sailing ships.  Towards the end of the sailing ship era good captains and crews actually sought out nasty blowing weather.  It let them sail faster and it got them home quicker.  Better tech of the day.  The same thing will happen mining the asteroids.  Time desire lives and technology.  Eventually lots of folks will live and work in space.  Not today but someday.

"One quarter Impulse Mr. Sulu!"

[TheRadiochemist]

56 minutes ago, Janus said:

Assuming an ISP in the order of Our best present day rockets,  and a typical relative velocity for a near-Earth asteroid,  Your asteroid would have to have ~3/4 of its mass to be made up of volatiles capable of being used as fuel.   An asteroid with that high a volatile percentage make-up is unlikely to contain a great deal of precious metals.   Rail guns need power to run, which would most likely be Solar, which would require building huge solar farms on the asteroid.  And the amount of asteroid you would need to "chuck" away would depend on much power you can generate for your rail gun.    For any of this to be anyway feasible or economically viable, we would need to have a much greater space presence than we have now or are expected to have in the foreseeable future. 

I don't know where you got that 50% figure from, as the typical iridium content is in the order of 0.5 ppm (parts per million).  This is relatively rich compared to the Earth's crust, but still fairly rare.

I meant that 50% of asteroids with precious metals contain iridium. If you had enough iridium to make 1,000 pounds of it, it would be worth 15.5 million dollars. I phrased it funny sorry.

 

56 minutes ago, Janus said:

Assuming an ISP in the order of Our best present day rockets,  and a typical relative velocity for a near-Earth asteroid,  Your asteroid would have to have ~3/4 of its mass to be made up of volatiles capable of being used as fuel.   An asteroid with that high a volatile percentage make-up is unlikely to contain a great deal of precious metals.   Rail guns need power to run, which would most likely be Solar, which would require building huge solar farms on the asteroid.  And the amount of asteroid you would need to "chuck" away would depend on much power you can generate for your rail gun.    For any of this to be anyway feasible or economically viable, we would need to have a much greater space presence than we have now or are expected to have in the foreseeable future. 

I don't know where you got that 50% figure from, as the typical iridium content is in the order of 0.5 ppm (parts per million).  This is relatively rich compared to the Earth's crust, but still fairly rare.

 

[Ken Fabian]

If rare and valuable metals are found at ppm within nickel-iron alloys - my understanding is that this is so but I could be misinformed - then they are going to be very difficult to extract in any efficient manner, no matter that platinum group metals have been found in meteorites at above 100ppm, which would be worth mining on Earth were they oxides or other chemically bound ores. Until sampling has been done we won't know if they will be in forms more amenable to extraction - a significant cost if the Osiris-Rex mission is a guide; $US500M per kilo to collect and return small samples to Earth.

The presence of abundant metals and other resources isn't in dispute; it's the costs of extracting them that makes them uneconomic.

Edited September 16, 2017 by Ken Fabian
improve clarity

[beecee]

Asteroid mining, in time, will occur. While technically difficult, it will also have untold advantageous. In the first instance, it will serve possible structures in space and on the Moon, such as out posts etc.  http://www.planetaryresources.com/#home-asteroids

Nice to see forward looking companies such as Planetary Resources making inroads, albeit small, into this area of space expertise today.

[Ken Fabian]

5 hours ago, HB of CJ said:

 History tells us lots of brave sailors died going down to the sea in ships.  We learned to build better stronger faster sailing ships.  Towards the end of the sailing ship era good captains and crews actually sought out nasty blowing weather.  It let them sail faster and it got them home quicker.  Better tech of the day.  The same thing will happen mining the asteroids.  Time desire lives and technology.  Eventually lots of folks will live and work in space.  Not today but someday.

"One quarter Impulse Mr. Sulu!"

I think the sailing ship analogy is very misleading -  exploitation of asteroid resources will be nothing like it; those sailing ships were economically viable technologies already, making profits servicing existing markets. If they had not been economically viable the competition that enabled their ongoing improvements would not have taken place.

Utilising resources in space is a whole different situation in that it requires technologies that don't yet exist,  and thus does not have that kind of competition to prompt it's ongoing development. A whole lot of pre-investment is needed and it has to be done without any incomes from the desired activity itself.

[beecee]

8 hours ago, HB of CJ said:

Raider5678:  I like that earth to the solar system required energy "subway map" and thank you.  We will mine the asteroids.  Give us another couple hundred to five hundred years.  The tech does not yet exist but it eventually will.  Related:   History tells us lots of brave sailors died going down to the sea in ships.  We learned to build better stronger faster sailing ships.  Towards the end of the sailing ship era good captains and crews actually sought out nasty blowing weather.  It let them sail faster and it got them home quicker.  Better tech of the day.  The same thing will happen mining the asteroids.  Time desire lives and technology.  Eventually lots of folks will live and work in space.  Not today but someday.

"One quarter Impulse Mr. Sulu!"

Well put. Obviously and inevitably, given the time, Asteroid mining will be undertaken, as well as other space endeavours for many legitimate and realistic reasons I have gone into before. Many sailors lost there lives for many reasons, one being in isolation, and lack of nutritious food causing the onset of Scurvy and sometimes death. I see asteroid mining happening within the 200 year time frame in actual fact, and of course enthusiastic humans are already looking at preliminary methodology, technology, and eventual commencement. Some will probably die in achieving that, but as technology advances, as methodology improves, in time it will be as achievable as earth based mining.

Edited September 17, 2017 by beecee

[Airbrush]

Very interesting thank you!  Also that is a nice solar system subway map.

The value of an asteroid is worth the entire world!  That is if we don't figure out how to divert a humanity extinguishing impact, we lose the entire world!  For this reason, the same technology that will be used to save the world will also be used to mine the asteroids.  We will use asteroids as stepping stones, gas stations, to the outer planets and moons, and other stars.

Edited September 18, 2017 by Airbrush

[Enthalpy]

Why the launch cost per kg is significant: If a mission shall return materials to Earth, this needs propellants in big amount.

Maybe they can be found locally, raw or processed, but maybe not. Asteroids containing metals usually don't have organics nor water, until some discoveries change that opinion. Up to now, few "main belt comets" are known, only at the outer edge of the main belt, not necessarily where interesting minerals are.

Some "near-Earth" objects are more accessible to our rockets, but there are few of them, which reduces the chances of finding interesting ore there, and water isn't expected so near to the Sun. The main belt objects are at around 2.8AU from the Sun; just coming back from there costs 4.9km/s at the asteroid, and is free if braking in Earth's atmosphere. Our best oxygen-hydrogen rockets eject gas at 4.6km/s, so bringing pure precious metal (not ppm ore!) from there would need more than 2kg propellants for 1kg treasure. Depending on the script, the propellants must first be brought there, which costs much more than 8kg propellants for 1kg treasure. At 40k$ per kg of gold and 5k$ per kg of payload in low-Earth orbit, the numbers are unfavourable as is.

But humans may have better ideas:

• Maybe near-Earth objects contains interesting materials after all.
• Or the goal isn't to bring them back to Earth but use them locally.
• We may have more efficient propulsion:
  http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/76627-solar-thermal-rocket/?do=findComment&comment=1014780
  or electric propulsion, but the thrust is faint. Or solar sails; I see how to build them in hectare area
  http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/78265-solar-sails-bits-and-pieces/?do=findComment&comment=857978
  maybe someone finds a means for the necessary square kilometres.
• Gravitational assistance can help, but it makes no miracle for the asteroids.
• Or we find or produce propellants locally. This depends on what prospector missions find. These too would dearly need a better propulsion.
• Launch costs can shrink with bigger launchers (Falcon 9 Heavy announces lower costs) or with reused launcher parts.
• Plus everything I didn't think at but other humans will.

More likely, a combination of several points may bring the economics into the reasonable area in the future.