I’ll get, at least for short time :) If nothing comes better, in 20-30 years retired I’ll build something like that Denmark amateur rocket. It is cheap even today, and the tech and blueprints will be widespread and available like say drones and homemade planes today.
Optimistically though I think by that time ticket to Moon on SpaceX cattle class will be $100K.
Hey I feel your space enthusiasm and would really like to be in space at least once and preferable to the moon, but I don't see how it can be economical for mining for earth. Space mining makes sense to build things in space for further space colonisation, but I guess we will have to invent other reasons to justify it.
(For me exploring space and working towards becoming a multi planet species is justification enough)
it is like for example situation with energy production 30 years ago when solar was expensive and coal was cheap. Yet the solar have been becoming more and more cheap while coal becoming more and more expensive. The same will be with a lot of mining - the cost of it on earth, including environmental costs, will be rising while space mining costs will be falling. It will take time before space mined iron would make economical sense, where is space mining things like previously mentioned iridium, etc. looks to already have economical sense, or very close to it, even today.
Space iron? Earth's crust is full of it, it will never make economical sense to bring it from space.
You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
Some very rare elements or tritium maybe, but this is is a big maybe.
One of the points of space economy is that rocket needs to leave earth only once. After that the equipment would just be mining and sending stuff back using pretty unlimited solar and nuclear energy thus the amortized cost of the mined material would be going down to pretty much 0 which in the long run may work even for iron.
Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally. The same thing will be with mining as the cost structure - absence of environmental, regulatory and political costs in particular and much cheaper energy (solar and nuclear) - is much better in the space than on earth. Also scale - you can easily find asteroids where you can have a mining operation 10x or even 100x the largest earth operation - and scale drives cost down. The earth based operations will just lose the competition.
>You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
If you're sending stuff back you need reentry vehicles. Even allowing for reusability, it's hard to imagine the cost of building and launching them being less than the value of iron they contain (current value around $1 per kg for the higher grades and a fraction of that for scrap) and you're going to have to deal with regulators to land them. Even if the asteroid material solves the problem of all the propellant needed as reaction mass for transit to and from the asteroid belt, the unit economics of return only make sense to bring back the highly valued elements, and only if the rare elements aren't actually ones where the terrestrial supply monopolist can ramp up production rates once they face competition.
"Nobody these days surprised that producing stuff in China and delivering it 10000km is cheaper than producing locally"
Actually people do see the madness in this, hence all the "produce local" initiatives instead.
The only reason it made sense, was not caring about external costs from fossil fuels and bad worker conditions in china.
"You could use the energy needed for a rocket start to melt and seperate it from allmost any rock here on earth way easier.
good luck getting permit :)"
Not hard. What do you think recycling smelters do?
It just does not make economical sense to melt and separate any rock and purify the elements. You use the ones you know have already high amounts of iron, copper, .. and you seperate them before as much as possible as smelting is energy intense and handling molten elements is hard and therefore expensive.
And the other point, yes, if there is a automated space industry, that can produce cheap reentry vehicles, some space mining might make sense. But if we would have that tech, we might as well use it on earth. Because you cannot just point a lump of iron towards earth. That would be called a asteroid and would be a weapon of mass destruction. You need spaceships. Going down .. and then up again, unless you use throwable spaceships?
The funniest aspect of this conversation is the context: an author who made his living on telling the stories of fools he met in the gold rush. Some people can't be dissuaded by reason.
