Asteroid Mining Viability
The cluster debates the economic feasibility of asteroid mining, questioning if it's cheaper than Earth mining for terrestrial use or more valuable for in-space manufacturing, construction, and avoiding Earth's gravity well.
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is asteroid mining viable compare to shipping raw material up the earth gravity well?
Why would off-planet mining and manufacturing make things easier?
Space is huge, but space is also empty. Mining asteroids is really energetically expensive if you want to get the material back to Earth. It’s a very reasonable thing to do if you want to build stuff in space, though.
What about asteroid / other planets mining?
The value to asteroids, is that they're already in space. No need to lift the materials out of a gravity well.
Economical with metal from earth maybe - what about from an asteroid? Time to think outside the box.
What can we mine in space that we can't mine more cheaply on Earth?
It's probably true that asteroid mining will never be economically viable for supplying Earthbound industrial processes. Where it might possibly be useful someday is if we ever try to do manufacturing and industrial processes in space. Absent completely sci-fi propulsion technology, it will probably never be a good idea to launch bulk raw materials out of Earth's gravity well.
Now we don't need asteroid mining?
naive question but could we resolve this with asteroid mining?