diddly-squat said:
dv said:
diddly-squat said:
I think artificial synthesis would come into play before extraction for near earth objects.
Explain your point in greater detail, please, giving examples where possible.
some of the lighter platinum group elements are synthesised as ‘by-products’ of nuclear fission
Yeah but that’s not going to, by itself, be a profitable exercise because of the low amounts. It isn’t used now because the technology to extract it from the waste doesn’t exist: in that regard it is on the same footing as space mining.
What would be required to retrieve PGEs from a NEA?
There is currently about a 220 tonne per year market for platinum. Its price is in the vicinity of 1100 USD/troz. I suppose we can expect that to trend up over the coming decade, but lets say that someone in forty years time has a plan to mine enough platinum to fulfill 30% of the market, 66 tonnes per annum, and that this extra amount keeps prices at their 2016 level. Suppose the plant is expected to operate for, oh, thirty years. Gross revenue, thus, would be about 70 billion USD2016.
Set aside for one moment the mining and refining aspect, we’ll return to that. Let’s start from the outside and work in, and say that we have ingots of platinum sitting on the surface of a NEA. There are various mission schemes ISRU but I willassume that the rocketry and fuel all has to come from earth (ie that there is no in situ manufacture of components or fuel). So we need to launch to LEO, trans-NEA, land, return. After LEO, this is about an 8km/s delta-v for the easiest targets. Using conventional ion rockets available today and common hardware ratios (and assuming you use atmospheric breaking at earth duh) bringing a tonne of platinum to earth would mean bringing about 5 tonnes of hardware to LEO.
The Falcon Heavy will shortly be able to take stuff 55000 kg to LEO at around $2700 per tonne. For $150 million USD2016 you can launch enough hardware to retrieve 11 tonnes of platinum from a NEA, which currently sells at $387 million USD2016. Because platinum is dense, the amount of dry hardware to be expended per mission would be small, and again using common ratios the expended hardware per mission might cost something like $50-100 million USD2016 (not counting development costs).
This basic maths is what makes me think that such an enterprise could exist in my life time.
Even if we make the pessimistic assumption that launch prices do not go down further, these numbers suggest that gross revenue minus launch and retrieval costs (sans development costs) would be around 29 billion USD2016. Some of it can be off the shelf already.
Also, the design phase occurs before the money starts coming in: We need to allow for the cost of finance. In order for that 29 billion USD2016 over 30 years to be worth it, the cost initially would have to be under 14 billion USD2016.
The retrieval hardware would be not fundamentally require any breakthroughs in technology: it shouldn’t cost more than a couple of billion to design.
So the question is, could someone twenty years from now design, build, deliver and install an extraterrestrial mining and refining plant for 12 billion USD2016?
Answer, I don’t know. There shouldn’t be anything fundamentally brainbending about it, it is a “mere” engineering problem. It don’t require any fundamental changes to energy, the economy or technology. As you note, the lack of gravitation is an issue but not something that requires unforeseen technological leaps: you would need to drill in to keep your plant in place, and you’d need to have some kind of rotating assembly to simulate gravity for sorting by density etc.
But forty years is a long time. Design and manufacture and testing could be so automated that costs are negligible.
