Why is asteroid mining bad

Unless the U. This may be another attraction for the company: asteroid mining is the ultimate offshore site. Nobody has given a lot of thought to how all this will be dealt with from a legal and governmental angle.

And the current tight coupling between corporations and the U. There are huge risks involved in this enterprise, even though the entire operation is supposed to use non-manned flight only. If anybody can afford it, though, it is the backers of Planetary Resources, who together have multiple billions of dollars to spend. And it may take every cent before they even get back a few grams of valuable stuff. Mining has always been a business for gamblers, and space mining is no exception.

At the worst, even if it fails, it will furnish a lot of employment for heretofore unemployed aerospace engineers who can get to work on something that might actually make money.

And if it all works out, it could be the first step in the transformation of space travel from an exotic, rare, super-costly thing engaged in only by governments to something closer to what international flying is like today: still sophisticated and relatively costly, but open to anyone with the money to pay for it. And as I say about so many things I consider in this blog, time will tell.

Sources : The Apr. My attempts to access the Planetary Resources Inc. But nobody has assessed this environmental impact in detail. These guys have calculated the greenhouse-gas emissions from asteroid-mining operations and compared them with the emissions from similar Earth-based activities. Their results provide some eyebrow-raising insights into the benefits that asteroid mining might provide. The calculations are relatively straightforward.

Rocket launches release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For kerosene-burning rockets, one kilogram of fuel creates three kilograms of CO2. Reentries are just as damaging. However, economies of scale from large asteroid-mining operations could lower this to about 60 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of platinum.

That needs to be compared with the emission from Earth-based mining. Here, platinum mining generates significant greenhouse gases, mostly from the energy it takes to remove this stuff from the ground. Indeed, the numbers are huge. The mining industry estimates that producing one kilogram of platinum on Earth releases around 40, kilograms of carbon dioxide. The figures for water are also encouraging.

They compare this to the emissions from sending the same volume of water from Earth into orbit. The big difference is that a water-carrying vehicle from Earth can haul only a small percentage of its mass as water. But an asteroid-mining spacecraft can transport a significant multiple of its mass as water to cis-lunar orbit. This interesting work should help to focus minds on the environmental impacts of mining, which are rapidly increasing in profile. Everyone is rich, all are happy, and no one wants for anything.

O pioneers! We are them! A graphical spacecraft, presumably future-theirs, flies away from our planet while he speaks. But traveling the road to space-based industry will require giant leaps. Like picking the most lucrative asteroidsthe ones with lots of water and precious metalsfrom far afield. And negotiating spacecraft near their complicated gravitational fields.

To do that, companies will have to leave the comfy confines of Earth's orbit, where they currently do all their experimenting. True enough, but it's also about the balance sheet: Earth-facing spacecraft, as all that venture capital suggests, are big money. Which is important for a company that has to continue existing until it can actually mine asteroids.