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As the article points out, Hayabusa "spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material". What is the plan for commercial

As the article points out, Hayabusa "spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material". What is the plan for commercial scale mining? How do we get the equipment there? How do we get the material back? Scaling up increases the requirements by many orders of magnitude to the point where it becomes unviable. It's not enough to simply point to launch systems that can put 100 tons into orbit and recover a single gram of material and say "look, it's possible". Scale is what makes it impossible.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago
The article states: "Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive. " This is entirely true. The writer has fallen into a classical trap in assuming you must launch your mission from earth. Never is a very long time though. I'd postulate that sometime between now and "never" we might have some alternative place to launch our fuel from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://www.nasa.gov/isru/overview https://www.nasa.gov/isru/overview This gets you your profit margin you need to scale up.
- flagrant 6y ago
  You have (somewhat) covered the fuel requirements by bringing in ISRU. That's fair, but I would remind you that ISRU is a research technology and is not even close to producing enough fuel fast enough to supply a single mission to the Moon, let alone massive commercial mining operations across the solar system. But fuel is not the whole story, is it? You need equipment. That's coming from Earth no matter what way you slice it.
  - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
    If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology", which is a slightly shorter time-scale. That said I think that there might almost be a (chicken/egg) commercial demand for an actual lunar mining+fuel processing facility as is. Refueling of earth-orbit satellites could extend their useful lifetimes. And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth. You can still get a big delta-V savings if you only launch the equipment into LEO, and then transport it onward using fuel mined on the moon. You save the cost of the-fuel-to-launch-the-fuel.
    - flagrant 6y ago
      > If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology" You cannot assume that just because we are researching a technology that it must be possible given enough research. We may do the research and find that it is not. > And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth. The problem is that this is already essentially impossible. The mass requirements for a commercial scale mining operation are astronomical compared to the things we have been putting into space so far.
      - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
        I'll grant that at 13,500 t, a machine like the Bagger 288 might take a few too many Starship launches (at 100t/launch). However, I'm pretty sure one can attain reasonable turnover from something a bit smaller, especially for high value minerals. Maybe you wouldn't consider 100 tons of equipment a commercial scale mining operation yet. Which is fair enough. If you want to scale up to really start making money, of course you'll need to have your refining and construction capabilities in space too. This is obviously a big bootstrap problem! I do think that Falcon heavy and/or Starship are starting to make a small initial bootstrap viable, for someone willing to take the risk.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

The article states: "Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive. " This is entirely true. The writer has fallen into a classical trap in assuming you must launch your mission from earth. Never is a very long time though. I'd postulate that sometime between now and "never" we might have some alternative place to launch our fuel from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://www.nasa.gov/isru/overview https://www.nasa.gov/isru/overview This gets you your profit margin you need to scale up.

flagrant 6y ago
You have (somewhat) covered the fuel requirements by bringing in ISRU. That's fair, but I would remind you that ISRU is a research technology and is not even close to producing enough fuel fast enough to supply a single mission to the Moon, let alone massive commercial mining operations across the solar system. But fuel is not the whole story, is it? You need equipment. That's coming from Earth no matter what way you slice it.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology", which is a slightly shorter time-scale. That said I think that there might almost be a (chicken/egg) commercial demand for an actual lunar mining+fuel processing facility as is. Refueling of earth-orbit satellites could extend their useful lifetimes. And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth. You can still get a big delta-V savings if you only launch the equipment into LEO, and then transport it onward using fuel mined on the moon. You save the cost of the-fuel-to-launch-the-fuel.
  - flagrant 6y ago
    > If we have research level technology now, it stands to reason that people will keep researching and improving it. So "Never" becomes "not for a while yet until we perfect this technology" You cannot assume that just because we are researching a technology that it must be possible given enough research. We may do the research and find that it is not. > And for the foreseeable future, yes (much of the) equipment would still need to come from earth. The problem is that this is already essentially impossible. The mass requirements for a commercial scale mining operation are astronomical compared to the things we have been putting into space so far.
    - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
      I'll grant that at 13,500 t, a machine like the Bagger 288 might take a few too many Starship launches (at 100t/launch). However, I'm pretty sure one can attain reasonable turnover from something a bit smaller, especially for high value minerals. Maybe you wouldn't consider 100 tons of equipment a commercial scale mining operation yet. Which is fair enough. If you want to scale up to really start making money, of course you'll need to have your refining and construction capabilities in space too. This is obviously a big bootstrap problem! I do think that Falcon heavy and/or Starship are starting to make a small initial bootstrap viable, for someone willing to take the risk.