this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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You might also destroy a lot of the resources on entry. Also: Where do you land it? It is not so easy to steer these things and if it lands on someone else's land you might even have to pay them for damages...
Mar-a-Lago
For a landing place I was thinking in a desert zone, like Australia, the Sahara or the yhe desert zone of the US.
Eh, we have rocks here on earth, we can mine those. The real opportunity is in mining asteroids and keeping the resulting material in space, where it's otherwise hard to get a whole lot of mass.
But the minerals found on asteroid can't be find on earth, or are extremely rare and hard to mine.
Which minerals are you thinking about? I mean there are mineral formations that don't occur on earth, but those are really only valuable for scientific study, to understand asteroid formation better. And then there are the iron/nickel asteroids which are likely to have some other heavy metals, but nothing truly exotic.
Some elements like platinum, palladium, and iridium are pretty rare at the earth's surface, but much more prevalent in asteroids. If any metals are economical to mine in space and use on Earth, it would be these ones.
Those elements may be very prevalent in a very small percentage of asteroids. Yeah, those are probably out there, but you'll have to find them. That'll be a special challenge all on it's own.
But sure if you could find one of those that might be worth bringing back to earth. But as far as dollar value goes, just about any asteroid is probably worth just as much, if you develop the technology to process it in space and then use it for building materials for space stations.
I believe there are three different commercial enterprises currently planning to build private space stations for tourism and science. If you had a company that could only provide 3d printed scaffolding, that alone would be worth tens or hundreds of millions to these companies. If you can do more than just scaffolding, there would be more money in it...
But these areas aren't free. There are people or organizations (governments) owning these lands. They will want to have at least a non significant amount of your profits. You would have to redirect the asteroid with some precision and it would take a lot of resources to do so. You will loose 50% to 90% of the asteroids mass on atmospheric entry.
The redirection alone will cost you several billions and to get your money back the asteroid would have to be of a certain size so it's impact will have the effect of several megatons TNT (equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima bombs). It will create a several hundred meter wide crater and have a much bigger blast radius.
I don't think we should give Elon Musk any stupid ideas...
Of course the government leaning the land for the landing is going to ask for a cut, but if traditional mining companies extracting materials on earth pay nothing already (if we include the externallities of mining pollution), they're not going to pay a lot for something that create value where before was just a dessert and the landing can be shopped around.
And the rest sounds like problems to be solve.