this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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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...