Is there any company working on plans to alter the orbit of an asteroid to clash it into earth? I guess that it would be the easiest way to mine the materials no?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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I actually wonder if there are any companies interested in altering an asteroid's orbit such that it does a moon flyby into a free capture orbit. It's probably the most fuel efficient way to pull an asteroid into Earth's orbit and the result would provide a close by asteroid to practice mining and refining material from.
practically mines itself
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...
Where do you land it?
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.
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.
I like that they used two iron trap doors on the side of it. Creative use of a block I hardly ever see. (You know, needing redstone to open it.)
Apparently redstone has issues in a vacuum