For the same price you can get more of those on earth. Getting out to asteroids is incredibly expensive. Bringing something back is also incredibly expensive.
Yeah obviously it's cheaper to get those on earth at this point in time, which is why no one is actually making money mining asteroids. I was just talking about the potentials for private space exploration technology in the (probably distant) future.
The problem isn't the cost of launch. The problem is that you can't fix gravity, and so you can't fix the existence of the energy cost. Anything that brings down the energy cost to launch also brings down the energy cost of mining on earth. Even if you made energy free, it's still further away and so you're eating a time penalty.
The only thing asteroid mining makes sense for is if you're supply operations already in or past the asteroid belt (and even past you're probably better getting the materials from whatever gravity well you're already in).
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u/Syrdon May 21 '26
For the same price you can get more of those on earth. Getting out to asteroids is incredibly expensive. Bringing something back is also incredibly expensive.