Space Mining.

What are the technological and logistical needs for extracting minerals in outer space?

The thought of colonizing the solar system; what would be our first step?

How can space mining contribute to sustainable growth on Earth?

• The wonderful machines – laptops, iPhones e.t.c are built on rare and precious minerals such as tantalum.
• The process of extracting these rare materials into your devices is ugly.
• The mining industries are responsible for air, and water pollution and the destruction of the entire landscape.
• Dangerous chemicals such as cyanide are used to extract these resources, harming bio-diversity workers and locals.
• What if we could replace these with a clean process that can’t harm? well, we can, all we need to do is look up.
• Evidence suggests that there are unlimited mineral resources in space worthy of trillions of dollars buried in asteroids close to Earth.
• Asteroids are millions of trillions of tons of rocks and metals that are left over by clouds that became planets millions of years ago.
• These Asteroids are so close that most scientists think an asteroid mining mission is easily feasible.
• As space travel is becoming more feasible economists and scientists have started looking at the resources found in these asteroids.
• Even relatively small metallic asteroids may contain trillions worth of industrial metals such as platinum that could cover the world’s metal needs for millions of years.
• However, Asteroid mining has one problem, it’s too expensive to replace mining on Earth.
• Billions of dollars of resources in space are worthless if it costs trillions of dollars to get them.
• For example, there are more than 20 million tonnes of gold in the ocean water worth 750 trillion dollars but filtering the gold would be too expensive that you would lose money setting it.
• The principle behind mining an asteroid is simple the basic idea is to choose an asteroid move it to a place that is easy to process, take it apart, and turn it into useful products.
• Unfortunately, all of this collides with the fundamental problem that human beings have yet to solve – going to space is expensive.
• We need cheaper space travel to make asteroid mining profitable.
• One of the solutions is to switch from classical rockets to electric spaceships. We already use electrical rocket engines for many of the space probes on science missions. In principle, we need to build bigger ones.
• This would be the starting point of humanity’s first real steps towards colonizing the solar system.
• None of these is science fiction we don’t need fancy materials or new physics to make asteroid mining feasible, all we need is an initial push.