Asteroids contain rich mineral resources, such as iron and nickel, with asteroid 16 Psyche containing enough ore to meet world production needs for millions of years. However, the high cost of space launches makes recovery prohibitively expensive. To make asteroid mining economically feasible, self-replicating robotics and in situ resource utilization would be necessary. Near-Earth asteroids could provide resources for early-stage space colonization and economic exploitation.
Outer space has extremely rich mineral resources, especially in the form of nickel and iron from iron-nickel asteroids. Asteroid 16 Psyche, a 200 km (125 mi) wide asteroid that makes up 1% of the material in the asteroid belt, contains 1.7 x 1019 kilograms of ore, enough to meet 2007 world production needs for millions of years . A more modest asteroid, just a kilometer across, could contain billions of tons of nickel-iron ore. For reference, the annual world production of iron ore is approximately one billion tons. There are about 800 billion tons of iron ore resources worldwide, which sounds like a lot, but if consumption rates continue to grow exponentially, they could be completely unearthed in less than a century, requiring iron from elsewhere. .
The concept of mining asteroids for minerals has been called asteroid mining. Sufficient resources exist in the asteroid belt to support our civilization’s need for iron and nickel for many years to come, but the high costs of space launches make their current recovery prohibitively expensive. Other resources exist on asteroids in smaller quantities, including most metals with an atomic number lower than iron. There are substantial freshwater resources on Jupiter-family comets, but desalination is likely to be cheaper than bringing an asteroid, even in the long run. There are large resources of Helium-3 on the surface of the Moon, which in theory could be used to fuel fusion reactors.
For asteroid mining to be economically feasible, extensive robotics, preferably self-replicating robotics, would have to be developed, as space mining would be a labor intensive and somewhat dangerous business. Heavy use of in situ resources would be required to minimize the weight of material to be launched from Earth. The first asteroid mining would likely occur on Near-Earth asteroids, which are rarer than their cousins in the asteroid belt, but large and numerous enough to provide serious resources for early-stage space colonization and economic exploitation. One possible target would be 4660 Nereus, a 1km-wide asteroid whose trajectory relative to Earth means it would require less energy to get there than the Moon, but the journey would be longer, as it is about three times as far away as the Moon at its closest approach.
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