@arstechnica@nyrath I have now witnessed two full generations of companies proposing to do privately funded space resource utilization projects either switch to Earth-orbit satellite projects, fold completely, or be taken over by scammers.
So I note how "Asteroid Mining Corporation Ltd" is simply starting with doing Earth-orbit satellite projects.
@CartyBoston@arstechnica It'd seriously reduce the cost of metal, which would make plastic less crucial, making fossil fuels easier to transition out of smoothly.
But as I said in the other post, the government needs to get the ball rolling, not the corpos. Corpos won't do it for the reason I said: makes more money to keep metal prices high.
@maxthefox@CartyBoston@arstechnica The costs of space resources returned to Earth would be very much higher than the costs of the same resources mined on the ground.
That is the case even for the most expensive rare earths and the platinum group metals; despite the hype of the current set of space resources companies (and much to my disappointment when I first understood it).
The energy costs alone are orders of magnitude different.
@maxthefox@CartyBoston@arstechnica With ARRM, we proposed to move asteroid material to Earth (technically lunar) orbit for processing. The products would have been sandbags and maybe water for astronauts. There is no resource in the rock piles worth shipping to the ground.
Different propulsion would not change that.
And there are no high-concentration deposits of rare earths on the Moon or asteroids; while there are abundant low-concentration deposits on Earth that no one now uses.
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