Der neue Weltraumwettlauf: Mineralienabbau auf Asteroiden – Der vorübergehende „Minimond“, der nun bis Ende November die Erde umkreist, erinnert daran, wie faszinierend unser Sonnensystem sein kann. Es ist auch ein Zeichen für das enorme Potenzial des Weltraumbergbaus.
https://news.miami.edu/stories/2024/10/the-new-space-race-mining-for-minerals-on-asteroids.html
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From the article
>Asteroid mining is not a far-flung idea, Dano believes. “There are currently millions of asteroids in our solar system, and about 2 million of them are larger than 1 kilometer. The resources contained inside them is the new dream of El Dorado, and there is currently a handful of companies banking on it,” he said, noting that recent missions to rendezvous with and to orbit and land on asteroids have demonstrated that space mining could be just a matter of time.
>But pursuing asteroid mining will require a massive investment—from the mining equipment, which would need to run in a vacuum, to the technology needed to transport extracted minerals to Earth, Dano pointed out.
>And then, there is the spacecraft itself. A ship dedicated to traveling to an asteroid for the purpose of extracting minerals from it would likely be a robotic craft. “A trip to Mars takes approximately eight months in the best conditions. The space and equipment required to sustain life is better used for spare equipment and resource storage,” Dano explained. “Leaving Earth’s gravity requires a lot of energy, so mining missions would be better launched from space or from low gravity bodies such as the moon, Mars, or Titan, one of Saturn’s natural satellites.
Asteroid mining is such an absurd fad. There are *so many* resources on the Earth that are almost incomparably easier to access. All the talk about asteroid mining simply ignores how impractical space travel is and how tiny are the payloads that we are now sending up. And also how small the aateroids are compared to the Earth. Asteroid mining only makes sense for consumption of the materials outside of gravity wells of terestrial planets, but there is little incentive to live there besides … asteroid mining, which is just a cyclical argument. It’s easier not to live there and not to mine.
It also downplays the profound difficulties in accomplishing such a feat.