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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company (AstroForge) appears to be making headway
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Technology
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I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.
This is not space exploration, this is not for science's sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there's virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity's exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we're in.
"I wish we could mine without destroying the environment"
"Well what if we mined in space instead?"
"Why don't you focus on the problems here on Earth buddy. Wow what an idiot. Can you believe that guy?"
Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.
There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.
Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won't bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.
If you engineer for it, you can send up a machine to fabricate the miners with raw resources. Then you just have to send up a couple starter miners and you never have to send another rocket up. Infinite resources down (limited by time). Solar power to drive the machines. Hell the manufacturer can double as basic initial processing plant and drop purified metals.
There miners robot don't exist yet, but they would probably require high tech components and manufacturing capabilities for all these different components (motors, electronics, batteries, sensors, ...).
Self replicating robots is still science fiction. If we wanted to build such robots in space, we'd need to build and launch manufacturing facilities in space before we can actually build robots in space.