That’s kind of like saying a shovel works for free.
A robot is a tool. Just because you don’t pay a robot a salary doesn’t mean it, or the work it’s used to perform, is cost-free.
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Best you’re going to be able to do is separate oxides from the metals. It takes some serious g forces to get metals to unmix and they still wouldn’t be pure enough. It takes chemistry to get things in a pure enough state to be useful. This is why mines exist in particular locations. Nature has already applied some chemistry to concentrate a particular element for us. Usually with a hydrothermal process, but that takes a lot of water and time.
Metal refining tends to require a selective redox reaction. For asteroids, the Mond process is a leading contender:
The contaminants are iron and cobalt, which means you end up with something wonky nickel alloys that might need to go through a second process to get the percentages adjusted to a useful alloy.
Similar processes exist for just about every metal.
Someone asked why do this near the moon. Because machines break down and reagents run out. And eventually ore bodies are used up. Having the hundreds of different machines for each element duplicated for each asteroid is more work that building and maintaining fewer machines locally that process the output from many asteroids.
And they aren’t going to fall from the moon to here because of orbital mechanics. Just as it takes serious energy to move something fast enough that it will orbit, it takes that same sort of energy to mass ratio to deorbit. You can play with Hohmann transfer orbits to shift stuff around cheap, but that’s precision stuff and is SLOW. Works great for getting asteroids into orbit.
And just in case, we will just put things in the moon’s well, making it that much harder for an accident to affect us. Orbital velocity is about 1.7 km/s while escape velocity is 2.4 km/s. So you’d need to accelerate something more than 700m/s in the right direction to even get it to leave the moon. And at just the right time to even go anywhere near the earth. That’s not easy to do even on purpose. Any anything big enough for use to care about on Earth would require a lot of energy. A 10m asteroid would need 120 tons of TNT at 100% efficiency to do it. The recent explosion in Beirut was only 10 times that big, which still couldn’t push a rock enough the size of the one that exploded over Russia a few years back.
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This is one reason I think those minerals shouldn’t be imported down the gravity well until well after there’s a sustainable human presence off-planet. We drop that treasure down the well, it’s no use to the (hypothetical) industry up there that will need it.
I remember when towing icebergs from the arctic was going to be our fresh water source.
Didn’t really work out in a cost-effective way.
But I like these “futuristic” things we think are going to happen but never do, like flying cars, they make good pulp sci-fi
Every mineral extraction process now assumes there’s gravity., Unless these ‘miners’ find a rock with a label on it authoritatively stating “Contents: 100% pure unobtanium” or the like, this pipe dream will require the development of microgravity ore processing.
For a well thought-out discussion of just a few of the issues involved, Neal Stephen’s SEVENEVES is recommended.
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In the larger picture this is an example of the escape route that “late stage” capitalists figure will save their asses as well as their assets. They’ve almost drained Earth dry and the natives are getting restless. Look at all those asteroids! All those planets! A universe full of worlds to gut and discard to manufacture trinkets to distract the underlings. Who needs to recycle? Who needs to limit consumption? Come and get it! No regrets. And no worry of being mobbed by the masses when you can fortify a remodelled planetoid. Unlimited growth!
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I think it’s basically an updated Jerry Pournelle “A Step Farther Out” column from the early 1980s.
When I read up on 16 Psyche after reading about the upcoming NASA mission there, it hit me that the “Lonely Prospector Belters” trope that had been around since long before Pournelle (and Niven’s “Belters”), was ridiculous. Who the hell needs a second asteroid to mine when 16 Psyche is apparently pure metal and about 22,000 trillion tonnes?
I did this whole blog post on it, counting the SF books that had wandering “Belters”:
http://brander.ca/blog/flying_mountains/
If 16 Psyche is a former planetary core, then it probably has not just millions of years worth of nickel-iron, but veins of every other metal in the periodic table. I think there’s just the one asteroid mine.
Then we get into questions of costs to/fro 16 Psyche, and we’re back to the really basic problem: a whole bunch of things need to get a lot better and cheaper to make this work, a lot of engineering would need to be invented, with many expensive setbacks. It’s a big hump to climb over, and looking back over 40 years since Pournelle columns, it’s looking like another 140 to me.
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Exactly, for example if money that is wasted on military was instead spent on developing sustainable sources and storage of energy, global warming crisis would not happen at all. It’s a sociological problem.
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That’s literally covered in the video.
Ultimately, if we are to fix the huge damage caused by humans, I think the long term (50 to 200 years) solution is to find a way to reliably move all manufacturing and agriculture into space.
There are colossal obstacles to overcome, but I think it’s needed. Don’t need to use insecticide if you’re in an environment where there are no insects, intensive mono-cultures don’t break down the non-existent food webs in space, fertiliser run-off won’t cause algal bloom problems and can be easily collected and recycled in a closed system. Some degree of Terrestrial agriculture would persist, purely as an artisanal and luxury endevour as some produce needs their geographical origins to taste right and be labelled as that produce (Champagne and Wensledale for example) but the daily staples can be farmed in space.
We can turn a lot of farmers into eco-conservationists and have them try to rewild and manage the huge plots of land that were previously used for food production, paid for by the state and new leisure facilities.
Cost will always be the barrier, but when you consider that the alternative is extinction, at some point our desire to stay alive will force us to figure ways to drive that cost down to the point where it becomes feasible.
I doubt any of us will be alive to see it, but it’s patently clear we cannot keep going on the way we are. Something which is on an unstoppable path right now and will likely happen in the next 10 years is that animal derived meat will become one of the first industries to be pushed into the artisanal/luxury market as plant-based meat replacement and grown muscle meats will simply replace them for the bulk of our protein needs.
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Or you know… move on to sustainable means of producing what we need and producing less junk that pollutes the environment that we don’t need? We have solutions to these problems here on this planet, we just don’t have the political will to fix them here. I hardly think the solution to fucking up our environment is to go and fuck up space, too.
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We can do both. Simply reducing the amount we use on Earth isn’t and shouldn’t be the only target. If we can remove the manufacturing and raw material collection process from being on Earth then you cut out a huge source of pollution and environmental damage.
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And possibly create new vectors of pollution and environmental damage. At this point, space travel isn’t remotely environmentally friendly, and will likely not be for a long time to go, even with the reusable capsules coming back into fashion.
Our environmental problems aren’t going to be fixed by incredibly expensive, pie in the sky ideas of off-shoring our manufacturing and extraction processes. It will be solved by making better choices here on earth about how we produce and distribute goods for humanity.
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Which is why I said it would be a very long-term thing (order of 50 to 200 years) and faces massive obstacles to overcome, chief amongst them is sheer cost.
I’m not talking about just throwing stuff up into space without care and attention, please don’t characterise what I said as such.
I didn’t.
I’m pointing out that we’re in a crisis right now, and we need to focus on solving that pretty quickly. That doesn’t mean we can’t also think about space, but I see no reason to focus on doing the exact same thing we’re doing here elsewhere, when we can’t get our shit together here. 
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The cool thing about using animations to make assertions about the future is that they are essentially weightless. You can invent just about anything and throw it up on the screen and don’t have to bother with any math, engineering, economics, or deal with technological or logistical bottlenecks
“We’ll just refine the metals in space!” Have these people ever seen an actual industrial scale facility? We’ll just move that thing into outer space. Sure. Look, I just drew it, don’t expect me to think about what goes into moving one of our heaviest industries into space. Without the benefit of next day shipping, amazon prime, a power grid, or a breathable atmosphere.
“We’ll just build everything up there! Space factories! It will be so cheap and efficient!” Never mind that cleaning couple of porthole windows the size of tea saucers takes two people a 6 hour space walk. Never mind that we haven’t built so much as a hammer from scratch in space. Even the ISS at best can be said to be “plugged together” out of modules assembled in some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities the planet has ever seen. And even the ISS, with a max crew of 6, still requires 3 shifts of 50 people at a time at mission control to keep the thing running. A 25:1 staff ratio just to keep the air working and falling out of the sky on a station that isn’t building, smelting or mining anything. Never mind those that built the modules, the rockets, those that produced the food, purify the oxygen, hydrogen and other consumables, all the parts of the system that make the most expensive thing ever built work.
“We’ll automate it!” Cool, call me when we fully automate a mine, a smelter, or a major Lockheed Martin satellite manufacturing facility here on Earth, with benefit of next day shipping, local repair services, a robust power grid and supply chain. Then this might be a reasonable discussion.
Make a video that covers THAT.
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Sasa ke, Inyalowda?
(My family has been in Eastern Kentucky for 250 years. The great progress that comes from mining rarely benefits the miners. We should fix ourselves before we drag the same shit to space.)
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It doesn’t have to be an accident. What happens to all the released heat energy from bringing down industrial quantities from orbit? (One tonne of refined metal gently landed releases as much energy as a one tonne kinetic impactor weapon slamming into the ground.)
That might be a non-issue. The Earth does get hit by a lot of space junk all the time, after all, but it’d be nice if someone did the math before everyone is wondering why global warming isn’t slowing down.
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