Mining Asteroids

image courtesy deepspaceindustries.com

Deep Space Industries is planning to mine the asteroids for profit. Will they really be able to turn a buck? NBC News reports the idea behind the venture:

Theoretically, mining the right kind of asteroid could produce precious metals worth sending back to Earth, such as platinum, gold and rare-earth minerals.

This assumes asteroids contain these minerals. They seem to be rightly named rare-earth minerals, because so far, evidence suggests they contain no mineral more valuable than iron. The more we learn about asteroids, the more they begin to look a lot like inactive comets--piles of dirt and rocks glued together by water frost. Have you noticed how most asteroids lie trapped inside the orbit of Jupiter, not outside? It's as if the comets and asteroids were blown out from the inner solar system and trapped by Jupiter's gravity, rather than Jupiter pulling them in from deep space--something to think about.

In any case, asteroid mining has to deal with the economic law of EROEI, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested. My novel, Beyond Earth examines this. In the words of character Neiman Hyatt:

There's no product here worth the amount of energy it would take to bring it back to Earth. Why go 250,000 miles away to get something you could get 25 miles away? It just doesn't add up.

He's referring to the moon, but the principal also applies to the asteroids and other planets. It's a question not often considered in science fiction, because it raises another question: Why even go into space? There are plenty of other reasons to go, and in Neiman's case, he's going to explore. I believe the planets and asteroids may hold some surprising discoveries, which I speculate on in my novel.