Asteroid Mining - Mining Considerations

Mining Considerations

There are three options for mining:

1. Bring raw asteroidal material to Earth for use.
2. Process it on-site to bring back only processed materials, and perhaps produce propellant for the return trip.
3. Transport the asteroid to a safe orbit around the Moon, Earth or to the ISS. This can hypothetically allow for most materials to be used and not wasted. (see Methods for asteroid retrieval or catching)

Processing in situ for the purpose of extracting high-value minerals will reduce the energy requirements for transporting the materials, although the processing facilities must first be transported to the mining site.

Mining operations require special equipment to handle the extraction and processing of ore in outer space. The machinery will need to be anchored to the body, but once in place, the ore can be moved about more readily due to the lack of gravity. Docking with an asteroid can be performed using a harpoon-like process, where a projectile penetrates the surface to serve as an anchor then an attached cable is used to winch the vehicle to the surface, if the asteroid is rigid enough for a harpoon to be effective.

Due to the distance from Earth to an asteroid selected for mining, the round-trip time for communications will be several minutes or more, except during occasional close approaches to Earth by near-Earth asteroids. Thus any mining equipment will either need to be highly automated, or a human presence will be needed nearby. Humans would also be useful for troubleshooting problems and for maintaining the equipment. On the other hand, multi-minute communications delays have not prevented the success of robotic exploration of Mars, and automated systems would be much less expensive to build and deploy.