FORGET COAL: Asteroid Mining Is Coming Sooner Than You Think.

Conventional wisdom may be that going to space to bring back what is needed on terra firma is economically nuts. Not so, analysts insist.

“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower,” says a recent report prepared on the subject by Goldman Sachs.

Proponents say that before long, robots could be traveling to asteroids to extract platinum and other valuable minerals to haul back to Earth or even one day to use in space-based manufacturing plants.

A 2012 Caltech study found that it could cost just $2.6 billion to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit near Earth, making human exploration and robotic mining that much easier. “We expect that systems could be built for less than that given trends in the cost of manufacturing spacecraft and improvements in technology,” the Goldman report says.

It also predicts the eventual result would be far lower costs: “Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum” by dramatically increasing the supply.

“The market is a big unknown because of things like platinum,” says Jay McMahon, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrodynamics Research. “You don’t know what’s going to happen if you bring back a big haul of platinum, what that would do to the market on Earth or how much demand there is.”

Well, I’m pretty sure the price would drop dramatically. . . . Of course, everything in Earth orbit costs nearly as much as platinum, just in terms of launch costs from the earth’s surface. So almost any space-based materials industry will make doing things in orbit vastly cheaper.