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.
Comment on Against all odds, an asteroid mining company [AstroForge] appears to be making headway
Hirom@beehaw.org 4 weeks agoHypothetically, 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 it we could burning, and even mining were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.
Space mining would be a best viable for a very niche use for a few material. It won’t bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 4 weeks ago
Hirom@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
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.
endofline@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Coal is a basic substance, so it is in the space. Maybe there is not likely oil or gas ( although I believe methan should be pretty much available everywhere as it’s simple substance ), uran will be in space for sure. Maybe even mining dead stars would be possible in the future, who knows