Why Mars? Because the first trillionaires might be mining $100 Quadrillion dollar asteroids

By Jo Nova

Thanks to Elon, many people are wondering “Why Mars?” and the answer might be “mining the asteroids”

Devon Eriksen has the best answer I’ve seen. He compares the race to space with the industrial revolution. Just as wood, coal and oil set us free of lives of  manual labor, a whole new set of materials beckon… if minerals that are rare and expensive on Earth can be mined in the asteroid belt, and processed on Mars, all kinds of new tools and toys may follow the boom.

The Earth, Eriksen says, is like a jar that’s been shaken until most of the heavy stuff settles to the bottom. The heavy metals mostly end up in the Earths core, with the lighter stuff on top. But apart from the distance, asteroids have easy access goods, and are split already into handy size chunks, conveniently parked out in the open, far from gravity wells and not hidden under crustal plates, oceans and magma. The rocks under our feet are so much closer but there is a whole planet in the way. It might be a lot cheaper to get the rare metals we need on asteroids than out of our core.

The 16-Psyche asteroid is one of the bigger ones, at 279 km across, or 173 miles, and spectroscopic analysis and radar indicates it’s mostly metal.  Judging by other bits of meteorites that fall on Earth, speculation is rife that Psyche contains nickel, iron, and things like palladium and platinum, but of course, no one knows.

Humanity has collected so far all of 255 grams of asteroid space rock (5g from a Japanese launch and 250g from NASA). But China plans to launch Tianwen-2 next year and collect samples from the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa.

The race is on:

The Trillionaires of Mars

By Devon Eriksen, Substack

The first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire

Earth is a metal-poor, heavy-element-poor environment.

We just don’t think of it that way because it’s what we are used to. And it’s a major bottleneck holding our industrial development back. Not because these elements will run out, but because the expense of extracting them limits availability, and drives costs up.

Well, the mass of the asteroid belt is roughly 0.05% of Earth’s mass. But, unlike the Earth, the asteroid belt isn’t a big lump of material, sitting in its own steep gravity well. It’s a powder. A spray of fine dust orbiting the sun. The largest asteroid is only about the size of Texas, and most are much smaller.

One single asteroid, 16 Psyche, some 140 miles across*, has an estimated value at today’s market prices of 100 quadrillion dollars. You read that right. That’s roughly 900 times the value of the entire world economy.

On Earth we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, and all the hard part of a journey to the asteroids is just getting out of the driveway accelerating at 10 meters per second per second. But Mars has a much smaller gravity well, and suddenly so much more interaction with space is possible:

… Mars’s gravity acceleration is about a third of Earth’s. A little over 3.5 m/s². Rocket science is not so difficult on Mars. [Closed caption for the hard-of-thinking: Devon is speaking comparatively. Rocket engineering is still difficult.]

So if you think SpaceX can move stuff to Earth orbit cheaply now, with their fancy reusable rocket boosters, and all their lightyears-ahead-of-NASA space tech, and their $2 million dollar Starship launches, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

On Mars, with its ⅓ gravity, and thin atmosphere, you wouldn’t even need a rocket to achieve escape velocity.

It’s the fact that here you have a planet, where people can live in sealed habitats (above or below the surface), and it’s really, really easy to throw things into space, and get them to and from the asteroid belt.

In other words, if Earth is the suburbs, and the Belt is the mine, Mars is your industrial zone.

Hell, you don’t even need to mine asteroids in place.

Depending on the delta-v cost, you can just attach boosters to your smaller rocks and push them right into Mars orbit. It’s called a Hohmann transfer. But whether you are moving metal from a mobile refinery, raw ore, or entire rocks, cargo is cheap to move in space, at least compared to space launch from Earth’s surface.

Space isn’t an ocean, you see. There are no waves, your cargo can’t sink, and there’s no air to slow it down. So you don’t load it up into a ship, and sail the ship somewhere.

There’s no place like space for those self-driving vehicles.

The man who builds Tesla cars,
May set up a workshop on Mars,
With rich ores to smelt,
From the asteroid belt,
Which could pave our way to the stars.

–Ruairi

h/t to David E

*It’s the average diameter, which is why it’s different to the NASA figure which is the longest width.