Is it really cheaper to mine platinum from an asteroid? (+video)

Science fiction dreams of mining riches from asteroids only make sense if humans can make it worth their time and effort. The new Planetary Resources group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and Hollywood moguls is now betting on the fact that there is big money in mining space rocks.

Nobody knows exactly how much asteroid wealth exists, but early estimates point to riches beyond Earth's wildest dreams. Just the mineral wealth of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter could be equivalent to about $100 billion for every person on Earth, according to "Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroid, Comets, and Planets" (Addison-Wesley, 1996) — perhaps slightly less now after accounting for the Earth's population growth over the past 15 years. [Does Asteroid Mining Violate Space Law?]

"The near-Earth asteroid population could easily support 10 to 40 times the population of Earth, with all the necessary resources to do that," said John Lewis, a professor emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona and author of "Mining the Sky."

Even smaller space rocks can have mineral prizes worth tens of trillions of dollars. The smallest known metallic asteroid that is an accessible near-Earth object has 40 times as much metal as all the metal in Earth's history, Lewis pointed out. He has joined Planetary Resources as perhaps the most recognized expert on asteroid wealth.

There's platinum in thar rocks

Knowing what asteroid wealth consists of depends on incomplete but enticing scientific surveys. Scientists sitting on Earth can detect chemical signatures of asteroids based on reflected light, or directly sample space rocks fallen to Earth as meteoroids. Japan has carried out the only successful space mission to retrieve asteroid samples in space, but the U.S. is planning its own asteroid sample and retrieval missions.

An M-class asteroid about 79-feet (24-meter) long could have as much as 33,000 tons of extractable metal and possibly one ton of platinum group metals. The platinum alone could be easily worth about $50 million dollars in Earth's commodity markets, according to studies cited by the paper "Assessment on the feasibility of future shepherding of asteroid resources" in the April-May issue of the journal Acta Astronautica.

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