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Clive Cookson of the Financial Times writes about Luxembourg's ambition to expand its space industry into asteroid mining. The target will be near earth asteroids between earth and Mars. The idea is to set up space stations within an earth orbit where material harvested from asteroids will be processed and separated into pure metallic form of which the more valuable ones such as platinum group metals will be transported back to earth while less valuable materials such as iron and nickel will become the feedstock for space manufacturing operations. The manufactured goods will not be sent back to earth but will instead be used as building blocks for further space exploration and mining. Cookson quotes several people connected with space mining fantasies as declaring that building the asteroid space mining infrastructure will cost tens of billion but be worth trillions. That assertion is a bit of a head-scratcher because in 2014 the earthly platinum and palladium production was worth $12.1 billion using average prices, dropping to $8-$9 billion in 2015 amid weaker prices. Declining prices are accompanying declining production, which is offset by a rise in recycling of catalytic converters. Other expensive metals have tiny markets such as indium whose global production was worth less than $600 million in 2014. Bringing any meaningful amount of such metals back to earth would have to displace earthly production, which of course means significantly lower prices. So what about scandium, of which only 10-15 tonnes are annually supplied? A case can be made that if a primary, scalable supply at a stable price emerged annual demand could hit 1,000 tonnes worth $2 billion as the aerospace and automotive industries adopt aluminum-scandium alloy. Could asteroid mining solve the "chicken and egg" problem the market does not seem to think the Nyngan and Syerston deposits of Scandium International Mining Corp and Clean TeQ Holdings Ltd in Australia's New South Wales will solve? It turns out that the scandium content of meteorites is in most cases less than crustal background levels, with the highest only 10% of the grades at Nyngan and Syerston. So nobody is going to bother recovering scandium from asteroid material and ship it back to earth. But scandium is quite relevant to asteroid mining because the highest cost will be lifting the initial mining infrastructure from earth into space. For that you want titanium or aluminum based alloys and the best among them in terms of properties and "workability" is aluminum-scandium alloy. Space mining is not going to be a solution to the scandium supply problem, but scandium could become the key to the profitability of space mining. Space mining infrastructure would be enormous compared to the size of current space stations, shuttles and probes which are all made from highly specialized and expensive alloys that would represent over-kill in space mining infrastructure. Aluminum-scandium alloy would be a simpler solution that could substantially reduce "lift" costs in terms of rocket fuel savings compared to much heavier steel based alloys that use niobium. But benefiting from lower lift costs is only half the story. The other half is the concept of "workability", which refers to the ease with which a material can be fabricated into the desired form and repaired. High performance alloys such as titanium and aluminum-lithium may have cheap raw material input costs, but require specialized equipment and conditions to be shaped into the desired form or repaired when damaged. Fixing mining infrastructure in space could be costly and even impractical if alloys are used which are far less workable than aluminum-scandium alloy.
