Why We Will Never, Ever, Mine The Asteroid Belt
Sci-Fi is a totally unreliable guide to reality
Lately Medium has been presenting me with fanboy articles all breathlessly proclaiming that we’re about to launch off into space to mine the asteroid belt. The supposed rationale is that we’re running out of minerals here on Earth so logically (as per the Monty Python definition of the word, at least) we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to attempt to mine asteroids.
But for those of us who didn’t waste our youth watching cheap Sci-Fi and who consequently have a useful but sadly uncommon grasp of reality, it’s immediately apparent that the fantasy of mining the asteroid belt is just that: pure fantasy.
This article will explain why.
First of all, despite what countless Hollywood schlock movies and TV shows have depicted, the asteroid belt is nearly empty. Most asteroids are very small, measuring a few tens of meters across. Meanwhile, the average distance between any two small asteroids is nearly one million kilometers (around 590,000 miles). In other words, the average separation between two small asteroids is more than twice the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Would we really, truly, expend vast amounts of money and rocket fuel to travel such enormous distances in order to attempt to…
