Asteroid Mining: Bringing Wealth back to Earth
Larry Bartoszek, P.E.
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Asteroid Mining—Bringing Wealth back to Earth
People have talked about mining the resources of the Solar System for decades, and companies have risen and fallen to accomplish this goal. Why talk about asteroid mining? A study of any of the rotating space habitats comes to the conclusion that they mass at least 10 megatons. Bartoszek showed in his 2024 talk at ISDC that the bottleneck in the production of a Stanford Torus was not the rate of steel production on Earth. It was the rate that material could be lifted off Earth, especially by a fully developed space elevator infrastructure. To be economical, large space habitats must be built from material gathered from space resources.
It will cost trillions of dollars to build large space habitats, which do not immediately (or ever) pay for themselves. Mining platinum group metals and other resources from asteroids is potentially worth trillions of dollars when done at scale. The return on investment from asteroid mining pays the way to becoming a spacefaring civilization.
Therein lies the issue. This talk covers what has been done so far to rendezvous with asteroids and return samples from them, and what the pitfalls will be in scaling up asteroid mining operations to their true potential. As with everything involving space travel, the rocket equation exerts its infamous tyranny on what is possible and what is feasible.
Larry Bartoszek has a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from the University of Illinois and is an Illinois Licensed Professional Engineer. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Welding Society, ASM International, the Chicago Society for Space Studies, the National Space Society, and is Vice President of the International Space Elevator Consortium. He is also a Space Ambassador for the NSS.
Larry Bartoszek owns Bartoszek Engineering, a consulting firm which specializes in mechanical designs for the nuclear and high energy physics research community world-wide. Bartoszek Engineering has worked for many national laboratories, universities and governments on experiments all over the world. He has built machines up to three stories tall and 120 tons, as well as table top devices.
His website is www.bartoszekeng.com.
A chronological history of the projects BE has worked on can be found at: http://www.bartoszekeng.com/STEM/All_projects.pdf
Larry started working on the Space Elevator as a hobby in 2004 developing conceptual designs for climbers as outlined in “The Space Elevator” by Edwards and Westling. He has given presentations at several Space Elevator Conferences, including Washington, DC, 2004, the Space Elevator Conference in Seattle in 2013, and the ISEC Annual Conference in Chicago in 2023 and 2024. Larry has created original designs for the climbers for the Space Elevator which have been published in two annual ISEC study reports. He became a Director on the Board of the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) in April, 2021. In July of 2024 Larry was elected Vice President of ISEC.
A webinar he gave for the International Space Elevator Consortium in April of 2022 can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q8cMGxIccI&t=2s
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