Asteroid Mining Program

The August meeting of Chicago Society for Space Studies will be the program Asteroid Mining presented by Larry Bartoszek, CSSS member and Vice President of the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC).

On the subject of asteroid mining, our speaker makes the following observation:

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. I showed in my 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. The gravity well of Earth is just too deep to make moving that much material off Earth in a reasonable time economical. Griggs in 2025 proposed that the only way to make space settlements pay for themselves and to attract investors to build them was to tie them contractually to asteroid mining.


When looking at what resources are available in asteroid mining, it becomes clear that only certain things make sense to bring all the way back to the surface of the Earth. The most valuable cargo that is economically sensible to bring back are platinum group metals. A single ten-ton cargo of rhodium is worth almost two billion dollars. 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.

Following Larry’s presentation, we will have ample time for questions and answers, as well as general discussion.

Doors open at 12:30pm. The Asteroid Mining presentation will be from 1:00pm until 2:00pm. The room will be available to us for general discussion until 3:00pm.

Asteroid Mining with Larry Bartoszek Meeting Details