The most profitable platinum mine on Earth - in South Africa - runs at about 14% gross margins. @MattGialich of @AstroForge thinks the company can mine platinum group metals (PGMs) at at a gross margin of 90%. They just have to go to space to do it.
The plan: Send a 440-pound spacecraft 10 million miles across the cosmos, magnetically dock it to a chunk of rock and metal hurtling through space, blast it with lasers, and then fly just the PGMs back to Earth.
No astronauts. No ground crew. Just robots, exploring the solar system beyond our Earth-Moon region.
Matt joined @Jason and @Lons on TWiST to break down the math, the next mission, why PGMs are so important, and how DeepSpace-2 is going to change the future.
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DeepSpace-2: The Mission
DeepSpace-2 essentially looks like a large box. It's hitching a ride to space on a @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching in November 2026.
Ridesharing as a secondary Falcon 9 payload is, of course, the key to making AstroForge's plan profitable. But while Falcon 9 is headed to the Moon, DeepSpace-2 will break off at some point and set its trajectory toward asteroid 2022 OB5.
This asteroid, which passed by the Earth in August 2022, is believed to be an M-type, or largely composed of metal. AstroForge believes it's potentially viable for mining.
Because M-type asteroids are largely composed of iron, they're magnetic. AstroForge can take advantage of this, essentially attaching their spacecraft to the asteroid like a fridge magnet.
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DeepSpace-2 will (if all goes well) autonomously match the asteroid's velocity and rotation, before “docking” with it using magnetic anchors. (Gialich goes into some detail on this during an appearance on “The Shawn Ryan Show.”)
So in reality, it's more like a craft docking with the International Space Station than crash landing on an asteroid, as we've seen in Hollywood films like “Armageddon.”
Once attached, DeepSpace-2 will use lasers to vaporize a portion of the asteroid's surface. On-board refinery technology uses more magnets to separate condensed particles of iron and other metals from the valuable (and helpfully non-magnetic) PGMs.