I’m sure there are a few hurdles, but wondering what is the biggest reason that keeps us back at this moment as the most pressing thing. Is it that the technology just isn’t there yet? Or is it because of legal complications, international treaties and all that? Is it just not financially feasible to do at this present time with the technology we do have? That we could do it, in theory, but the ROI is too low?
We as a species are not yet capable of doing this.
We can barely land successfully on our moon, we haven’t made it to Mars with humans and many of the robots we did send crashed before becoming operational.
We don’t have the capability to run completely automated mining on Earth, people are so far always needed on site.
If we’re going to mine asteroids, we’ll need to have a lot more capabilities than we currently do.
Note that I’m scratching the surface here, we haven’t yet discussed travel time, keeping humans alive and sane, fuel or Earth resources required to mount the effort.
Not to mention we have tried to land on asteroids a couple times now, but failed. Best we coukd do was smash against them to analize the dust.
The OSIRIS-REx did manage to bring back some material from Bennu. We retrieved 121.6 grams and it cost around a billion dollars. It took 8 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx
Edit: Fixed how much it cost.
Yes, but it still didn’t land. It very slowly approached then bounced while collecting the dust. This is probably the closest we have so far of landing.
I thought Rosetta was successful, somewhat?
I mean, kinda. It didn’t land, it tumbled on the asteroid and got itself stuck on a dark pit. I guess landing on your face is a kind of landing.