Matt Gialich

Why even bother?

There's this thing called cost, and it's really important.

And what we call the all-insustaining cost of mining, especially on the platinum group metals, is extremely high.

And the reason is the good oroids of platinum group metals are really deep in the ground.

When you go to South Africa, where some of the best mines are, about 80% of our PGMs come from South Africa, those mines are 1,500 to 2,000 meters deep.

These are not easy mines.

They are extremely deep in the ground, which means they're super hot.

They're really dangerous, and we're kind of at the threshold of where we can mine.

The mining industry as a whole has been making a big push to say, can we mine below 2,500 meters?

And the question isn't actually, can we mine below 2,500 meters?

The answer to that is yes.

Can we economically mine below 2,500 meters?

The answer to that right now is a hard no.

And so that's the problem that actually exists with us as humans is we're not able to access a lot of the resources we have here on the planet because of this thing called physics.

We are now able to go, hopefully, mine asteroids for a fraction of the cost it takes on Earth.

And we think of today, even at the prices we're seeing today on both launch and building the spacecraft, we're looking at margins upwards of 80%, where a margin on Earth today for platinum on the high end is about 15%.

No shit.

No, so we study them.

They hit the earth all the time, and we just rename them as meteorites.

So in our office, we have about 300 different meteorites that are just laying around.