I think it's sad that our entire economy is designed around infinite growth to such a degree that we can say with a straight face astroid mining is the way to go. We have everything we need, it's power that is the problem and always has been.
Speak for yourself. If this company reduces the price of iridium, makes PET and CT scanners cheaper, helps more people get scans, and ultinately results in more cases of cancer and heart disease identified sooner and people leading healthier lives, then I need this company.
There is absolutely no chance for this company to reduce the price of iridium before you die.
For now, even the cost per kilogram of a payload launched in an Earth orbit is greater than the price of iridium.
The cost of the energy for the round-trip to an asteroid per kilogram of brought back substance would be much greater.
Even this transportation cost would be dwarfed by the cost of the energy and of the chemical reactants needed to extract on the surface of an asteroid one kilogram of iridium from a thousand tons of ore, which would normally consist of iron-nickel-cobalt alloy, which is very hard to process, either mechanically or thermally.
We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.
We are only running out of critical metals because all industries are accustomed to design only how to make a product that they can sell from raw materials, expecting that it will be dumped as garbage in the future.
All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life.
The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies.
Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product.
Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals.
In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.
Running out of metals like "we can't build critical infrastructure and spoons are like diamonds" or running out of metals like Apple might lose a billion next quarter? Running out of metals in what context?
I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.
