But seriously, whatever rare-earths we find there, nobody will complain about open pit mining.
Like the old "Earth first" joke implies (... we'll strip mine the other planets later), it might be a good time to, well, start stripping potentially toxic chemicals from places we aren't trying to live in, since we pulled out much of the easy stuff here. (even if that's the opposite of the joke)
Perhaps lithium is easier to find on the lighter "chondrite" (non nickel/iron) type asteroids?
I'm not sure about that. There are a lot of issues to consider, like how you get the materials back to earth and how you avoid creating lots of debris that poses a hazard to other spacecraft.
Those are probably solvable, but not very easy. And it's not unimaginable that we might not want to take some of the materials back to earth, but rather use them to construct things elsewhere.
In other words, maybe Google really will build a moonbase someday. I just hope I live to see it.
> and how you avoid creating lots of debris that poses a hazard to other spacecraft.
Debris is a considerable hazard. NASA tracks about 21,000 items bigger than 10 cm. They estimate there are about 500,000 items between 10 cm and 1 cm. They estimate there are 100 million items smaller than 1 cm.
These items are travelling at about 7 km per second. The average impact speed is about 10 km/s.
I guess Google's feeling the pinch from Chinese supply blocking.