Carbonaceous chondrites are bodies that have never aggregated into a big planet, so their chemical composition is close to the average composition of the Solar System.
They are extremely numerous, but most of them are extremely small. Changing the spaceship orbit to catch one of them, which might have a few tons only in rare cases, will provide only a few grams at most of useful elements, far too little for the energy spent to achieve this.
Mining a big asteroid that is a fragment of the core of a former bigger planet has much more chances to be worthwhile, but even for that nobody has gives any suggestion yet for how to separate the mined metals from iron and nickel at the extraction place, otherwise the transportation of the raw alloy would also need too much energy.
adrian_b|1 year ago
They are extremely numerous, but most of them are extremely small. Changing the spaceship orbit to catch one of them, which might have a few tons only in rare cases, will provide only a few grams at most of useful elements, far too little for the energy spent to achieve this.
Mining a big asteroid that is a fragment of the core of a former bigger planet has much more chances to be worthwhile, but even for that nobody has gives any suggestion yet for how to separate the mined metals from iron and nickel at the extraction place, otherwise the transportation of the raw alloy would also need too much energy.