How much equipment would be needed to set up a mining colony?

Setting: a mining colony on a distant world, exporting rare-earth minerals. As in many space opera stories, the world is a shirtsleeve environment with a reasonably pleasant biosphere.

Tech level: I am making the assumption, admittedly unrealistic but commonplace because it is useful for science fiction purposes, that we have a handwavium engine that can reach planets where you can walk around in shirtsleeves, while the rest of our technology is mostly similar to today e.g. no desktop nanofactories or suchlike. But flights are still quite expensive, so minimizing the required number is still an important consideration.

As I understand it, when mining rare-earth minerals, the biggest problem is that the concentration in even the best ores is quite low, so it takes a lot of effort to refine the ore to get the stuff you want.

This creates a dilemma for our colony: if they export raw ore, many cargo flights will be spent hauling stuff that is mostly worthless rock. But if they do the refining on site, presumably this will need a lot of equipment and personnel, so many cargo flights will need to be spent up front bringing these in, before the first dollar of export revenue can be earned.

So my question is: roughly how many tons of equipment and how many workers does it take to set up an on-site refining facility for rare earth minerals?

posted almost 6 years ago

rwallace‭

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