One of the biggest challenges of a mining endeavour lies in the judgement of its economic feasibility such as theestimation of costs and the prediction of the market value of the designated product. Whereas the complexity ofthe latter originates mainly from the supply and demand of the economic situation, the complexity of the firstderives from the lack of heritage data, the high degree of innovation and the uncertainties that are connected toany long-term project.In this paper, the authors apply a cause-effect analysis technique calledstructuralequationmodelling(SEM)usingpartialleastsquares(PLS) to estimate the costs of an asteroid mining mission concept called KaNaRiA. Fordata ascertainment, two expert interview rounds have been conducted involving international space engineersand scientists from different professional levels and areas. First, a qualitative method called theDelphitechniqueis used to identify the main cost drivers and quantify their influence on the overall costs. Second, the cost driverswere formulated as questions to enable the classification on a Likert-scale. The collected data is the input for thedevelopment of the cost prognosis model by applying PLS-SEM. The cost model is given and its usage explained.The resulting cost model allows a user-individual estimation of the mission costs depending on the individualjudgement of the influence of the final, relevant cost drivers. An application of the model using the judgment ofthe authors’ is presented.    «

One of the biggest challenges of a mining endeavour lies in the judgement of its economic feasibility such as theestimation of costs and the prediction of the market value of the designated product. Whereas the complexity ofthe latter originates mainly from the supply and demand of the economic situation, the complexity of the firstderives from the lack of heritage data, the high degree of innovation and the uncertainties that are connected toany long-term project.In this paper, the authors appl...    »