Monday, November 20, 2023

Can We Mine Asteroids? Experts Explain Why It’ll Happen Sooner Than You Think

Asteroid mining, once thought to be centuries away, could become a major industry within the decade

Published 11/19/23
Companies like Trans Astra are figuring out how to mine asteroids for precious metals that are becoming increasingly scarce on Earth. Trans Astra

For Joe Sercel, the future of mining isn’t on Earth; it’s in space.

Specifically, it is on the many bits of rock, ice and dust that litter the solar system and which scientists collectively call asteroids. These often fragile rocks can look very different to one another — some are more than the size of a skyscraper while others are as small as a car — but many of them have something tantalizing in common: They often contain precious metals, water and other materials that are vital to life as we know it on Earth.

Sercel is the CEO of TransAstra, a company that is actively planning to mine asteroids for their treasures and bring them back to Earth.

In his version of the future, spacecraft not unlike the recent NASA mission to study an asteroid, OSIRIS-REx, will travel to mid-size and small asteroids in the solar system and scoop them up like giant butterflies in nets to bring back to Earth for processing. The resulting trove could contain gold and platinum, iron and palladium, and more. Some have even been estimated to be worth several quintillion dollars. No miners necessary.

“I like to say that the only entity that can land on an asteroid and walk around an asteroid is Bruce Willis,” Sercel told The Messenger in an interview, referencing the 1998 movie Armageddon

And while Armageddon is fiction, mining in space is much closer to reality. In fact, according to many scientists, it is practically an inevitability.

Years, Not Decades

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer and astrophysicist who has published several papers on the possibilities of mining space, told The Messenger that by some definitions, humanity has already started to mine asteroids.

In late September, the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx dropped off a container of rock it collected from the asteroid Bennu, which was 50 million miles away from Earth. It wasn’t the first mission of its kind: A similar probe, called Hayabusa 2, safely deposited its own asteroid samples on Earth in 2020. Both of these missions are — more or less — a mining expedition.

But in both instances, the several ounces of rock they returned is a tiny fraction of what an active mine on Earth generates in an hour.

That’s a far cry from what an asteroid mining mission would need to collect to be profitable. But McDowell believes that more large-scale operations are likely to take place “within the next couple of decades.”

That kind of prediction is music to Matt Gialich’s ears. Like Sercel, he runs an asteroid mining company called AstroForge. Gialiche said when the company started two years ago, the dominant belief was that space mining was “a century away. Now, we’re less than a decade away.”

In fact, AstroForge was supposed to launch the first private mission to an asteroid this month, but encountered delays with its SpaceX rocket. Still, Gialich is optimistic that his company will begin mining platinum in space sooner rather than later, as well as refining it in space, by the end of the decade.

TransAstra and AstroForge are just two of the private companies that are looking to deep space for their fortunes. In fact, the notion that asteroids will inevitably supply Earth with raw materials has become accepted to the point that researchers have started to work on the legal and tax implications, never mind the rocketry to get there and back.

Will Asteroid Mining Make Money?

Economics are a major hurdle, however. In a recent paper, Ian Lange, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, examined the startup costs of space mining. Lange and his colleagues were interested in the question after they noticed that because ore on Earth is so degraded at this point, the need to find a new source of metals to feed the demand in technology that depends on these materials is reaching desperation. They envisage a future where humanity will struggle to have enough of the necessary resources to keep up, particularly due to the environmental costs of terrestrial mining.

“The story we're trying to tell a little more is that if you talk to folks (at) any of these mining investment firms, it's really more social, and environmental reasons why we can't mine,” said Lange.

“We're tying our hands behind our back terrestrially because there are some still relatively good deposits, but basically, you know, permitting or [environmental, social and governmental] concerns or biodiversity loss, water quality concerns,” prevent mining.

Meanwhile, going to space has never been more affordable. After decades of government monopoly over space flight, the rise of companies like SpaceX has made the cost of launches drop.

For their paper, Lange and his colleagues tried to work out when space mining might make sense from a monetary and environmental standpoint. While they couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment in time, they still conclude that asteroid mining is an inevitability and that most, if not all, of the metal humanity needs for any reason will both be cheaper to get from space, more profitable and more eco-friendly.


“The general idea is that you will be having, on Earth, resources getting more expensive and outer space getting cheaper,” said Lange. “And you can speed up the path at which outer space gets cheaper through some investment.”

Looking Up


Asteroids near Earth could be just the start. Astronomer McDowell has written a paper in which he argued that Mars’ moon Phobos would make a suitable base for mining missions to the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter..

Earlier this month, NASA launched a probe destined for the belt, and specifically to Psyche, an object estimated to be made of metal worth a ludicrous $10 quintillion (the GDP of the entire planet, by comparison, is a mere $88 trillion).

While NASA will not bring any pieces of Psyche back to Earth, (as one NASA scientist put it during a recent press conference “We are not going there to mine an asteroid, NASA does not mine asteroids”) AstroForge's Gialich said there are some key differences between what his company aims to accomplish and what research probes set out to do.

“OSIRIS REx was an experiment. We're not a science experiment, to be very clear, we're not doing this for scientific reasons. There's no experimentation here, right? We're bringing this back as a raw resource.”

If this all seems like (very, very rich) pie in the sky, Gialich does note that his mission — and that of his competitors — is still very much rooted in the facts of life here on Earth.

“What matters is that we can do this for a profit. We are a business, and we need to make money and this is a very lucrative endeavor that we're taking on and, if we can pull it off, we're going to be a massive industry.”


Could Musk’s Mars colony be a base for asteroid miners?

BY MARK R. WHITTINGTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/19/23


SpaceX founder Elon Musk speaks during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2016. In a receptive audience full of space buffs, Musk said he envisions 1,000 passenger ships flying en masse to Mars, “Battlestar Galactica” style. He calls it the Mars Colonial fleet, and he says it could become reality within a century. Musk’s goal is to establish a full-fledged city on Mars and thereby make humans a multi-planetary species.
 (AP Photo/Refugio Ruiz, File)

One of the plotlines for season 4 of the hit TV series “For All Mankind” is an attempt to use a Mars colony as a base to mine the asteroids of the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It turns out, that at least one study suggests that Mars would be the perfect jumping-off point for an asteroid mining operation.

The Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics asserts that instead of staging from Earth or Earth orbit, staging from Mars orbit to access the main belt makes a lot more sense because it involves less delta-V. Delta-V is defined as the amount of impulse a rocket must produce to launch from a planet, land on a planet or change direction in space.

In layperson’s terms, it is easier and cheaper to travel to a main belt asteroid and back staging from Mars orbit than it is to go to one from Earth and back again.

The study states that a base or a settlement on Mars, including a station in orbit, would make an asteroid mining operation much easier. Many other questions will have to be answered before a Mars-based asteroid mining operation can be developed so that it makes economic sense. For example, having mined resources from an asteroid and brought them back to Mars orbit, how does one ship them to Earth, where they can be of use? How much would a Mars base or settlement aimed at asteroid mining cost to set up?

Those questions could be settled by SpaceX’s Elon Musk. For a long time, Musk has dreamed of setting up a Mars settlement, even going so far as to wish that he might die on the Red Planet “just not on impact.” His reasons tend toward the mystical, about “expanding consciousness” beyond Earth.

Musk is currently engaged in the first practical task needed before humans settle on Mars: developing the most powerful rocket ship ever built, the Starship, at SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The Starship will have other applications, from taking astronauts back to the lunar surface to launching huge payloads into low Earth orbit and elsewhere. But Mars is the ultimate destination in Musk’s mind.

Musk has been quite ingenious in finding ways to monetarize his space dreams. His Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket ships have reduced the cost of space launches by orders of magnitude, attracting numerous customers from the public and private sectors. Musk’s space communications system, Starlink, recently hit break-even cash flow, according to Forbes, well on its way to profitability.

As a bonus, the Starship that Musk is developing to take settlers and the material they need to survive to Mars can also serve as the basis of an asteroid mining transportation infrastructure. Thus, the Mars settlement that Musk wants to build can have a practical, profit-making basis.

Imagine, perhaps as soon as two or so decades hence, a Starship rocket takes off from Mars orbit and brings a cargo of mining robots to a likely asteroid. Psyche, the so-called “golden asteroid,” worth by some estimates in the quintillions, would be a prime target. The robots would mine minerals and store them in the Starship’s hold. The rocket would return to Mars orbit with its rich cargo. The Mars settlement would use some of the minerals. Most would be sent to Earth on board a Starship for export. The first interplanetary trade route will have been established.

As technological civilization grows in size and complexity, the need for raw materials will only increase. The amount of such resources is limited on Earth and extracting them has an environmental cost. The resources available in the asteroid belt are abundant and mining them does not affect the Earth’s environment.

In times past, space exploration has been regarded as either a nice-to-have but not essential program or a needless diversion of resources from earthly needs. Elon Musk has been criticized by politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for his dreams of developing Mars, demanding that the SpaceX CEO and other billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.

However, if there is one thing that the new age of commercial space has taught us, it is that there is money to be made beyond the Earth. A Mars settlement as a base for asteroid miners would be the ultimate example of that truth.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?“ as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?“ He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.

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