by GOLDEN, Colo. — A stream of cash falling from the sky is a tentative but promising harvest from asteroid mining. It is already a “claim-jumping” enterprise with claims that billions, trillions, even quadrillions of dollars loom in deep space, ripe for the picking and grabbing.
Several space mining groups, eager to dig into extraterrestrial mining of asteroids, have already come and gone. Left behind are torn, tattered and beleaguered business plans.
However, the past is prologue. But this time, step-by-step strategies are presented. By and large, the prospect of reaping blobs of moolah from extraterrestrial mining has become a temperate affair.
Related: Asteroid mining startup AstroForge raises $13M, books launch for test mission
Resources: enable space exploration
“A decade ago, people got excited, and they were the ones who declared that the first trillionaire was going to be made in space in these years,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden , Colorado.
“They didn’t succeed and their plans were very ambitious, too far-fetched, and just didn’t happen,” Abbud-Madrid told Space.com. Many nations have also struck out at space mining, but for good, he said, they all paid attention to an important fact: Resources are an enabler of space exploration.
In that regard, water has become the main goal for everywhere we want to go, Abbud-Madrid added.
Space mining has matured to the point where there are dozens of startups, even larger firms, that are dealing with aspects of what’s called the “space resource value chain,” Abbud-Madrid said.
But a “who’s who” of questions is at play: Who will obtain the data required to locate valuable resources in space? Who will identify the concentrations of available material, drill, excavate, extract and clean it? Who will provide transport, electricity and communication? Who will not only mine, but use the resources to create structures for space exploration?
Deficit in the financial sense
For now, it’s a deficit in an economic sense, Abbud-Madrid said, “and that’s why asteroids were abandoned … but they’re making a comeback.” Still, one has to be careful, Abbud-Madrid said, “as some companies are going to fail, some business cases are not going to close, and then it comes down to a more reasonable level. But the interest is there.”
First, however, is identifying what resources are available. The question then becomes who is the customer? “It’s a chicken and egg problem. It goes in circles,” Abbud-Madrid said.
It is clear that in the short term the value chain for space resources is now linked to the moon. “The whole field is moving and it’s all about the moon.” Once it’s proven a prospecting paradise, he said, “maybe it will be the asteroids, but it could be a much longer view.”
The long view will include a legal beagle look at asteroid resource extraction, such as ownership and claim issues.
“You see the consensus that the UN Space Treaty does not necessarily block the extraction of resources. It does not allow you to own the planetary body. But in terms of the law, how do you do that in an organized, efficient, sustainable and responsible way? That will require diplomacy ,” Abbud-Madrid concluded.
Get to know asteroids
In recent years, getting to know asteroids up close has gained momentum.
For example, it was the ground-breaking NASA Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous effort that hit the asteroid Eros back in 2001. Japan has achieved test returns of space rocks with its Hayabusa missions. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is currently returning to Earth after its touch-and-go collection event on the asteroid Bennu. Meanwhile, the space agency’s Lucy probe is outwardly bound to reconnoitre more Trojan asteroids. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has yet to overshoot a unique metal asteroid.
Then there’s the recent NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)—the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration of striking and relocating a space rock.
All these missions are definitely helping to gather knowledge about asteroids, Abbud-Madrid said. “Now it’s about how do you retrieve the material? That’s going to be the next challenge. Understanding the asteroids is key. We’re in that phase of getting to know them.”
Read more: NASA’s DART asteroid-shattering mission: The ultimate guide
Sky-scanning system
Joel Sercel is the founder and CEO of TransAstra, a California-based company that aims to sustainably harvest resources from the moon and asteroids to change the course of history.
“Several breakthroughs need to happen technically to enable asteroid mining. We feel like we’ve put them all to bed,” Sercel told Space.com. TransAstra has designed the transport and equipment to get the job done, “to actually process the asteroid in a meaningful way,” he said.
Part of the plan, Sercel said, is the use of Sutter Mill telescopes; it was the Sutter’s Mill discovery in 1848 that spurred the California gold rush. “It’s a whole new way of thinking about how to search for asteroids. We’re really bringing down the ‘cost per discovery’ by many factors.”
Using low-cost, commercial telescopes in Arizona and California, TransAstra’s cloud-scanning system is armed with sophisticated software. The system is already busy at work and being fine-tuned, Sercel said. The TransAstra agenda is to attach easily accessible asteroids that are small, such as within 15 to 50 feet in size.
“We have a roadmap of missions that could get us to the point where we’re discovering hundreds of times more asteroids a year than current asteroid surveys,” Sercel said.
TransAstra’s work in this area has been supported by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, he noted.
Industrial scale
Call it a hive of activity.
Under TransAstra’s Apis aircraft system architecture, Sercel and his team are pushing forward an industrial-scale asteroid mining system that includes the Omnivore solar thermal rocket, a Mini-Bee demonstration concept, and the Worker Bee Space Tug. The group has also tested “optical mining,” a trademarked technique that uses concentrated sunlight to excavate and extract fuel from volatile asteroids, moons, and planetary surfaces.
Sercel sees optical mining enabling TransAstra’s vision of harvesting thousands of tons of water and other materials for rocket propulsion in space. This can greatly reduce human exploration and space industrialization in deep space, and help free the Earth’s biosphere from the ravages of resource exploitation.
“We go into space to solve the problems here on Earth,” Sercel concluded. “Nobody wants to think about a future where humans don’t thrive. So it’s time for us to go into space.”
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