What Happened To Space Mining?

Just a couple of years ago, it seemed like

space

mining

was inevitable. Analysts, technology visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that

space

mining

was going to be big business. The first billionaire you will ever be will be the person who exploits the natural resources of asteroids. In a 2017 note to investors, a Goldman Sachs analyst wrote: "Space mining could be more realistic than perceived. A single asteroid the size of a football field could contain between $25 billion and $50 billion in platinum". Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, backed by companies like Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, emerged to reap the anticipated benefits.

After all, the holy grail of asteroids known as 16 Psyche was worth an estimated $10,000 trillion. But fast forward to 2022, and both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have been acquired by companies that have nothing to do with space mining. And humanity has yet to commercially exploit even a single asteroid. But that hasn't stopped a new generation of startups from trying. AstroForge's mission, obviously, is to leave Earth with a vehicle, go to an asteroid, extract it of its rare earth elements, and then return it to Earth to sell. TransAstra was founded with the mission of working towards the vision of harnessing the resources of space, especially asteroids, for the betterment of humanity.

There is enough material in asteroids to support a population of one billion people. Until now, the closest we have come to mining an asteroid has been prospecting missions. In October 2020, NASA collected a small sample of dust from the asteroid Bennu as part of its OSIRIS-REx mission. The sample won't return until 2023, but during the mission, scientists were surprised to learn that Bennu's surface was not as solid as predicted. In December 2020, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) brought back a sample from an asteroid known as Ryugu, as part of its Hayabusa2 mission. To collect the sample, the agency fired a projectile at the asteroid and collected the flying material.

Like Bennu, scientists discovered that Ryugu also had a rubble pile surface. Although these recent advances from companies like NASA and JAXA have provided useful information about the composition of asteroids. Space mining has not yet become a commercial activity. So

what

's taking you so long? For one thing, space mining is a long-term endeavor and one that venture capitalists didn't necessarily have the patience to support. If we were to develop a large-scale asteroid mining vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to do it through commercial processes. It would be difficult to convince the investment community that this is the right thing to do.

Take NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is expected to take seven years to complete and cost more than $1 billion, all to bring back a handful of asteroid material. And Planetary Resources, despite its million-dollar investment, the closest the company came to asteroid mining was launching a satellite to explore future targets. In fact, the mining of celestial objects has become a motif of satire, showcasing corporate greed, as seen in this clip from the 2021 Netflix film, 'Don't Look Up.' This comet hurtling toward us from deep space actually contains at least $32 trillion of these technology-critical materials. I'm sorry, is that why you aborted this whole mission?

Is it because you are trying to extract rare minerals from the comet? Others say that mining precious metals to sell on Earth never made much economic sense. If you look at platinum, the production cost of platinum is around $1,100, even more, and the price per ounce of platinum is less than $1,000. So it means that mining the land is not profitable at the moment. When analysts made their predictions, they looked at the amount of precious metals and materials in asteroids and did not look at the economics of the industries. In today's economy and in the economy of the near future, in the coming years, it makes no sense to chase precious metals in asteroids.

And the reason is that the cost of getting to and from asteroids is so high that it far exceeds the value of anything that can be exploited from asteroids. When we think of space mining, precious metals probably come to mind. But in fact, asteroids may contain other materials, which in the short term could be even more valuable. There is the extraction of materials in space for use in space, and then there is the return to Earth, the ideas back to Earth. They have to compete with land markets for those same materials. That would be a big challenge and may happen one day, but most likely in the distant future.

But in the short term, materials are extracted for use in space. The number one element is water. There are certain types of asteroids that have hydrated minerals. We can process those minerals to release water. Our best use of water is actually as processing into our rocket propellant. And then with rocket booster, we'll be able to move through space more easily. We don't have to launch all of our propellant from Earth. Gabor Szecsi agrees that when it comes to exploiting the cosmos, we must look beyond precious metals. In the short term, we should focus on helium and water.

Helium because it is not readily available on Earth and in water because it has potential use in space. A lawyer by training, Szecsi spent several years working with the European Space Agency and decided to focus his legal expertise on advising space startups. He is now an advisor to an Australian startup that aims to extract water and helium-3 from the moon. And the isotope of helium, helium-3, has applications in national security, medicine and cryogenics. The recent helium shortage has forced some research laboratories to suspend their projects and raised national security concerns. Knowing

what

we can, mine, is one thing, but figuring out how to extract it is another.

With the help of new data from NASA and JAXA, scientists and companies have had to come up with new ways to exploit asteroids. In ancient thinking, landing on asteroids and anchoring to them and drilling or excavating where the plan was, may now seem less viable because of what we have learned about asteroids. Scientists usually classify asteroids by their type of composition. C-type or carbonaceous asteroids are the most common and are made of clay and silicate rocks and contain water. S-type or stony asteroids are the second most common and are generally made up of a metallic mixture of nickel-iron and magnesium-silicate.

Finally, metallic or M-type asteroids represent the rest of the known asteroids and are believed to be made primarily of nickel-iron. What we've learned is that most asteroids are piles of debris rather than one big, mountain-sized piece of solid material. Building on this new understanding of asteroids, TransAstra has been working with Dreyer to develop a technology it calls optical mining. The optical mining process we have invented involves the first step, capturing the asteroid in an enclosure, what we call a capture bag. Asteroids normally spin, because that's what they do in space. Our spacecraft matches the spin with the asteroid, flies the bag over the asteroid, captures it and holds it tightly.

So we have positive control. Now, once we contain the asteroid in our capture bag, our solar reflectors redirect that concentrated sunlight into the capture bag and we use it to drill holes in the asteroid, heat the material and expel the volatiles, water and the other gases. , outside of minerals. And then we can capture those volatiles in an ice trap. TransAstra is initially focusing on extracting water to make rocket propellant, which Sercel says will enable low-cost space travel. But eventually, the company plans to collect everything that appears on the periodic table. We have calculated that a single TransAstra asteroid mining vehicle, which we call Honey Bee, can fly to an asteroid and bring back about 100 tons of water and other ice in a single mission.

It's worth about a billion dollars. And we know this because we have a contract to deliver 100 tons of ice into geostationary orbit from a publicly traded company. But that kind of revenue is still a long way off. TransAstra is funded by about $5 million in NASA grants and contracts and several million in venture funding. To stay honest, Sercel says TransAstra is focusing on developing its intellectual property little by little, using the technology that will eventually be incorporated into its mining missions to meet existing market needs. One of the business opportunities is traffic management. With our Sutter telescope technology, we can turn a small, inexpensive commercial telescope into a powerful instrument that can detect space traffic and orbital debris, something from the size of a toaster oven to the orbit of the Moon.

TransAstra has already deployed its telescope system at two observatories in the US, and the technology is currently used for asteroid prospecting. Eventually, TransAstra also plans to launch its telescope technology into space to see deeper into the universe. Likewise, today there is a thriving orbital logistics business to deliver satellites to their orbital destinations from where rockets drop them off. To this end, TransAstra is developing an orbital transfer vehicle known as Worker Bee, whose body can also be used for its asteroid mining vehicle. But the company has not yet operationalized any of its technologies in space. Still, Sercel says TransAstra is already making a small amount of revenue from initial contracts for its satellite towing services and has contributed more than half a million of its Sutter telescope technology in the form of NASA R&D grants. .

Our plan is to generate positive revenue every step of the way as we build the company and use these near-term businesses to mature the technology. And then while you're doing that, you'll have all the pieces in place to go out and start mining asteroids. Our mining process consists of three stages. We have to vaporize the material. So we're going to take an asteroid and essentially vaporize it into a cloud of atoms and then ionize it. So each of us will take that cloud and positively charge all the atoms. And then once we have a bunch of positively charged atoms, we can classify them.

AstroForge is another early-stage company trying to make space mining a reality. Founded in 2022 by a former space engineer and a former Virgin Galactic engineer, AstroForge still believes there is money to be made mining asteroids for precious metals. We have a limited amount of rare earth elements, specifically platinum group metals. These are industrial metals that are used in everyday things: cell phones, cancer drugs, catalytic converters and we are running out of them. And the only way to access more of these is to leave the world. AstroForge plans to mine and refine these materials in space and bring them back to Earth to sell.

The key technology we are developing is our mineral processing system. So that system consists of the excavation subsystem that moves the material from the asteroid to the spacecraft. And then there's that refinery piece that actually extracts the valuable material and removes all the unnecessary material that we can't actually sell on the ground. So keep costs low. AstroForge will connect its refining payload to commercially available satellites and launch them on SpaceX rockets. There are quite a few companies that manufacture what is known as a satellite bus. This is what would normally be considered a satellite, the type of box with solar panels and a propulsion system attached to it.

So, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. The people before us, Planetary Resources and DSI, had to buy complete vehicles. They had to build much, much larger and much more expensive satellites, which required a huge injection of capital. And I think that was the ultimate downfall of both companies. SpaceX really allowed many companies to get started in the aerospace world basically because of the lower cost of access to space. So now we can take advantage of that and really focus on the technology piece. AstroForge says it has raised $23 million in venture capital funding and plans to conduct several test missions before launching its first official mining mission in 2025.

The company is targeting near-Earth asteroids and a single mission is expected It took about two years. OurFirst mission is to build a refinery. So we're going to take an artificial asteroid, exactly the concentrations that we've created. So we're going to show that we can extract platinum from this at zero G in a vacuum. Mission number two for us is a prospecting mission. This is where we go out to an asteroid, we make sure we can get to an asteroid, our spacecraft can last two years, and we can take high-resolution images to make sure the surface is what we expect it to be.

In the third mission, we now introduce our extraction arm for that mission. We'll go out, take a sample of the asteroid, bring it back to Earth, and study it on Earth to understand exactly what the concentrations of that asteroid are. Our fourth mission is when we put all those pieces together, we send out our mission with the excavation arm. We set up our processing facilities and repeat those steps to obtain platinum. Like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries before them, today's asteroid mining companies face a host of challenges. The first is the uncertainty derived from the lack of established international law regulating space mining.

Currently, most space activities are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which was established during the Cold War. One of the treaty's principles prohibits the appropriation by individual nations of any celestial body such as the Moon or asteroids, and requires that any space exploration in use benefit all of humanity. When it comes to space mining, the entire discussion revolves around whether the outer space treaty allows or prohibits space mining. One of the interpretations of what we should do with the mined minerals is to share the benefit that is derived from them, and it is not clear whether the benefits should be for the wealth that arises from the extraction of the space mineral or if mining can provide us with some scientific knowledge.

And the benefit would simply be sharing scientific knowledge. In the absence of an established international law governing space mining, some countries have taken it upon themselves to establish their own. The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, passed by the Obama administration in 2015, drew attention when it gave companies property rights over the materials they extracted from asteroids, although it stopped short of granting companies ownership of the materials themselves. asteroids. Since then, Luxembourg, Japan and the United Arab Emirates have established their own space mining laws. But Schmidt says not having an international law for space mining could be enough to deter some companies from trying to mine the cosmos.

I believe that national laws are not enough for companies to overcome the legal uncertainty they observe, especially when asking about ownership. If they invest money and go to space and extract something and the discussion about ownership is not clear, they have no certainty that what they are going to extract will be theirs and they will have complete freedom to use the material for whatever. they want. But Sercel says there is already precedent for this. There are limited spaces in the geostationary orbit where satellites can be placed. Once you have the assigned slot and the satellite, other countries and other companies can't go there and mess with it.

So we are sure that when we go to a bagged asteroid and extract its resources, we will own those resources. Another challenge is even more basic: deciding which asteroids to target for mining first. Before carrying out their own missions, all early-stage mining companies must rely on researchers' existing observational data and the hope that the asteroids they have selected contain the minerals they seek. The most challenging aspect of asteroid mining is actually the asteroid itself. We have a lot of evidence, observations and scientific data, but we don't actually have a lot of true knowledge, which means that there have only been a handful of missions that have actually gone to the asteroid.

So you can design a perfect system, you can control all these things, the technology piece, you can control the operations pieces that you can control, but you can't control what the asteroid is until you get there. If companies somehow manage to extract the materials they are looking for, the next obstacle will be selling them. In theory, an influx of precious metals introduced into the planet's commodities market could be enough to collapse it. But AstroForge says this is unlikely. When looking at the supply and demand curve for platinum group metals, the total market capitalization of these metals is measured around $60 billion.

We are talking about recovering 80 million dollars per mission. So for us, it would take quite a few missions to really greatly affect the supply and demand curve as we move forward. For now, commercial space mining remains highly speculative, with companies just beginning to test their business and technological plans. Still, experts believe that some form of asteroid mining will eventually take place. The question is when? I think we will be able to mine an asteroid in the next decade. At a minimum, this will be done as a proof of concept for a mining process, but possibly also include an actual sale of water that will likely then be processed into propellant.

In terms of the timeline for asteroid mining, for us, the biggest issue is funding. So it depends on how quickly we can scale the business to these other companies and then get hands-on engineering experience on operating systems that have all the components of an asteroid mining system. But we could launch a mission to an asteroid within five to seven years. If we have developed a functional space manufacturing industry, then I can imagine asteroid mining becoming a valuable option. But it is not a ten-year period. I think we're going to explode into space, maybe in 20 or 25 years.