Tapping the Riches of Space

Is there really wealth among the stars? Can we tap raw materials in space for exploration and profit? That far-off-sounding question is starting to get some serious attention. Earlier this year, Seattle-based startup Planetary Resources, Inc. (PRI), announced that its group of tech and entertainment investors was backing a serious, decade-long campaign to extract precious metals and other resources from asteroids. In early June, The Wall Street Journal discussed which terrestrial minerals might run short in this century, and whether we could profitably find new supplies in space.

This concept spurred extensive discussion at AIAA?s Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) in Washington, D.C., last month, where I joined an expert panel to take a look at the prospects for practical use of space resources, ranging from asteroid mining to extracting rocket fuel from ice at the Moon?s poles.

NASA has an ongoing interest in what?s called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU. Jerry Sanders from NASA?s Johnson Space Center said that the agency has developed a robot processor that can break down lunar soils and extract oxygen for use in life support and as a rocket propellant. Sanders says that it doesn?t take a huge refinery to do this. A device the size of a lawnmower, processing just 4 cups of soil per minute, will produce 10 metric tons of oxygen annually. NASA has already put a prototype of the oxygen processor through its paces in Hawaii.

For Mars exploration, NASA is field-testing extraction schemes for oxygen, water, and methane. The primary objective is to manufacture the tons of propellant needed for getting off Mars and making the return trip to Earth. That could reduce the amount of fuel a spacecraft would have to carry from Earth?a major driver of the cost of any round-trip mission.

Of course, there are other huge challenges involved in mining the moon or Mars. Among them: pinpointing the locations of lunar water deposits and deploying long-lasting, reliable, and autonomous machines that function in frigid temperatures (minus 238? C in permanently shadowed craters harboring lunar ice deposits) or in very-low-gravity environments (as on near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs).

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin told the GLEX panel that the quickest way to start extracting space resources might be to start where we?ve already been: the moon. The moon is the nearest "near-Earth object," he said, sprinkled with nickel, iron, and platinum-group metals from billions of years of asteroid impact. Oxygen could be extracted from the lunar regolith (the moon?s outer layer of pulverized soil and rocks), or perhaps more easily from newly identified water ice deposits near the lunar poles. The oxygen produced could support an astronaut outpost or serve as rocket propellant for boosting materials off the moon.

Markets

Griffin and Harvard astronomer Martin Elvis say that any planned use of space resources must pass a stringent economic test: Can those materials be harvested for less than it takes to ship them from Earth? As launch costs drop below the usual $10,000 per pound (as private rocket companies like SpaceX claim), extraction plants on the moon or nearby asteroids might be too expensive an investment. Financiers will also look at the profit horizon for space mining: If it?s too distant compared with terrestrial investments, investors will put their capital in less risky, near-term ventures.

The cost of prospecting spacecraft has to come down too. Elvis envisions swarms of cheap, small probes to confirm the presence of water and other resources. Multiple, low-cost asteroid prospectors will be less vulnerable to occasional failures than the expensive planetary probes NASA produces today.

Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki says that his company plans to exploit asteroid resources using a series of small, increasingly capable spacecraft. Taking advantage along the way of NASA?s discoveries at the moon and NEAs, "we?ll try things, gain experience, and eventually succeed," Lewicki said. PRI?s strategy is to continually return value in its space activities, culminating in delivering space-derived products like water and metals to markets in Earth?Moon space.

Elvis says that a commercial?NASA partnership?investing as little as $18 billion over 10 years?could produce enough water and construction materials in space to allow NASA to reduce substantially the cost of supplying future astronaut expeditions. Another payoff: mining water, nickel, and iron from a near-Earth asteroid would leave behind a dust of cobalt, platinum-group metals, and semiconductor elements such as gallium, germanium, selenium, and tellurium. Platinum, with a price hovering at around $1450 an ounce, might be a space-mined byproduct worth returning to Earth.

Griffin also supports NASA?commercial collaboration. Success in using space resources, he says, can only come if government-run space agencies tap the talents and skills of industry, including expertise in mining technology, mountaineering (for anchoring to low-gravity asteroids), and the financial sector. To lower the capital barriers to entry, NASA and its partners should take on some of the initial costs and risks of space-resource demonstrations, Griffin says, then turn the activity over to private firms.

That kind of spark could boost would-be space miners over a big obstacle: At the moment, there?s no market for space resources. It?s a big catch-22: NASA hasn?t incorporated space-resource use into its plans for the moon or asteroids because the technology is viewed as immature. But without firm plans to use space resources, the agency has little incentive to fund technology development and field tests.

Risk

Today, the chief enemy for any ambitious technology venture, Griffin says, is our society?s aversion to risk. Failure is part of any untried, high-payoff program. But the practice of firing someone or canceling an effort after a failure or two is the surest way to demoralize our best engineers and create lengthy, underperforming, and unaffordable programs. Risk aversion may be one big reason NASA?s exploration managers haven?t invested seriously in space resources.

We?re not going to be able to reach beyond the International Space Station and sustain human explorers on the moon or Mars unless we start "living off the land" in space. If we can?t shoulder the risk of developing off-planet energy, water, and structural materials, high costs will forever chain us to Earth. The risks of tapping space resources are real, but the payoff is huge?nothing less than an economic boom between Earth and moon, and the means to put robot and astronaut explorers to work unraveling the mysteries of our solar system.

Tom Jones is a veteran NASA astronaut, planetary scientist, and co-author of Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System.

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