GOLDEN, Colorado – A cash flow cascading from the sky is a temporary but promising harvest from asteroid mining. It’s already a “claims boom” enterprise, with claims that billions, trillions, even quadrillion dollars are floating around in deep space, ripe for the taking and for the grabbing.
Several space mining groups, eager to dig into the extraterrestrial recesses of asteroids, have already come and gone. Left behind are discarded, tattered and mangled business plans.
However, the past is prologue. But this time the strategy is being made in a phased manner. More or less, the prospect of profiting from off-Earth mining has become a sobering affair.
Connected: Asteroid-mining startup Astroforge raises $13 million, books launch for test mission
Resource: Origins of Space Exploration
“A decade ago, people got excited and were announcing that in those years there was going to be the first trillionaire in space,” said Angel Abboud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. Golden, Colorado.
“They didn’t succeed and their plans were too ambitious, too far out, and it didn’t happen,” Abboud-Madrid told Space.com. A number of nations also scoff at space mining, but for the good, he said, they all note one important fact: Resources are an enabler of space exploration.
In that regard, water has become the main objective of every place we want to go, Abboud-Madrid said.
Abdad-Madrid said space mining has matured to the point where there are dozens of startup companies, even larger firms, in what he calls the “space resource value chain.”
But a “who-will” of questions is at play: Who will get the data needed to locate valuable resources in space? Who is going to identify, drill, excavate, extract and purify the concentrations of available material? Who is going to provide transport, electricity and communication? Who isn’t just going to mine, but is going to use the resources to build structures for space exploration?
loss in economic terms
For the time being, there’s a lack of economic sense, Abboud-Madrid said, “and that’s why asteroids were abandoned … but they’re making a comeback.” Still, one has to be cautious, Abboud-Madrid said, “since 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 “
First, though, is identifying what resources are available. Then the question becomes who is the customer? Abboud-Madrid said, “It’s a chicken and egg problem. It goes in circles.”
It is clear that the space resource value chain is now linked to the Moon in the near future. “The whole field is spinning and it’s all about the moon.” Once it’s proven to be a prospecting haven, he said, “Maybe it will be an asteroid, but that may be a very long view.”
That longer view will include a legal-beagle look at ownership and claims issues such as extracting asteroid resources.
“You see the general consensus is that the UN Outer Space Treaty is not necessarily preventing the extraction of resources. It doesn’t allow you to own a planetary body. But in terms of law, you want it to be an organized, efficient, How do we do it in a sustainable and responsible way? It will take diplomacy,” Abboud-Madrid concluded.
getting to know asteroids
In the past few years, there has been a boom in getting to know asteroids up close and personal.
For example, in 2001 the asteroid Eros was touched down during NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous effort. Japan has achieved space rock sample returns with its Hayabusa missions. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is currently on its way back to Earth following its touch-and-go collection program at asteroid Bennu. Meanwhile, the space agency’s Lucy probe is externally bound for reconnaissance of several Trojan asteroids. Yet a unique one for a metallic asteroid is NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.
Then there’s the recent NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration of striking and moving a space rock.
All of these missions certainly help gather knowledge about asteroids, Abboud-Madrid said. “Now it’s about how do you get the material out? That will be the next challenge. The key thing is to understand the asteroids. We’re in that stage of knowing them.”
Read more: NASA’s DART asteroid-smashing mission: The ultimate guide
sky-scanning system
Joel Sercel is the founder and CEO of TransAstra, a California-based firm that aims to sustainably harness resources from the Moon and asteroids to change the course of history.
“It needed to take a number of breakthroughs technically to enable asteroid mining. We think we’ve put them all to bed,” Sercel told Space.com. Transastra has laid out the blueprint for transportation and equipment to get the job done, “to actually process the asteroid in a meaningful way,” he said.
Part of the plan, Sarcel said, is the use of the Sutter Mill telescope; It was the discovery of Sutter’s Mill in 1848 that inspired the California gold rush. “It’s a whole new way of thinking about how to conduct surveys for asteroids. We really get a ‘cost per discovery’ because of a number of factors.”
TransAstra’s sky-scanning system is equipped with advanced software, using low-cost commercial telescopes in Arizona and California. The system is already busy at work and is being fixed, Sercel said. Transastra’s agenda is to scavenge easily accessible asteroids that are small, within 15 to 50 feet in size.
“We have a road map of missions that can lead us to the point where we are discovering hundreds of times more asteroids annually than current asteroid surveys,” Sercel said.
Transastra’s work in this area is supported by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, he added.
industrial scale
Call it a beehive of activity.
Under TransAstra’s Apis flight system architecture, Sercel and his team are advancing an industrial-scale asteroid mining system, which includes the Omnivore Solar Thermal rocket, a Mini-B demonstration concept and the Worker B space tug. The group has also tested “optical mining”, a trademarked technique using concentrated sunlight to mine and extract propellants from the surfaces of volatile-rich asteroids, moons and planets.
Sercell optical mining makes possible TransAstra’s vision of obtaining thousands of tons of water and other materials for rocket propulsion in space. That means deep space human exploration and space industrialization could greatly reduce that, helping to free Earth’s biosphere from the ravages of resource exploitation.
Sercel concluded, “We go into space to solve problems here on Earth.” “Nobody wants to think about a future in which humans don’t thrive. That’s why it’s time for us to go into space.”
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