- November 3, 2023
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Emilio Cozzi
A sustainable business plan for exploiting asteroids and lunar resources does not yet exist. But work is being done on it. In the meantime, business is done with governments, drawing from the abundance that surrounds us, just a couple of (cosmic) steps from our Planet.
BY EMILIO COZZI
Quintillions. Apart from the mathematical-linguistic specifics (in our terms, “trillions”), whether they are dollars or euros matters little. The figure is so extraordinarily high that to give an idea, we refer to the calculation that New York Times columnist Peter Coy offered his economic column readers: “Let’s say a nice new car costs $100,000. With $10 quintillion in your pocket from asteroid mining, you could buy one of these cars for every person on Earth, and then replace it with an even newer car every hour, and continue to do so for each person every hour for the next year and a half before your money would run out.”
Coy is writing about Psyche, the metallic asteroid that is the target of the NASA mission of the same name, which launched a few weeks ago. Presented to the world as an incredibly rich mine, Psyche is estimated to be worth ten thousand times the global gross domestic product.
However, the mission’s task is not to mine, but to study what remains of a never-fully-grown planet, the metallic core of another “world” (the Earth also has a metallic core) that remains an asteroid, now wandering in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Its composition is not yet known, but it will be revealed by the NASA probe starting in 2029, the expected year of arrival.
This does not mean that Psyche has not already given rise to more in-depth discussions about extra-atmospheric resources. If one were to give a definition, it would have to refer to the riches that we can bring to Earth from space or exploit directly in situ for the benefit of human activities (economic, but not only). So, while fantasy imagines gigantic drills perforating fragments of distant worlds, perhaps under the control of robots like in the tales of Isaac Asimov, reality suggests a more gradual approach: before uncovering these space treasures, it is better to talk about dust, ice, and light. Because it is among dust, ice, and light that the search for the first extraterrestrial resources will begin.
The Lunar Mine
It will be a new chapter in space exploration: understanding what holds value beyond the horizon of our atmosphere. The first stop will be the Moon. It is the largest celestial body and, so far, the only one also accessible by human crews. It has no atmosphere or life, and it is thought that there we might find materials that are increasingly rare on our planet, primarily rare earth elements and helium-3. The former, essential for electronic components, are largely produced, owned, or managed by China on Earth. Helium-3 will be crucial when nuclear fusion becomes a reality.
The right place is the south pole, where conditions seem ideal: at some higher points, in fact, the Sun never practically sets, ensuring at least one of the most sought-after energy sources: its light. In the depths of craters, however, the shadow is eternal. There, the search will begin for ice, above all. It exists, though the quantities are still to be determined. From water, in addition to being exploited as a vital resource for astronauts, hydrogen can be extracted, meaning fuel for generating energy useful for a settlement and, in the future, a colony. But also, potentially, to refuel rockets that will bring the pioneers back home or propel them towards more remote destinations in the solar system.
The first resources will be those that allow self-sufficiency or at least facilitate survival in those hostile environments. This is true for the Moon – where even the lunar dust, regolith, can provide water and serve as a building material – and even more so for Mars. On the Red Planet, indeed, the search will be for the underground lakes detected by the radar instruments of orbiting probes.
Then it will be more appropriate to speak of business. Because the new space race (to the Moon, to begin with) will not replicate the Apollo program; it will involve giving the green light to private companies that want to exploit the resources of our natural satellite after governments and space agencies have paved the way.
Searching for what and in what quantities are still unclear questions. In this regard, NASA has created the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (or CLPS), a $2.6 billion program to fund private (robotic) missions on the lunar surface. Exploration maneuvers will begin this year: Intuitive Machines will be the first American private company, with a CLPS contract, to try to land its lander. Astrobotic will send a rover to venture into the shadows and seek out ice. Over the next six years, at least twenty initiatives are running parallel to the Artemis program, which aims to return a crew to our natural satellite for the first time since 1972. This is expected to happen with Artemis III, at the end of 2025, although skeptics – including significant names such as Paul Martin of NASA’s Office of Inspector General – insistently speak of the following year.
But Let’s Talk Business
Will it ever be worthwhile for a private entity to establish its business among the dusty lunar plains? Once again, some distinctions are necessary: the answer is yes if by business we mean serving the next exploratory missions, in which states primarily invest. It is the modernized paradigm of what has happened in the last sixty years in western space. The funds, billions upon billions, are those of the taxpayers. For the transportation service, for example, where SpaceX is almost monopolistic. For materials and technologies to be developed, as is already happening for the CLPS, under the umbrella of the Artemis program, or for the Chinese venture (and here the capitalist ecosystem has much more nuanced contours) of the International Lunar Research Station. There will be a need for connection, navigation, data services, a network of satellites to be built around the Moon. NASA (with Lunanet and Lunar Surface Navigation System) and ESA (with Moonlight, Italy playing a leading role) are working on it, with a call to the private sector to develop what is needed and then sell the service to governments. Going it alone is not yet an option.
To unlock the treasure chest will still take time, first to study what it actually contains. And how much. But something can already be said in perspective: a study by the See Lab at Bocconi University, based on data from the Colorado School of Mines, estimates that the public-private model of space exploration, for the purposes of resource exploitation, can have almost 100% success. We are still talking about going to the Moon, extracting ice, and deriving propellant from it. With that, refueling spaceships and drastically reducing transportation costs. All other mining activities could stem from there. With this boost to exploration, seeking new mining targets, such as minerals and other resources, will naturally follow.
The Moon is also seen as a springboard to Mars. For its reduced gravity (producing propellant to take off from there would be much cheaper than doing it on Earth) and especially as a testing ground to test and validate, just a stone’s throw from Earth, the technologies for survival and self-sufficiency needed on the Red Planet, which is hundreds of millions of kilometers away. The business plan of a company intending to embark on this path can only start from this. Australian research centers, such as CSIRO and CRC, study (also in collaboration with the Italian company e-Geos for satellite mapping) automatic and remote-controlled systems and vehicles, such as bulldozers and excavators, for extraterrestrial mining activity.
In the popular imagination, thanks to the stories of Asimov, the mines to tap for depleting or scarce resources on Earth are asteroids, kind of gigantic icebergs adrift in the Solar System. In “Martian Way,” Asimov describes the tension that grips the human colonists on Mars accused by Earthlings of consuming too much water. For this reason, the protagonists decide to push themselves to the rings of Saturn to tow a large ice supply and become independent from the supplies of the blue Planet (inhabited by the now hated “Earthlings”).
Leaving fiction aside, the energy consumption to reach and harpoon an icy asteroid or a metal reserve like Psyche is so high as to make the economic sustainability of the project seem distant today. Take the example of Osiris-REx, the NASA probe that landed on the asteroid Bennu to bring soil samples back to Earth: costing over a billion dollars, the mission dropped a capsule with a few hundred grams of dust and rubble in the Utah desert. The goal of such an endeavor will probably remain confined to knowledge for many more years to come.
The Sun, the Greatest Wealth
Yet for decades, space missions, around Earth or farther away, have been mining perhaps the greatest wealth, the only one whose abundance we are certain of: solar energy.
In space, without an atmosphere to filter it, clouds to obscure it, and without the alternation of day and night, its quantity is, strictly speaking, immense. Satellites, probes, telescopes, space stations, and capsules have unfolded their wings, opening solar panels to power their batteries.
Thanks to them, the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble continue to peer into the farthest corners of the cosmos. Closer to us, solar energy strikes the Earth from a distance that would make collecting light very advantageous. Hence the idea: gigantic photovoltaic plants capable of transforming solar radiation into electricity from space, and then sending it to Earth (guessed who imagined this…? Isaac Asimov, in 1941. The story is “Reason”).
The technology is known: microwaves. It’s the system that allows, for example, the wireless charging of smartphones, vacuum cleaners, and cars, widely available on the market. But, understandably, from short distances, confined to a living room, a closet, or a garage.
The projects, still all on paper, instead envisage transferring huge amounts of energy – megawatts or even gigawatts of power – from over 30,000 kilometers to ground stations. A first test was carried out by Caltech, transferring a few watts to light up a couple of LEDs, in space, less than a meter apart. Another experiment, this time Chinese, tested the same technology on the ground from a distance of 55 meters.
Should it be undertaken, it will be a titanic operation. The plants being planned, like those in the European Space Agency’s Solaris program, are structures kilometers long and wide, to be assembled in geostationary orbit using, it is anticipated, autonomous robots. For comparison, remember that the largest orbiting structure ever built, the International Space Station, is the size of a football field.
All of this would need to be carried into orbit using hundreds of launches. Costs vary, but we’re talking about billions of euros just for construction. And that’s without considering the current lack of the necessary orbital manufacturing technology, or the fact that the cost of launches to that distance, today, would not allow for a sustainable business plan. Unless, of course, governments decide to invest.
The prospect is not far-fetched: considered one of the paths to decarbonization, the so-called Space Based Solar Power is garnering increasing interest. Estimates from ESA’s preliminary study indicate that the first space solar station could be operational by 2040, provided investment in its development starts now. China is in more of a hurry. It promises full operation by 2028.
Space Gold: Data
Meanwhile, let’s return to the present: space mining is already happening, just not in the way one might initially think. It’s about data: images, observation, and communication constitute the first space treasure that we have already learned to exploit, especially in Earth’s orbit with satellites. But not only: the knowledge we acquire every day from orbiting telescopes, from Hubble to James Webb, from Gaia to Fermi, is also immense. They too are engines capable of propelling the space economy. A report from the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) estimates the global value generated from Earth Observation in 2021 at 2.8 billion euros, with over 2 billion in added value and less than one for the “raw data”, numbers expected to double within a decade, according to projections. The figures for satellite positioning services (GNSS) are impressive, valued at 199 billion euros in 2021 and expected to skyrocket to almost 500 billion by 2031.
These are all the “derived” products from observations, services to people and devices (think of navigation, at sea or on land), to companies in field cultivation or to public entities for territory management (weather, natural disasters, heatwaves, landslides, or surveys of structures and buildings) with geospatial data. From the raw material, data, there abound industries capable of processing and transforming them into products to be marketed. Without the need to venture (yet) millions of kilometers away, the treasure trove of space resources is here, just above our heads.