Just a couple of years ago, it seemed that space mining was inevitable.
Analysts, tech visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson predicted that space mining was going to be big business.
The first trillionaire they will ever be, is the person who exploits the
natural resources on 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 25 billion
to $50 billion worth of platinum."
Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries,
backed by the likes of Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to
take advantage of the predicted payoff.
After all, the holy grail of asteroids known as 16 Psyche had an estimated
worth of $10,000 quadrillion.
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 mine even a single
asteroid. But that hasn't stopped a new crop of startups from trying.
AstroForge's mission, obviously, is to leave Earth with a vehicle, go out to an
asteroid, mine it for its rare earth elements and then return that to earth
to be sold.
TransAstra was founded with the mission of working towards the vision of
harnessing the resources of space, especially the asteroids,
for the betterment of humanity.
There's enough material in the asteroids to support a population of a
trillion people.
So far, the closest we've gotten to mining an asteroid has been prospecting
missions. In October 2020, NASA collected a small dust sample from the
asteroid Bennu as part of its OSIRIS-REx mission.
The sample is not due to return until 2023, but during the mission, scientists
were surprised to learn that Bennu's surface was not as solid as predicted.
In December of 2020, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) brought back a
sample of an asteroid known as Ryugu, as part of its Hayabusa2 mission.
To collect the sample, the agency fired a projectile at the asteroid and scooped
up the flying material.
Like Bennu, scientists found that Ryugu also had a rubble pile surface.
Although these recent advancements by the likes of NASA and JAXA have provided
useful information on the composition of asteroids.
Space mining has yet to become a commercial endeavor.
So what's taking so long?
For one, space mining is a long-term endeavor and one that VC's did not
necessarily have the patience to support.
If we had to develop a full-scale asteroid mining vehicle today, we would
need a few hundred million dollars to do that using commercial processes.
It would be difficult to convince the investment community that that's the
right thing to do.
Take NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, for example, which is expected to take seven
years to complete and cost over $1 billion, all to bring back a handful of
asteroid material. And Planetary Resources, despite its millions in
investment, the closest the company ever got to asteroid mining was
launching a satellite to prospect future targets.
In fact, the mining of celestial objects has become a point of satire, showcasing
corporate greed as seen in this clip from Netflix's 2021 film, 'Don't Look
Up.'
This comet hurtling towards us from deep space actually contains at
least $32 trillion of these critical materials critical to technology.
I'm sorry, is that why you aborted this entire mission?
Is because you're trying to mine the comet for rare minerals?
Others say 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 the earth mining is not profitable right now.
When analyst made their predictions, they were looking at the amount
of the precious metals and materials in the asteroids and they didn't look at
the economies of the industries.
In today's economics and in the economics of the near future, the next
few years, it makes no sense to go after precious metals in asteroids.
And the reason is the cost of getting to and from the asteroids is so high
that it vastly outstrips the value of anything that you'd harness from the
asteroids.
When we think of space mining, precious metals likely come to mind.
But in fact asteroids can contain other materials, which in the short term could
be even more valuable.
There is mining materials in space for use in space, and then there is return
to Earth, the return to Earth ideas.
They have to compete against terrestrial markets for those same
materials. That would be very challenging and it may happen someday,
but it's most likely in the far future.
But in the near term is mining materials for use in space.
The number one item is water.
There are certain types of asteroids that have hydrated minerals.
We can process those minerals to release the water.
Our best use of the water is actually as processing to to make it into our
rocket propellant. And then with rocket propellant, we can move around space
more readily. We don't have to launch all of our propellant from Earth.
Gabor Szecsi agrees that when it comes to mining the cosmos, we should look
beyond precious metals.
In short term, we should focus on helium and water.
Helium because it's not readily available on earth and water because it
has a potential use in space.
An attorney by trade, Szecsi, spent several years working with the European
Space Agency and decided to focus his legal expertise on advising space
startups. He's now an adviser for an Australian startup that aims to mine
water and helium-3 from the moon.
And isotope of helium, helium-3 has applications in national security,
medicine and cryogenics.
Recent helium shortages have forced some research labs to suspend their
projects and induce national security concerns.
Knowing what we can, mine is one thing, but figuring out how to mine it is
another.
Braced with new data from NASA and JAXA, scientists and companies have had to
devise new ways to mine asteroids.
In older thinking, landing on asteroids and anchoring to them and drilling or
excavating where the scheme, that may now look less viable because of what
we've learned of asteroids.
Scientists typically categorize asteroids by their composition type.
C-type or carbonaceous asteroids are most common and are made up 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 nickel-iron and magnesium-silicate mixture.
Finally, M-type or metallic asteroids account for the rest of the known
asteroids and are thought to be primarily made of nickel-iron.
What we've learned is that most asteroids are rubble piles as opposed to
one big mountain sized solid piece of material.
Based on this new understanding of asteroids, TransAstra has been working
with Dreyer to develop a technology it calls optical mining.
The optical mining process that we've invented involves step one, capturing
the asteroid in an enclosure, what we call a capture bag.
The asteroids are typically spinning, 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 cinches it down tight.
So we have positive control.
Now, once we contain the asteroid in our capture bag, then our solar
reflectors redirect that concentrated sunlight into the capture bag and we use
it to drill holes in the asteroid and heat up the material and drive the
volatiles, the water and the other gases, out of the minerals.
And then we can capture those volatiles in an ice trap.
TransAstra is initially focusing on mining water to make rocket propellant,
which Sercel says will enable low cost space travel.
But eventually, the company plans to harvest everything on the periodic
table.
We've calculated that a single TransAstra asteroid mining vehicle, one
we call the Honey Bee, can fly out to an asteroid and bring back about
100 tons of water and other ices in a single mission.
It's worth about a billion dollars.
And we know that because we have a contract to deliver 100 tons of ice in
geostationary orbit from a publicly-traded company.
But that kind of revenue is still a ways off.
TransAstra is funded by about $5 million in grants and contracts from
NASA and several million in venture funds.
To keep itself above board, Sercel says that TransAstra is focusing on
developing its intellectual property piecemeal, using the tech that will
eventually be incorporated into its mining missions to satisfy already
existing market needs.
One of the commercial opportunities is traffic management.
With our Sutter telescope technology, we can turn a small, inexpensive
commercial telescope into a powerful instrument that can see
space traffic and orbital debris, something the size of a toaster oven all
the way out to the orbit of the moon.
TransAstra has already deployed its telescope system at two observatories in
the U.S., with the technology currently being used for asteroid prospecting.
Eventually, TransAstra also plans to launch its telescope tech into space to
be able to see deeper into the universe.
Likewise, there's a burgeoning orbital logistics business today for delivering
satellites to their orbital destinations from where rockets leave
them off.
To do this, TransAstra is developing an orbit transfer vehicle known as Worker
Bee, the body of which can also be used for its asteroid mining vehicle.
But the company has yet to operate any of its technology in space.
Still, Sercel says that TransAstra is already making a small amount of revenue
from startup contracts for its satellite tugging services and has
brought in more than half a million from its Sutter telescope tech in the
form of NASA R&D grants.
Our plan is to be revenue positive at every step along the way while we're
building the company and using these near-term businesses to mature the
technology. And then as you do that, you have all the pieces in place to go
out and start asteroid mining.
Our mining process is three stages.
We have to do a vaporization of the material.
So we're going to take an asteroid and essentially vaporize it into a cloud of
atoms and then we're going to ionize it.
So we're going to each take that cloud and positively charge all the atoms.
And then once we have a whole bunch of positively charged atoms, we can sort
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's money to be made in
mining asteroids for precious metals.
We have a limited amount of rare earth elements, specifically the platinum
group metals. These are industrial metals that are used in everyday things
your cell phone, cancer drugs, catalytic converters and we're running
out of them. And the only way to access more of these is to go off world.
AstroForge plans to mine and refine these materials in space and bring them
back to earth to sell.
The key technology that we're developing is our ore processing system.
So that system consists of the excavation subsystem that moves the
material from the asteroid into the spacecraft.
And then there's that refinery piece that really that extracts that the
valuable material and removes all the unnecessary material that we can't
actually sell on earth.
So keep costs down.
AstroForge will attach its refining payload to off-the-shelf satellites and
launch those satellites on SpaceX rockets.
There's quite a few companies that make what is referred to as a satellite bus.
This is what you would typically think of as a satellite, the kind of box with
solar panels on it, a propulsion system being connected to it.
So for us, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
The previous people before us, Planetary Resources and DSI, and they
had to buy entire 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 of those companies.
SpaceX really allowed a lot of companies to start in the
aerospace world basically because of the lower cost to access space.
So now we can kind of leverage that and really focus on the just 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 with a single mission expected
to take around two years.
Our first mission is to send up a refinery.
So we are going to take an artificial asteroid, exactly concentrations we've
created. So we are going to show that we can extract platinum from this in
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 for two years and we can take high-resolution images
of it to make sure the surface is what we expect it to be.
The third mission we now introduce our extraction arm to that to that mission.
We're going to go out, we're going to take a sample of the asteroid, bring
that back to Earth, and we'll study on Earth to understand exactly what the
concentrations are of that asteroid.
Our fourth mission is when we put all those pieces together, we send out our
our mission with the excavation arm.
We put our processing facility on it, and we repeat those steps in order to
get platinum.
Like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries before them, today's asteroid
mining companies face a large number of challenges.
The first is uncertainty stemming from the lack of an established international
law to govern space mining.
At the moment, 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 bodies such as the Moon or asteroids,
and requires that any space exploration in use should benefit the whole of
humanity.
When it comes to space mining, the whole discussion is about whether the Outer
Space Treaty allows or bans space mining.
One of the interpretation what we should do with the mined minerals is to
share the benefit which is coming of it, and it's not clear whether the
benefits should be to the wealth which is emerging from mining the
space mineral or whether mining can provide us with some scientific
knowledge. And the benefit would be just sharing the 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, raised eyebrows when it gave property rights to
companies for the materials that they mined from asteroids, though it stops
short of granting companies ownership of the asteroids themselves.
In the time since 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 dissuade some companies from trying to mine the cosmos.
I think that the national laws are not enough for the companies to overcome the
legal uncertainty they observe, especially when you ask about the
ownership. If they invest money and go to the space and mine something and the
discussion about the ownership is not clear, they don't have certainty that
what they are going to mine will be theirs and they will have full freedom
to use the material for whatever they want.
But Sercel says there's already precedent for this.
There is limited slots in geostationary orbit where you can put satellites.
Once you have the allocated slot and the satellite, other countries and other
companies are not allowed to go there and mess with it.
So we're certain that when we go to an asteroid captured in bag and mine the
resources from it, that we will own those resources.
Another challenge is even more basic, deciding which asteroids to target for
mining in the first place.
Prior to conducting their own missions, all early stage mining companies have to
go on is existing observation data from researchers and a hope that the
asteroids they have selected, contain the minerals they seek.
The most challenging aspect of asteroid mining is really the asteroid itself.
We have a lot of evidence and observations and scientific data, but we
don't actually have a lot of truth knowledge, meaning there's only been a
handful of missions that have actually gone to the asteroid.
So you can design a perfect system, you can control all of these things, the
technology piece, you can control the operations pieces you can control, but
you can't control what the asteroid is until you get there.
If the companies do somehow manage to extract the materials they're seeking,
the next hurdle is selling them.
Theoretically, an influx of precious metals introduced to the commodity
market on earth could be enough to crash it.
But AstroForge says this is unlikely.
When you look at the supply and demand curve for platinum group metals, right,
the total market cap of these metals is measured right around $60 billion.
We're talking about bringing back $80 million per mission.
So for us, it would take quite a bit of missions to really greatly affect the
supply and demand curve as we go forward.
For now, commercial space mining remains highly speculative, with companies just
starting to test out their tech and business 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 within the next decade.
At the very least, this will be done as a proof-of-concept for a mining process,
but possibly also include an actual sale of most likely water to be then
processed into propellant.
In terms of the timeline for mining asteroids, for us, the biggest issue is
funding. So it depends on how fast we can scale the business into these other
ventures and then get practical engineering experience operating systems
that have all the components of an asteroid mining system.
But we could be launching an asteroid mission in the 5 to 7 year time frame.
If we have a developed a working space manufacturing industry, then I can
imagine asteroid mining will become a valuable option.
But it's not a ten year time period.
I believe that we are going to mine in space, maybe maybe 20, 25
years from now.