Introduction:
Background:
According to NASA, there are potentially 100,000 near Earth objects including asteroids, and comets in the neighborhood of our planet.
Some of these NEOs are small while others are substantial and potentially packed full of water and various important minerals, such as nickel, cobalt, and iron.
One day, advocates believe, those objects will be mine by a variety of equipment that are typically used in the coal mines or in the diamond mines.
According to industry experts, the contents of a single asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars.
First, a fleet of satellites will be dispatched to outer space, fitted with probes that can measure the quality and quantity of water and minerals in nearby asteroids and comets. With that information, mining companies like DSI will send out vessels to mechanically remove and refine the material extracted. In some cases, the extracted goods will be returned to Earth. But most of the time, it will be processed in space. For example, to produce rocket fuel and store it in container vessels.
John S. Lewis once a professor of Cosmochemistry and Planetary Atmospheres at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and DSI's chief scientist, envisions a future where "ever more remote and ever more massive reservoirs of resources" take astronauts farther and farther from our planet. "First to the Near Earth Asteroids and the moons of Mars, then to the asteroid belt, then to…[the] Trojan asteroids and the outer moons of Jupiter, then to the Saturn system and the Centaurs.”
For now, belief-and a fervid sense of enthusiasm-represent the core of the DSI business model. After all, the company, and its only major competitor in the asteroid mining arena, Washington-based Planetary Resources, are dealing in hypotheticals: equipment that remains largely in the planning phase, a market that won't fully emerge for years, if not decades, and a science that has yet to be tested in any meaningful way.
For the 12-person team at DSI, and the 50-person team at Planetary Resources, asteroid mining isn't just a dream. It's the future-one in which all those deep-pocketed private spaceflight companies will be eager to pay for access to space's riches. DSI and Planetary Resources might be the equivalent of the mining barons of yore.
The idea that outer space could one day be mined for sustenance or human gain stretches back centuries. As early as the late 1800s. A Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky prophesied the construction of mines on the surface of asteroids. In 1926, Tsiolkovsky released his 16-point plan for the colonization of the galaxy. Point 12 was "the exploitation of asteroid resources".
Asteroid mining was very much on the mind of science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, who in his 1944 short story Catch That Rabbit where two bored corporate overseers on an asteroid, watched a team of robotic miners plying their trade. Celestial extraction also figured prominently in Jack Williamson's popular 1951 novel.
One of Planetary Resources first missions was to develop a spacecraft, called the Arkyd, that the company hoped would eventually detect mineable asteroids. To help fill out its coffers, in 2013, Planetary Resources turned to Kickstarter. It raised $1,505,366 for what it called the "first publicly accessible space telescope," which would ride on board the Arkyd.
Despite its connections and fundraising prowess, however, Planetary Resources soon found itself running into the same problem as DSI. Investors were concerned about the legality of the venture. Financiers, said Peter Marquez, Planetary Resources's vice president for global engagement, needed to know that their money wasn't going to go toward fighting battles in a courtroom.
Bonin, the chief engineer said, DSI plans to land its first mission, Prospector 1, on an asteroid. "Its only purpose," Bonin said, "will be to map the amount of water on an asteroid to see if there's as much as we think there is." If there was-and only if there was-extraction would begin with the deployment of another specialized spacecraft. Otherwise, Prospector 1 would come home and the process would start again.
Planetary Resources is slightly further along than its chief competitor. In 2014, the company put a probe, the Arkyd 3, aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket bound for the ISS. Upon reaching the space station, the hope was for astronauts there to release the Arkyd from the air lock and put it into low-Earth orbit, where its avionics and control systems could be assessed by Planetary Resources. But the rocket failed to achieve full liftoff and crashed.
Last year, Planetary Resources took to the skies again, this time placing a new device, the Arkyd 3R (A3R), on a rocket owned by SpaceX. Lewicki said this spring, that the newest Arkyd spacecraft, the Arkyd 6 (A6) satellite, was being tested at Planetary Resources headquarters in Washington before a scheduled June launch. The A6 satellite will probably stay aloft for a full year, aiming for water and mineral while sensing technology in the direction of Earth. This will allow Lewicki and his team to test the accuracy of those sensors and make any necessary adjustments.
KaNaRiA is a mission feasibility study project named after its German acronym which in English stands for cognitive autonomous navigation for deep space resource extraction. The KaNaRiA project is funded by the Navigation Department of the German Aerospace Centre, Space Administration on behalf of the German Ministry of Economy and Energy.
The KaNaRiA project firsts meeting was held on 1 October 2013. KaNaRiA’s main scientific goal is the design of advanced autonomous navigation strategies for spacecraft missions to micro-gravity planetary bodies without atmosphere. Special attention is paid to the mission and system requirements on navigation for each mission phase: interplanetary flight, planetary approach, rendezvous, descent and landing. For this purpose, KaNaRiA involves a multidisciplinary group of researchers covering the fields of: space technology, space navigation, cognitive informatics, sensor fusion, optimization and optimal control, virtual reality and computer graphics. As an end product and test platform, a human interactive, virtual reality mission simulator is developed which enables the test and verification of bio-inspired spacecraft navigation and guidance algorithms in the context of an asteroid mining mission.
The KaNaRiA team is composed of five research groups coming from two German universities: Bundeswehr University Munich (UniBwM) and University of Bremen. At UniBwM, two research groups from the ISTA are in charge of the mission design and mission analysis on one side, and spacecraft navigation concept and navigation system design on the other side.
Based on the KaNaRiA asteroid mining mission objectives, a mission reference scenario and a reference mission architecture have been defined on an early project stage by the department of Space Technology at ISTA. As a result of this work, KaNaRiA has been proposed as a multi-spacecraft mission to the asteroid main belt. Composed of a flock of prospective scout spacecraft, a mothership carrying the mining payload and several service modules placed on a 2.8 AU parking orbit around the Sun, KaNaRiA intends to dynamically and chemically characterize main belt asteroids, identify targets for mining and perform a soft-landing of a heavy mining payload on one of the selected targets. More details on the KaNaRiA reference mission scenario and architecture are provided in later sections of this paper.
Forecast:
The space mining market is expected to grow from USD 0.65 billion in 2018 to USD 2.84 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6%.
Approximately 10,000 asteroids have already been identified near the Earth. These near-Earth asteroids vary greatly in size, with some having a diameter of several hundred kilometers, and others as small as several meters across. Davida, which has a real diameter of 326.06 kilometers, has been identified as the most valuable asteroid in the asteroid belt, with a resource value estimated to be some 27 quintillion (26,990,000,000,000,000,000) U.S. dollars. It is a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid, and it contains water, nickel, iron, cobalt, nitrogen, ammonia, and hydrogen. In terms of cost-effectiveness to mine, however, Ryugu has among the highest estimated profit as a proportion of the value of its materials: it is worth some 5.57 trillion U.S. dollars, and it is estimated that 1.25 trillion U.S. dollars of that would be profit.
According to a report by NASA, the space miners are anticipated to bring two kilos of asteroid material to Earth by 2023, which would be accounting for approximately for 1 billion. The demand for commodities is likely to grow at a high rate due to abundant availability of minerals in the space.
North America is projected to hold a significant market share over the projected period. The regional growth is expected to be influenced by high demand for space exploration activities from the established organizations including NASA and the Department of Defense. The due increasing reliance on space assets coupled with need to maintain safe space operations are projected to fuel the market growth over the coming years. The Middle Eastern & African region is also anticipated to explore immense opportunities over the coming years.
Some leading consumers of space mining market are NASA, European Space Agency, and CNES among others.
However, the high costs associated with asteroid mining may hinder the growth of the space mining market.
2015 (not including debt financing, which brings the total investment during this period to 6.1 billion U.S. dollars). Some industry insiders have estimated that space mining may be a reality as soon as 2025, with technology continuously being developed by the industry’s key players such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.
Now, it costs NASA on average $10,000 to lift a pound of water into orbit — whether in the form of water for drinking, or as constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms rearranged for use as rocket fuel. Thus, the economic value of the water alone contained in near-Earth asteroids — not even considering the tons of valuable metals they may also contain — works out to … better sit down for this … 44 quintillion dollars.
Implications:
In the U.S., the White House and National Aeronautics and Space Administration in recent years have embraced commercial space projects and made promoting them a priority. Congress also has taken the lead in establishing laws and regulations to support and provide flexibility for companies aiming to extract minerals from the moon, asteroids or other heavenly bodies.
Until relatively recently, however, policymakers and scientists alike assumed that if the technology were ever to be implemented in real life, it would be governments, not private contractors, with the money and the rockets to do the actual mining. The foundational tracts of space law articulate this notion.
While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty clearly states that no single country has the right to "appropriation by claim of sovereignty," the treaty doesn't address whether a country can exploit planetary resources for financial gain. Thus, an American entrepreneur considering mining asteroids would face something of a legal void: On the one hand, nothing in international law (or at least international law ratified by the United States) says the business isn't allowed. Then again, there is nothing that specifically says that it is. Meanwhile, the 1979 Moon Agreement bans the militarization of the moon and the "alteration" of celestial bodies. Only 16 countries are party to the agreement; the United States, concerned about the constraining effect the pact might have on its spaceflight programs, has declined to be involved.
The solution, to Planetary Resources's execs, seemed to be the passage of a bill that would effectively legitimize, from an American legal perspective, the asteroid mining industry. In 2013, the company hired the veteran lobbying firm K&L Gates to advance its cause on Capitol Hill. (Planetary Resources declined to say how much it paid the firm.) In a memorandum addressed to lawmakers, Marquez laid out the company's case for legislation: "[B]eing the standard bearer for this strategic market has many benefits" for the United States, including more jobs and room for growth in the tech sector. Some other perks were political. If passed, this would be the first asteroid mining bill in global history. According to Marquez, his hope was that when it came time for other countries to pen their own legislation, they would use Washington's as a template.
In July 2014, Bill Posey, a Republican representative from Florida, and Derek Kilmer, a Democratic representative from Washington, introduced a bill on the House floor they called the Asteroids Act. "Our knowledge of asteroids-their number, location, and composition-has been increasing at a tremendous rate, and space technology has advanced to the point where the private sector is now able to begin planning such expeditions," Posey said in a statement. "Our legislation will help promote private exploration and protect commercial rights as these endeavors move forward."’
In 2015, their lobbying efforts paid off. The Asteroids Act was rolled into a larger bill called the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which protects the rights of private spaceflight ventures like Bezos's Blue Origin. It also states, in no uncertain terms, that any "United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained." The emphatic message to the asteroid mining sector? Go forth and conquer.
In February, not long before I visited the DSI offices, Luxembourg, home to one of the largest satellite companies in the world, announced plans to write its own asteroid mining legislation. According to news reports, it is likely the legislation will be similar to the act signed into law by Obama last year.
For now, only a few countries have acknowledged publicly that they have designs on asteroid mining. Still unanswered is the question of who, in fact, owns space. What will happen when, one day, companies from two countries clash over the same rock? After all, while the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act codifies the rights of American space companies, it won't do much to prevent the emergence of international disputes over asteroid rights.
When I asked Kfir about that possibility, he suggested that a multinational body might emerge in the mode of the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which coordinates the orbital slots for the thousands of satellites circling Earth. With an asteroid mining equivalent, he said, companies might approach the committee and inform the secretariat that they are seeking claim to asteroid X or asteroid Z. Rights would be granted on a first-come, first-served basis.
Investment Advice:
All of those earlier steps, mission, mining, extraction, and exchange might need to be worked out for the other steps to have value, but there is likely some value before that.
Especially if the expectation is that asteroid mining for minerals WILL happen. If it’s going to happen and you’re a world-level investor, you need to invest. If it’s possibly going to happen, you still need to hedge risk. If gold and silver are just laying around, whoever gets it will have a very distinct economic advantage.
Every mega-billionaire, every sovereign royal, every national treasury, and every Fortune 500 international corporation has got to be aware that if gold and silver are just laying around out there with minimal environmental, regulatory, and ownership hurdles, there’s got to be a strike point where intense investment to mining makes sense.
There has just got to be! I would not want to be the $100 Billionaire who finds out that a $1B investment returned $1Trillion. I cannot let that pass me by, and, even if I let it pass me by because I’m a live-big party billionaire, my team of financial advisors who paid to oversee my fortune had better not miss it!
Deputy Prime Minister Etienne Schneider said in an interview Thursday that the government has set aside roughly 200 million euros ($223 million) in public funds to support such projects.
Still, DSI quickly found that many potential investors were skittish. They understood that there indeed was money to be made, especially if DSI was able to lock down the market early and sign contracts with the largest of the private spaceflight companies, or even with NASA. Yet there wasn't much precedent. "People would ask, 'Well, are you allowed to extract these minerals? Can you guarantee that an outside body'-the United Nations, say-'isn't going to shut you down?'" Kfir told me.
If DSI was scuffling to gain footing with investors, Planetary Resources was flush with them. In addition to Schmidt, Larry Page, his Google co-founder, provided financial backing. Virgin's Richard Branson also invested in Planetary Resources, and filmmaker James Cameron signed on as an advisor. At the helm of the company was CEO Chris Lewicki, a NASA scientist. He had served as flight director for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and as surface-mission manager for the Phoenix Lander that reached Mars in 2008.
In addition to Luxembourg’s investment, there are several billionaires that have acted as angel investors to space projects. Google co-founder, Larry Page, is one such individual, having ties to asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. Investment in space ventures in general has increased steadily in each five year period since 2000, from a total investment of 1.07 billion U.S. dollars between 2000 and 2005 to five billion U.S. dollars between 2010 and 2015 (not including debt financing, which brings the total investment during this period to 6.1 billion U.S. dollars). Some industry insiders have estimated that space mining may be a reality as soon as 2025, with technology continuously being developed by the industry’s key players such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.