Gotteem. This ain’t about Valentine’s Day. Nor is it about Minecraft. Nor the seagulls from Finding Nemo. This is about asteroid mining. You’ve been jabaited. But stick around for the ride of your life, or well, a mildly exciting exploration of the next generation of mining.
The Earth is limited in its resources, as we know. We’ve all heard of the aluminum shortages, the helium shortages, the lithium shortages, etc. Well, it’s only going to get worse as we build more infrastructure and technology. Luckily, we’ve got a large, basically unlimited supply of metal and other resources floating in space: asteroids. These are both useful for Earthly endeavors as well as our extra-planetary exploration. There are a bunch of different types of these rocky wanderers. C-type Asteroids don’t have a lot of practical value on Earth, as they are mostly water and organic material-rich. However, in colonized space areas, these resources could help for astro-botany, another subject my blog has discussed. Also, the phosphorus C-type asteroids contain is useful in both space and on Earth, since phosphorus is becoming more constricted on our planet. S-type asteroids hold much more value, containing large quantities of iron, cobalt, and nickel. They also contain rarer metals, like gold, rhodium, and platinum.
There are a number of problems with getting resources from asteroids. First, we’d need to find the metals we need before landing on them, or otherwise it is extremely unfeasible. This could be done by using sensors to check the reflected light from an asteroid, and from that data determine the asteroid’s composition. Some plans consider just collecting small samples, then analyze them with physical machinery. At the moment, the proto-mission from NASA is returning to Earth. OSIRIS-REx is the first space mission sent specifically to sample an asteroid (Bennu). Launched in 2016, it is scheduled to return in fall of 2023. It had UV, infrared, and visible light sensors to collect tons of information, including composition analysis of the asteroid. It is also bringing home a small portion of the surface as well. This is the first step from turning the (almost hopelessly) theoretical concept of asteroid mining to an actuality. But OSIRIS_REx’s small sample is not nearly the amount needed to make something like asteroid mining profitable. Next comes the difficulty of of physically mining the asteroids in economically sustainable quantities.
Some plans have described toting the asteroids into orbit around Earth to then be processed. Others propose using spider-like robots to swarm the asteroids and collect samples that way. At the end of the day, most of the designs are still far theoretical, and need much advancement before they even near viability. The plans also use the Moon as an industrial processing center to then ship the resources to Earth or other civilizations.
The main problem with asteroid mining is there is no infrastructure in place. It requires control centers, docking stations, processing hubs, and other places to maintain a mining operation in space. It isn’t efficient to process the raw resources on Earth, especially if some are getting sent to other colonies in the solar system. The escape velocity is difficult to overcome and requires amounts of fuel and energy to achieve. But to build that much infrastructure in space would require a ton of materials, which would be both expensive and time-consuming to send from Earth. Some proposals use raw material from asteroids in space from initial missions to build the rest of the infrastructure for a larger scale operation. But this is the primary limiting factor in asteroid mining.
Another problem is that the metals aren’t in veins as they are on Earth; rather, due to lack of geological activity, they are more homogeneously distributed throughout the asteroid. This makes them more difficult to collect.
There are legal barriers in place as well. Who would own the asteroids? The most recent international space treaty addressing this concern is the UN’s Outer Space Treaty from 1966. Yes, from 1966. So it’s not exactly in touch with modernity. Some seem to think that it will be whoever lands on it first, but the legality is still off for grabs. At least within the United States, the Space Act of 2015 gives companies the right to whatever resources they mine, so that is a bonus for these domestic companies.
Asteroid mining could be the next big industry, or it could be a bust. In my opinion, it will be a big thing in the next century, but looking forward fifteen to twenty years, it won’t come to fruition. We just don’t have the infrastructure for it yet. It is still extremely expensive to send rockets to space, much less the many to build a processing center in orbit or on the moon. We are also still dealing with big problems on Earth… um, climate change still exists. Maybe we should wait to send hundreds of rockets into orbit while we are struggling to reduce the carbon footprint in every other way. But that is just my opinion.
