‘‘There is one goal of my company. It’s to mine a f****n’ asteroid.” When I interviewed Matt Gialich, co-founder and CEO of asteroid mining start-up AstroForge, he didn’t pull his punches. It seems to be the style these days. From lab engineers to tech industry giants, the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” has clearly entered the realm of space exploration. And it’s not only AstroForge that is single-mindedly focused on one goal. While the biggest space companies, like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, invest in human spaceflight for tourism or exploration, a gaggle of smaller companies are in a race with one end in sight: extracting resources from the solar system.
Asteroid mining has long been a topic of conversation amongst academics, space industry leaders and economists alike – but how plausible is it really, and is it even a good idea? “The appeal of asteroid mining is that elements that are rare in the Earth’s crust may be found near the surface of some asteroids, where they could be relatively easy to access,” Monash University astronomer Michael Brown told Sky & Telescope magazine earlier this year. “But developing the technology to robotically and effectively mine tons of raw material from distant asteroids won’t be easy.”
The payoff could be immense, though, and well worth the difficulty. Asteroids are known to contain iron, nickel, iridium, palladium, platinum, gold and more. These precious metals are necessary for much of the technology we rely on today. They are also increasingly hard to come by on Earth. According to a 2016 MIT report, a single metal-rich asteroid could contain more than the entire Earth’s known platinum reserves, almost 200 times the yearly global output of mining the precious metal. A comment by Nasa planetary scientist Donald K. Yeomans in the 1990s claimed the value of resources in the asteroid belt “would be equivalent to about $100 billion for every person on Earth today.”
To actually mine an asteroid, a spacecraft would need to first make the perilous journey off the Earth’s surface and into the asteroid belt, traveling over 100 million miles. It would need to be able to precisely target an asteroid – likely only a few kilometres across – and be lightweight enough to be cost-effective (since launching is quite costly at thousands of dollars per pound). The vessel would also need to contain all the mining and refining equipment required to do the work.
It’s hard enough landing on an asteroid in the first place. Such missions have taken place, but their purpose has been to retrieve rock samples. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) returned the first bits of an asteroid from the stony Itokawa back in 2010 with the Hayabusa mission, and they did it again in 2020 from the carbon-heavy Ryugu with Hayabusa2. An American mission, OSIRIS-REx, is expected to return with samples from asteroid Bennu in September of this year. But these are scientific missions, returning mere ounces of material from asteroids. Nothing from Earth has travelled to a metal asteroid. . . yet.
A $700 quintillion asteroid
Nasa’s Psyche is the first mission to a metal asteroid, scheduled to launch on 5 October. In 2026, the spacecraft should reach the asteroid 16 Psyche, thought to be the exposed metal core of a failed planet. “By visiting Psyche, we can literally visit a planetary core the only way that humankind ever can,” Psyche mission lead Lindy Elkins-Tanton told the Atlantic. There are hopes that it will tell us more about the solar system’s origins. The asteroid’s worth has been quoted at $700 quintillion, enough to make every human on Earth almost as rich as Jeff Bezos. And while mining is not a part of the mission, Elkins-Tanton is optimistic that the knowledge revealed may be useful for future commercial missions. “We’ll be the first to show what the surface of a metal body looks like, and that will be a critical set of information for anyone who wants to land later on,” she stated back in 2018. “I think asteroid mining is in our future.”
But how far off will that future be? Ideas for harnessing space resources have circulated amongst academics since the 1970s, while the first major players in industry appeared around 2010. Founded under a purposefully ambiguous name, Seattle-based company Planetary Resources spurred a media frenzy in 2012 when they announced their intentions in off-world mining. They were backed by a star-studded cast of investors, including former Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Titanic filmmaker James Cameron and real-estate mogul Ross Perot Jr. Another company, Deep Space Industries, came on the scene shortly after in 2013. Although the two companies had some success with pathfinder spacecraft and test launches, the real deal asteroid mining never materialised. Despite the media buzz, they still couldn’t raise enough cash.
Many commentators took these failures as an opportunity to claim that the asteroid mining “bubble” had burst, just as they predicted. But a number of new players were already getting started. Private space exploration has grown exponentially in the past decade, with cost per pound for launches dropping drastically. And while the United States still dominates the emerging field (unsurprising, given its history in the space sector since the Cold War), other global players are now in the race. A number of companies were founded in the last decade, including China’s Origin Space and the UK’s Asteroid Mining Corporation. These join AstroForge, ExLabs and TransAstra, all born in the famed cradle of tech innovation: California.
“What can we do if we push the limits of exploration? What can we do if we take on more risk?” asks AstroForge’s Gialich. In April, they launched their first test flight on a SpaceX rideshare, experimenting with the technique for refining platinum in the conditions of space on a small satellite in low-Earth orbit. Refining materials in space keeps that pollution-generating process off our planet, and doesn’t require workers to sacrifice their wellbeing. Plus, the spacecraft won’t have to lug home waste material, meaning it can carry more of the oh-so-valuable metals.
In October, AstroForge plans to test the other half of the equation: actually getting a spacecraft to an asteroid, and doing a fly-by. (Landing comes in a future test mission.) This mission is only possible because it piggybacks on another spaceflight: the launch of Intuitive Machines 2, a commercial lunar lander. It’s a common practice in space exploration to buddy up in this way, to bring down costs.
The shimmering goal
For now, the exact target asteroid is a secret, and it will probably stay that way for quite some time. They have made it clear, though, that they’re specifically hunting for platinum group metals: ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum. These are crucial for technology like optical fibres and hard drives, as well as for cancer medicines. “We plan on returning our first money-making platinum group metal load by the end of this decade,” Gialich tells me, brimming with confidence.
But many are still sceptical, and even Gialich recognises the huge challenge ahead. No commercially funded mission has ever yet properly made it out of Earth’s gravity. Communicating with distant spacecraft requires huge radio dishes across the entire globe. Nasa and the European Space Agency possess such networks, but anything similar would be far too costly to build from scratch.
So private companies must rely on technologies tested by others, and collaborate as needed with these larger governmental entities. Anything to reach that shimmering goal – not only producing gargantuan profits, but also, as some believe, saving the world.
Asteroid mining does promise quite a few world-changing benefits. Humans have over-exploited the planet, and some of the resources we rely on – especially in the digital age – are now in short supply. Take platinum. Although there is certainly ore remaining, the majority of it is in South Africa, which is having difficulties producing it due to power shortages. Mining also takes a huge toll on the environment and on the miners themselves, who often develop serious health conditions. Palladium is a possible substitute but suffers from similar issues.
Geopolitical conflict and competition for scarce resources pose a major threat to current ways of living. We may be facing a future where only the most privileged can afford to use technologies that are currently widespread. Clearly, a huge shipment of platinum and palladium coming down from the stars would solve this shortage. “It’s the obvious first candidate to go mine,” says Gialich, who is hopeful it could “solve one of the biggest existential threats.”
Climate change is arguably an even bigger threat to humanity. One big idea to end our dependence on fossil fuels would be to use large solar panels orbiting Earth. But constructing something of this scale in space is quite a challenge, particularly getting the raw materials up to orbital height. Asteroid mining could provide the millions of tons of construction materials needed to build such a system. Most of our space exploration goals also require massive amounts of materials – especially consumables, like water and oxygen for life support and fuel – that are too heavy to lift into space en masse. Getting water and metals from asteroids, rather than having to lift them off the Earth, would make planetary exploration much more possible.
Colonialism in space?
Despite the benefits being almost too good to be true, many are wary about opening up space to commercial ventures. The 2021 film Don’t Look Up played on the fear that billionaires involved in the space industry will accidentally destroy the world. In the film, an asteroid is heading towards Earth. Instead of redirecting or destroying it, an overconfident tech giant (mistakenly) claims he can mine it and bring untold riches to the planet. Thankfully, asteroid mining as planned – taking place in the asteroid belt itself – likely doesn’t pose such a risk. As with most of humanity’s existential threats, the risks of asteroid mining are far less obviously dramatic and will happen on far longer timescales.
Astronomer Martin Elvis and philosopher Tony Milligan worry that an asteroid-harvesting space race will decimate the solar system, exhausting its vast resources in a few hundred years if not controlled – just as the industrial revolution polluted and destroyed vast swaths of the Earth’s ecosystems before we even realised the damage. A 2019 research article of theirs in Acta Astronautica suggests that humanity should set a rule to only use an eighth of the solar system for resources, leaving the rest as a sort of wilderness preserve. This is crucial for science as well, as there are many questions that can only be answered from detailed study of the other planets and asteroids in our cosmic neighbourhood. “Whatever we do, we have to do it responsibly, respecting the rights of future generations and the protection of scientifically valuable places,” said Dr Leopold Summerer from the European Space Agency in The Guardian in 2016.
Others worry about the ethics of off-world harvesting. University of San Francisco astronomer Aparna Venkatesan described it last year as taking “the mindset of colonialism to a truly cosmic scale”. The potential for huge wealth generation is clear and the influx of resources could create large power inequalities if concentrated in the hands of a few, like the supposed “first trillionaire” hyped during the 2010s asteroid-mining boom. This is especially worrisome given the high cost of entry to even participate in asteroid mining.
Meanwhile, some worry that the sudden influx of precious metals could crush the materials economy on Earth, rapidly devaluing materials that are key to global trade. Economists also point out that intense competition could result in militarisation and conflict to protect commercial and national interests.
Legal black hole
The backdrop for all these concerns is an extremely unclear legal and regulatory situation, where often no precedent exists. Space law as a field remains in its infancy, with the main international doctrine still the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which claims that outer space usage shall be “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries” and “free for exploration and use by all States”. It also proclaims that outer space “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation” and that “States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”
Some read this as an agreement not to exploit space resources but “you see consensus that the UN Outer Space Treaty is not necessarily blocking the extraction of resources,” as Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, told Space.com. The US took things a step further, signing the SPACE Act into law in 2015, safeguarding the rights of companies to expand into outer space and explicitly allowing US citizens to own space resources. Does this law successfully thread a loophole, since the UN treaty prohibits nations not individual actors? Or does it violate international law, since space is not the US’s sole jurisdiction?
There is still no consensus on the SPACE Act among legal scholars. The US government, however, made its stance perfectly clear when then-president Donald Trump signed an executive order encouraging the use of space resources by private companies in 2020. Nasa’s Artemis Accords – ostensibly designed to reify the Outer Space Treaty, as the agency returns to the Moon – also doubled down on the rights to commercial space mining, claiming that mining should be regulated at the national level.
Astronomer Aaron Boley and political scientist Michael Byers expressed their concern in a 2020 article for the journal Science, saying this agreement “could enable the US interpretation of international space law to prevail and make the United States – as the licensing nation for most of the world’s space companies – the de facto gatekeeper to the Moon, asteroids, and other celestial bodies.” They added that Nasa’s actions must be seen for what they are: “a concerted, strategic effort to redirect international space cooperation in favour of short-term US commercial interests, with little regard for the risks involved.”
As with most burgeoning industries throughout history, it seems likely that mistakes will come first, and regulation second. “I am positive that when we go out and we mine an asteroid, there’s going to be regulation,” says Gialich, even if the rules are still evolving. “I mean, we’ve seen this in every industry throughout history, right? Like the Wright brothers didn’t have any FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] to deal with, because it didn’t exist.”
There are potential positives of asteroid mining, from providing key resources to solving fossil fuel dependency; however, with little to no regulation, there is no stopping the nascent sector from speeding ahead, possibly in the direction of private profits instead of helping humanity.
It’s a fascinating, if troubling, time to be alive. While we may not have to fear an asteroid plunging to Earth, it’s a good idea for more of us to pay attention to the new frontier being opened up in space.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
