The utilization of space resources by asteroid mining is potentially a trillion-dollar industry. Naturally, business people are interested.
This November, the Beijing-based private space resources company Origin Space will launch a space mining robot called Neo-1. While the idea of extracting off-Earth resources has been on many people’s minds, the Chinese startup is one of the first to take steps towards testing capabilities and identifying mining locations.
NEO-1 won’t be doing the mining itself. It will be testing technologies. It’s a small 30kg satellite that will be launched into space by a Chinese Long March series rocket as a secondary payload and enter a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit.
Origin Space co-founder Yu Tianhong said:
The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital maneuver, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification, and control.
The company will launch another spacecraft – a satellite developed by DFH Satellite Co. Ltd. called Yuanwang-1 (aka Little Hubble) – next year. That one will carry an optical telescope designed to monitor and observe Near-Earth Asteroids. It’s essentially the spy-bot keeping an eye out for suitable targets with minable resources.
Following Little Hubble will be a third mission – the sending of NEO-2 to the Moon – set to take place around late 2021 or early 2022.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently announced that the agency would purchase lunar regolith and rock samples from commercial companies, reigniting interest in the issue of space resources worldwide. And Donald Trump passed an executive order that encourages mining of resources on asteroids and the Moon.
However, the Secure World Foundation’s Director of Program Planning, Brian Weeden, says it’s not as resourceful and straightforward as it may sound. He said:
We’ve heard a lot about water on the Moon, but if you talk to any lunar scientist, they will tell you we don’t know what the chemical composition of that water is and how difficult it will be to extract and refine it into a usable product. The same thing goes for asteroids to an even greater degree. We have massive mining operations and factories and smelteries to refine raw materials into usable products on Earth. How much of that will you need in space, and how do you build it?
Right now, the only real customers are the national space agencies that are planning to do things on the Moon. They might have a use for lunar regolith as a building material and water for fuel and life support. But aside from the tiny contract we saw from NASA last week, I haven’t seen any major interest from governments in buying those materials commercially or at what price.
Nevertheless, there are other space mining companies, including a couple of US-based firms (Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries); and a Tokyo-based company called ispace, which has already raised $28 million to begin a series of lunar landers. Planetary Resources was the first, but it suffered funding issues and sold out to ConsenSys in 2018. Meanwhile, Deep Space Industries has pivoted away from asteroid mining towards making small satellites.
As you could imagine, the concept of space mining is highly controversial, and many scientists have called for a partial ban on the practice to protect the solar system. A group of researchers has proposed making over 85% of the space wilderness protected against human development.
Lead author Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical, told The Guardian:
If we don’t think about this now, we will go ahead as we always have, and in a few hundred years, we will face an extreme crisis, much worse than we have on Earth now. Once you’ve exploited the solar system, there’s nowhere left to go.
If everything goes right, we could be sending our first mining missions into space within ten years. Once it starts and somebody makes an enormous profit, there will be the equivalent of a gold rush. We need to take it seriously.
Apparently, humankind hasn’t learned its lesson here on Earth.
