The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Metal Tech News - May 22, 2024
A shrewd combination of short- and long-term product offerings is essential for space mining companies that are quite literally ahead of their time.
A six-legged spiderlike robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E.
Lunar Outpost is taking the lead on one of the competing lunar terrain vehicle projects commissioned by NASA, with principal partner Lockheed Martin and other partners, including General Motors and Goodyear.
The enticing metallic asteroid Psyche is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Plenty of space mining companies have boomed and gone bust in the last decade. In spite of this, "the field has exploded in interest," said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. The costs of space travel and exploration have been reduced dramatically due to the privatization of transport.
With deep-sea mining still controversial, mining on the Moon and asteroids definitively resolves the problem of damaging the planet. If the price keeps falling and its studied advantages continue to ascend, space mining will find itself appealing to a wider pool of investors and industries.
In-situ (as opposed to being shipped in by rocket) use of space resources is being seriously studied. Even unmanned technologies could benefit from extracting simple space ice, which could be converted to hydrogen fuel and coolant. Hydrogen itself is massively plentiful in the vacuum and may be easier to collect and directly utilize in space, even if sending it home doesn't yet have an attractive price point.
On the Moon, for instance, it is likely that space agencies and private entities will compete to mine ice at its poles and anything else it could use to create longer-term astronaut research habitats instead of importing materials.
Then come the other elements of great interest back on terra firma – namely, the ongoing promise of platinum group metals, nickel, and cobalt on asteroids.
Recent attention has focused back on the Moon, which the U.S. hasn't explored since 1972, with several countries now looking to establish bases on the lunar surface to serve as a jumping-off point for deeper exploration of our solar system.
Lunar Outpost is taking the lead on one of the competing lunar terrain vehicle projects commissioned by NASA, with principal partner Lockheed Martin and other partners, including General Motors and Goodyear.
China and India have both landed research vessels on the Moon, and in February of this year, Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander made it carrying both commercial and NASA payloads in preparation for the long-anticipated Artemis mission.
NASA has ambitions to build base camps for astronauts on the Moon within the next decade, and China is planning to build an international lunar research station as well.
"We've fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the Moon," said Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, "and we've kicked open the door for a robust, thriving cislunar economy in the future."
Lunar surveying is already happening, and as of December 2020, NASA has contracts with four companies – Lunar Outpost (Colorado), Masten Space Systems (California), ispace Europe (Luxembourg), and ispace Japan – commissioned to extract small amounts of material from the lunar surface with their various technologies as proof of concept.
As of yet, there are no similar demonstrations in the works for mining asteroids.
The composition of asteroids can be solid rock or rubble piles held together by their own gravity. For example, near-sun asteroids are thought to be made up of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, while far-away asteroids are usually made up of silicate rock.
How do we know? Astronomers can infer from studying meteorites originating from asteroid belts, providing valuable insights. Additionally, through the use of spectroscopy – a method that involves studying how objects interact with light across different wavelengths – they can observe the absorption features in sunlight reflected by asteroids.
While this method illuminates their surface composition, discerning the presence of metals still requires additional analysis and tangible samples.
The enticing metallic asteroid Psyche is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
NASA already has a spacecraft en route to study Psyche – a metallic asteroid so enticingly shiny it could be a flying gold nugget as far as we can tell.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx was the first U.S. mission to bring a sample from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth. Its payload of 122 grams (close to 4.5 ounces) is the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space, with the probe already speeding toward its next target, the asteroid Apophis.
About a quarter of the Bennu sample will remain with researchers on the OSIRIS-REx research team, comprising over 200 scientists from around the world. Agencies getting their own sample to study the asteroid's regolith include the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The Japanese Aerospace Agency's Hayabusa2 mission also brought back about 0.18 ounces (5 grams) of material from its target asteroid, Ryugu, in 2020. These were also distributed for study between nations.
China has plans to send an asteroid sampling mission as soon as next year, while the United Arab Emirates Space Agency is planning to explore the asteroid belt with its own mission scheduled to launch in 2028.
Hope and optimism, while definitely necessary in this field, aren't bankable. A shrewd combination of short and long-term product offerings is essential for companies that are quite literally ahead of their time.
Luckily, every space race has produced plenty of useful secondary products and technologies to take advantage of here and now. Not just freeze-dried food but sports shoes, laptops, solar cells, and camera phones emerged from the space industry.
TransAstra is a company that is not resting on its laurels (or grants) and provides turnkey observatories for sale, along with supporting software and equipment for private and military purposes.
"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," said Dr. Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO.
Chinese corporation Origin Space already has an asteroid-observing satellite in orbit around Earth, where it will be testing mining tech. Colorado company Karman+ plans to head straight to an asteroid by 2026 and test out its excavation equipment.
A six-legged spiderlike robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E.
Asteroid Mining Corporation Ltd. isn't relying much on outside investment in the long term, either. Instead, founder and CEO Mitch Hunter-Scullion has focused his company's early work on terrestrial applications that pay now. In 2021, the company partnered with Tohoku University Space Robotics Laboratory, based in Japan, to work on a project applicable to Earth mining as well.
The result is a six-legged spiderlike robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E. Designed to operate in microgravity, it can crawl around a rugged surface and collect data and samples. In 2026, the company plans to do a demonstration mission analyzing soil on the Moon.
In the meantime, SCAR-E can inspect ship hulls, dangerous environments, tight mining spaces, and more.
"I think every asteroid-mining company has this realization that money runs out, investors get tired, and you have to do something," said Hunter-Scullion. "My opinion is that unless you've built something which makes sense on Earth, you're never going to be able to mine an asteroid."
Ian Lange, an economist at the Colorado School of Mines, said space mining isn't about a shortage of terrestrial resources. "It's not that we don't have lithium around," he said, as an example. "The problem is that for a number of reasons, we're not allowing ourselves to take them out of the ground."
Space mining isn't without its own environmental impacts, Lange notes. All those cheaper launches contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and space mining will create waste and potentially dangerous debris if mishandled. And the idea of bringing costs down to match terrestrial minerals isn't realistic yet, either.
The regulatory landscape for space mining has evolved in recent years, according to Melissa de Zwart, a professor specializing in space law at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Today, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, and the United States all have legislation preserving various rights to own space material. The US has also established the Artemis Accords, a set of best practices for behavior on the Moon.
Other nations have also supported these and similar principles, which include ensuring that lunar digs align with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the major international law governing space exploration, including mining (even though it was enacted long before space mining was on the practical horizon).
The Outer Space Treaty lays some ground rules similar to what has been established for international waters: you can't plant a flag, claim the area and start mining, explained de Zwart. But a country might extract material from the Moon or an asteroid and then own that material. More importantly, nations are considered responsible for what their private companies do, and their activities must benefit humanity.
It's just a framework at this point, without exact definitions of the do's and don'ts of responsible space mining, but there is talk toward that more logistical end: The Hague International Space Resources Governance Working Group has put together some starting points for developing an international how-to framework, and the United Nations has a working group dedicated to the cause.
Still, many technological and economic hurdles lie ahead of any actual mining.
"What kind of manufacturing or refining activity is happening in space right now? Zero. You don't go from zero to the state of the current economy quickly. You've got to crawl and walk first," Lange said.
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