Automated on-site resource utilization will likely be first wave of lucrative off-world industry.

NASA's multibillion-dollar Artemis program isn't just about America returning to the Moon or even extended visits – it's also paving the way for lunar resource mining operations, with a lunar economy expected to include mining metals like aluminum, iron, manganese, rare earths, and titanium.

But surprisingly, its first product will most likely be mundane by Earth standards – water.

The phrase "worth one's weight in gold" has an appreciable downside when it comes to the prohibitively expensive process of rocketing materials and people off planet Earth.

According to NASA, the cost of transporting anything to the Moon today is roughly $10,000 per pound. Assuming a person needs around three gallons of water daily to survive, and a gallon of water weighs about 8.3 lb, the costs of this most basic of human needs add up quickly.

NASA is looking for ways to ship less water and material and to automate as much as possible before and after astronauts arrive on the lunar surface.

While the space agency's funding is finite, the private sector is not so constrained; encouraging the sector to try its hand at prospecting and develop lunar commodities to further space exploration vital to stimulating a space-based economy – one that not only expands Mankind's reach into the universe but facilitates improved technologies in the environmentally beneficial fields of renewable power generation and storage, waste reduction, sustainable resource utilization and reclamation, among others.

The dream of space-suited mining specialists shipping extraterrestrial wealth back home to ease the strain on Earth's dwindling reserves is still far behind several key technological and logistical breakthroughs.

Much more practical and closer on the horizon is the transition from Earth-delivered payloads to in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), which would supply air, water, fuel, and construction materials to bases on the Moon and beyond. This initial step would be automated sampling and prospecting, which has already been the focus of several collaborative missions expected to launch over the coming decade.

First, mining Earth's nearest neighbor needs to pay off domestically – in this case, by the Moon, for the Moon.

"We are trying to invest in the exploration phase, understand the resources ... to [lower] risk such that external investment makes sense that could lead to development and production," said Gerald Sanders, NASA's keynote speaker at the 26th World Mining Congress 2023: New Mining Frontiers.

According to Sanders, who has been a rocket scientist at NASA's Johnston Space Center for 35 years, the agency is looking to develop resources on the Moon that initially include oxygen and water, expanding to iron and rare earths, and has already taken steps toward excavating Moon soil in 2032.

His presentation includes an extremely detailed breakdown of what is needed to facilitate commercial ISRU.

ICON/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

NASA is funding a commercially driven approach to space exploration, while DARPA is awarding companies collaborating to develop a commercial infrastructure for the Moon by 2035, including lunar transmission, energy, and communications.

DARPA's infrastructure

The 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) project is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative to develop a commercial infrastructure for the Moon by 2035, creating a framework for integrated commercial services on and around the Moon, including lunar transmission, energy, and communications.

The project's stages are designed to move away from isolated scientific efforts toward a series of shareable, scalable, resource-driven foundational systems that create monetizable services in an operational lunar economy.

LunA-10 Topic Area 1 (TA-1) lays the groundwork – a portfolio of providers and users who will define a framework that takes advantage of commercial development and nongovernmental funding streams. Each integrated system design will be backed by a quantitative analysis of needs, anticipated use case(s), concepts of operations, scaling analysis, and metrics for system performance.

Performers will identify current investments and future technical challenges toward achieving these goals.

All developments and involvement by civilian or government personnel in this effort will be grounded in scientific and peaceful purposes while emphasizing the commercial value of human exploration and scientific experimentation.

Collaborators on this initiative include companies like Blue Origin, CisLunar Industries, Firefly Aerospace, Helios, Honeybee Robotics, ICON, Nokia, Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, and SpaceX.

DARPA's LunA-10 efforts complement NASA's Artemis program, aiming to create a self-sufficient and vibrant lunar economy supporting space development and travel provided by and for a wide variety of users intending to operate on and around the Moon.

Heading out

Last February, Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down in the Moon's south polar region carrying six NASA payloads, which have since transmitted valuable information from the lunar surface, including data on space weather and lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, and communication and navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies.

The contract, valued at a comparatively small $118 million, is the first successful landing as part of NASA's broader $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to partner up with private industry to advance capabilities for science, exploration and commercial development of the Moon under NASA's Artemis campaign.

NASA structured the contracts to promote innovation and cost-effective manufacturing as well as foster a sustainable commercial lunar market where it can add to demand, purchasing services instead of directly owning and operating hardware, rather than monopolizing its own closed-loop economy.

The CLPS program is designed to motivate companies to generate profits and deliver returns to shareholders. The $100 million fixed-cost contracts would transfer much of the cost overrun risk to the companies themselves, with the idea that as costs are driven down, the use cases go up, and an economy emerges.

In addition to paying for launch, the lunar lander startups are left with very tight budgets to build their spacecraft.

"It doesn't come easy, especially when you're trying to break the barrier of a price point," said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus.

Odysseus marked the United States' first lunar landing since Apollo 17, as well as the first successful landing as part of the CLPS initiative. The success of missions attracts more private investment and interest in CLPS contracts and program awards.

NASA currently has 14 providers on contract that are eligible to bid on task orders under the initiative, including Lockheed Martin Space, SpaceX, Blue Origin and several ambitious startups.

Commercial ISRU

The first customers of a budding commercial ecosystem on the Moon are expected to be government space agencies and commercial rocket companies using the Moon's resources.

"We want to be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace between the Earth and the Moon, and we want multiple providers that are competing on cost and innovation," said former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine. "We think of it like venture capital – our investment is low because other people are investing in the customers. The portfolio is large, so we can take risks."

To develop a market, the Moon first needs extensive resource exploration. With private industry now in the rocket-building business, transportation to extraterrestrial destinations is becoming cheaper and more reliable. But, like any terrestrial mine development, resource certainty, reserve estimation, scalability, and economic feasibility need to be established before a company is willing to invest in a lunar mine.

Mining and in-situ materials production is primarily intended to reduce mission and architecture mass and costs. The flurry of privately built landers and rovers headed to the Moon to sample and analyze are meant to facilitate fewer large-scale launches to get supplies off Earth – propellant, consumables, construction materials, and eventually enhance mission capabilities to go farther with more independence.

NASA's initial focus is on potential resources for fuel and water production, using lunar soil as a building material and feedstock for additive manufacturing of high-wear parts and tools.

"We are trying to invest in the exploration phase, understand the resources ... to [lower] risk such that external investment makes sense that could lead to development and production," said Sanders. "We are literally just scratching the surface."

Adobe Stock, AI-generated

Terrestrial industry and economy don't need to wait; space exploration has consistently produced technologies and materials that improve everyday life on Earth, from better tires to digital cameras.

Ready to drill

With eight missions so far targeting various regions of the Moon, the CLPS program is structured to enable a wide range of lunar exploration activities. At the top of the list is broadening the search for water ice and volatiles, which can be broken down into oxygen and water for astronauts, fuel for equipment, and propellant for return visits and trips to Mars.

This year, NASA has an automated drill headed to the lunar surface: The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain, or TRIDENT, is key to locating ice and other resources on the Moon.

"Honeybee Robotics designed the TRIDENT drill for NASA to sample lunar regolith," said Amy Eichenbaum, the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) deputy project manager. "TRIDENT will help understand the physical properties of the lunar regolith while also allowing analysis of the resources present in samples taken from various depths."

TRIDENT is a rotary-percussive drill that incorporates sensors that measure drilling parameters, including weight on bit, rate of penetration, and auger torque. For each hole drilled, data files are created recording those parameters. An identical drilling system is used in Rio Tinto, Spain, and Atacama, Chile, documenting drill performance in different materials drilled during fieldwork.

The Australian Space Agency is also developing a semi-autonomous rover that will take regolith samples to demonstrate the collection of lunar soil that contains oxygen in the form of oxides on a NASA mission as early as 2026, said Samuel Webster, an assistant director at the agency. Using separate equipment sent to the Moon with the rover, NASA aims to extract that oxygen.

Sanders/Kleinhenz for NASA

The future is here

The promising lunar mining economy already offers technological advances that benefit industry here and now on Earth. Even prior to the first moon landing in the 1970s, space exploration has produced technologies and materials that have improved everyday life, from better tires to digital cameras.

Three asteroid-mining startups have been straddling the line between space-ready technology development and terrestrial products:

TransAstra is a company that is not resting on its laurels (or grants) and doubles as an intellectual property developer, selecting collaborative projects that forward all aspects of its own asteroid mining technology while satisfying existing market needs like orbital logistics and debris traffic management.

"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 TransAstra CEO Joel Sercel.

Origin Space also has several immediately applicable solutions, including an increasingly important space debris removal and traffic management suite.

Humanity has launched over 12,000 satellites since 1957, leaving nearly 3,000 defunct spacecraft circling the planet at speed alongside bulky debris like upper-stage rocket bodies. As Earth's orbit becomes ever more crowded, the danger of collisions and subsequent debris fields grows.

AMC

The Space Cargo and Reconnaissance Explorer, or SCAR-E for short, is designed for sampling and operations in microgravity environments and for the automation of high-risk tasks here on Earth.

Asteroid Mining Corp. is iterating spider-like robots called Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorers (SCAR-E), designed to drill into asteroids and process extracted material on-site. Their engineered capabilities to navigate rough terrain and climb surfaces make them perfect for jobs here, including dangerous exploration, high-risk repairs, nuclear decommissioning, remote sensing, disaster relief and rescue operations.

Japanese lunar firm ispace partnered with AMC late last year to deliver a SCAR-E robot to the lunar surface to test its ability to extract lunar resources. After ispace's first mission in 2023 ended in a crash landing, the company hasn't slowed down, with more planned over the next three years.

"As part of our business model, ispace supports pioneering projects by providing lunar transportation services to realize technology demonstrations in short timeframes," ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said.

Upcoming missions will also deliver TENACIOUS, a micro-rover developed by the company's Luxembourg-based subsidiary, as well as four customer payloads, which include a water electrolyzer, a module for food production experiments, and a deep-space radiation probe – the APEX 1.0 lunar lander's first mission as early as 2026, and more on the way.