Space mining countdown has started
- 21 December 2024
Fuel for Space Race 2.0 will be a critical driver of initial off-Earth resource development, potentially opening up many new frontiers for terrestrial miners, Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 heard.
Experts on a panel at the London conference agreed finding resources in space that might be worth bringing back to Earth was likely to stay in the realm of science fiction for the foreseeable future. And not just because towing a platinum-rich asteroid back to Earth (try getting that one through the risk assessment department) would theoretically crush the home market. Costs are a bit of a stretch at this point, too.
However, in situ resource utilisation, or ISRU, could expand rapidly on the back of cislunar economic growth over the next few decades, they said.
“I think it is quite important … to dispel this perception that space is full of resources that will relieve resource pressures on the Earth,” Imperial College research fellow and former branch chief at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Stan Starr, said.
“There isn't anything in space that the Earth doesn't have … This whole solar system is made out of the same stuff.
“And it’s much more costly to extract it from things in space if you want to use it on Earth.
“If we’re going to mine things in space it’s going to be used in space.
“I hope that once that is grasped it will remove this impression that somehow all the countries have to be competing to extract space resources to address resource scarcity on Earth.
“Because I do think that's a myth and if we can establish it as a myth before we get too far down this road we might save ourselves some problems in the future.”
Rhonda O’Sullivan, an Australian geologist and alumni of the International Space University in France, said the challenge of space mining was “complex and exciting” from technological, economic and legal perspectives, presaging massive change in the decade ahead as the NASA-led Artemis and other space missions gain momentum.
“The development of human activities in space won't only hinge on the ability to travel and to explore space but also on harnessing space resources to support space activities,” she said.
“These resources will be critical to building habitats, sustaining life and refuelling transport vehicles or orbiting structures and satellites. They'll also play a key role in space manufacturing, an industry that could redefine how we think about production supply chains.”
Ian Crawford, professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College’s School of Natural Sciences in London, told the conference mining in space would be “like mining the Earth insofar as we talk about extracting raw materials from objects in the space environment”.
“At least initially space mining is going to involve extracting materials in space for use in space,” he said.
“The advantage of that is you don't have to lift the stuff you need in space out of Earth's relatively huge gravity well.
“It takes 20 times less energy to get something off the surface of the moon into cislunar space than it does from the surface of the Earth into cislunar space. So ultimately there may come a time when, if you needed materials for space manufacturing, it would be more economical to source them in space rather than lift them from the Earth.
“Of course we're not there yet because that would have to be built on a whole industrial infrastructure in space that we don't have yet.
“That ecosystem is going to have to be bootstrapped up from nothing before it becomes viable.
“In the short term the materials for space manufacturing in low Earth orbit are probably going to come from the Earth, especially now SpaceX and other companies are reducing launch costs.”
As the “stunning advancement” of SpaceX’s heavy-payload Starship continued to rewrite the Earth-launch playbook, Starr suggested the Boeing and Lockheed Martin-backed United Launch Alliance’s circa-US$3000/kg price benchmark for propellant supplied from Earth was likely to be improving.
Its $500/kg for ex-lunar propellant, made from Moon surface ice, meanwhile represented a “tremendous bargain” for commercial users if it could be achieved. Scaling would start to open market windows for suppliers.
“There are a number of people who believe that there will be a market for liquid oxygen in low Earth orbit, if not methane and possibly hydrogen,” Starr said.
“There are issues with hydrogen [efficient storage, etc], but you could transport it as water … and oxygen and hydrogen can be created from that.
“There’s [also] an abundance of asteroids that contain a lot of water and CO2 and other volatiles which would conceptually be relatively easy to mine and use in space to make more rocket propellants.”
Re-usable rocket boosters and the availability of cheaper rocket fuel off-Earth are seen as game-changers for increased space launch activity and longer-range travel. As is the rapid evolution of public-private partnerships.
“One of the things I like about NASA’s model is NASA doesn’t want to build things it wants to buy things,” Crawford said.
“So if NASA wants liquid oxygen to refuel its rockets on the moon it will buy that LOX from somebody, not make it themselves.
“That’s a good model because then you have a company set that up and it can also sell liquid oxygen to other parties and go forward.
“NASA has helped SpaceX a great deal in funding their initial rockets for crew access to the [International] Space Station … and also funded the Starship out of a lunar lander program.
“I think it’s a good model for governments to help get companies over that initial hump where they have developed technologies and need to understand the risks and what they need to charge for them.”
UK Space Agency chief of staff Sarah-Jane Gill, another former geologist who discovered a new life in space, said the risk-sharing approach by government agencies such as NASA, the European Space Agency and Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and emergence of groups such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, was “changing the playing field”.
“The rise of SpaceX, making access to space cheaper, has meant that we’re opening [space] up to a whole new set of actors,” she said.
“We’ve seen this massive change in the sector [driven by] commercialisation and independent wealth like we've never seen before.”
