Asteroid Mining, Colonising Mars and Improving Life on Earth

If explorers are going to get to Mars then they’re going to need to find water, both during transit and once they arrive. As Lewicki explains, it’s a crucial ingredient in the rocket fuel that will propel them to the Red Planet, and more than that it’s needed for sustenance, farming and hygiene.

“Water is useful to us human beings for a variety of reasons. We're made of the stuff mostly, we drink it and it's part of our food supply; it's a part of our hygiene and that's something that's very important. In space where there's no air, water is important in the oxygen that we can use to breath, but in space, water also starts to take on a unique and new role as we become interplanetary travellers,” said Lewicki.

“But the most important role that water can provide in space is by providing rocket fuel. The water molecule, H20, is a molecule of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen when combusted and burned together make the most powerful rocket fuel that exists, and it's the reason why all of the space shuttle missions were powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and now Blue Origin’s BE-3 and BE-4 engines are using this technology to provide the most efficient, rocket propulsion that you can find. “

Luckily, near-Earth asteroids are apparently bursting at the seams with water, and Planetary Resources has a plan to exploit it. First of all, the company would capture an asteroid, and then, using the unlimited thermal energy from the sun, the asteroid would be heated up.

From there, the vacuum of space would be used to transport water vapour that has been baked out of the asteroid, and then the infinite cool of space, which as you move away from the sun can get as low as minus 270 degrees Celsius, would essentially act as a free industrial refrigerator that would turn our water into a pure ice cube that can then be transported back to Earth orbit to use in our fuel tanks, water stores or in our radiation shields.

For those of us not headed to Mars though, we too could see massive advantages from asteroid mining. An iPhone, for example, contains gold, silver, platinum and copper, so an abundance of resources would likely see prices of consumer products fall, as Planetary Resources predicted when it first announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids.

“Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications,” said Peter H. Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, in a statement released at the time of the company’s inception.

As impressive as it is that mining asteroids could give us cheaper electronics, or even solve the problem of energy storage, some commentators believe Planetary Resources’ work could also promote peaceful interactions between nations and people, as selfishness caused by scarcity is replaced by sharing brought about by abundance.

The American astrophysicist, author and science commentator Neil deGrasse Tyson is certainly hopeful. “If you haul an asteroid the size of a house to Earth, it could have more platinum on it than has ever been mined in the history of the world. More gold than has ever been mined in the history of the world. When that happens, the scarcity that has led to human-to-human violence, there’s a chance it could all go away,” said Tyson in a NPR radio interview.

Imagine a scenario where we become an interplanetary species; if that were the case then space mining would become a necessary and very lucrative industry. But who would get to take home those profits? In November 2015, former US president Barack Obama signed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law. The law recognises the right of US citizens to own the asteroid resources they obtain as well as encouraging the commercial exploration and utilisation of resources from asteroids.

The signing of a law like that is clearly good news for a company like Planetary Resources, but this is just US law, and, unhelpfully, it is US law that is incompatible with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, where almost 100 states, including the US, Russia, and China, agreed that outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies such as asteroids, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.” Consider then what countries like Russia and China would feel about a private US company like Planetary Resources mining in space, especially if, like the company predicts, space is full of loot.

Planetary Resources though doesn’t appear overly concerned with that problem. “We have explored dozens and dozens of these places now, in the last 20 years. We've flown by them, we've orbited them, we've landed on them, even comets now, I'm sure everyone is familiar with the Rosetta mission. We've even returned samples of the surface of the Moon and brought them back to Earth,” said Lewicki at Web Summit.

“They are worlds that we now know; they are places that we understand, they're areas of the solar system that we see as an opportunity to develop into the future resource mines for developing our industry.”

Whether you believe that our lack of knowledge about asteroids is as serious problem or not, these are at the very least early obstacles, which hopefully won’t become insurmountable ones. Clearly there’s a long way to go before asteroid mining is a reality, but if companies like Planetary Resources do find a way to do it, then it has the potential to improve life both on this planet and beyond.