This post is based on a speech I gave on October 17, 2018, at Westside Toastmasters in Santa Monica, CA.
How many of you are worried about running out of natural resources? How many of you are concerned about the effects that energy production, mining and industry are having on the environment? As an example of these concerns, consider that in 2017 a study was published in the journal Nature which sounded an alarm that rare earth minerals needed for smart phones and laptops were dwindling, including several used extensively in green technologies. Tonight, I want to talk about looking to the skies for possible solutions.
What if I told you that we can find all the resources we need in space, beyond Earth, in our Solar System? Resources that can be used to build and fuel the spacecraft needed to mine, refine, and transport the resources, as well as to build and sustain colonies on other worlds. That is the premise of the book Mining the Sky which I finished reading not long ago. The author, John S. Lewis, is currently a professor emeritus of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona-Tucson. The book was published in 1997 and looks at the resources available on the Moon, asteroids and comets, on Mars and its moons and beyond. Professor Lewis estimated trillions of dollars (based on the value of a dollar in 1996) worth of metals, such as iron, nickel, cobalt, gold, and platinum, could be mined from one small near-Earth asteroid alone. While the value of the minerals may be exaggerated in the book, there can be little doubt that the tens of thousands of asteroids in the solar system contain enough minerals to supply Earth, spacecraft, and colonies for hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. In addition, the author makes the case for using space resources for power, including building solar power satellites or even solar power arrays on the moon using raw materials from space, and then beaming the energy back to Earth. Professor Lewis assumed what he proposed in the book could come to fruition by 2030, but I’d say we’re a bit behind his plan. However, he makes a compelling argument for mining resources in space to “relieve Earth’s energy problem, make astronomical amounts of raw materials available, and raise the living standard of people worldwide.”
Steps are being taken even now to make progress toward asteroid mining. On September 21, 2018, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), landed two rovers on the asteroid Ryugu, the first space mission to successfully land on a fast-moving asteroid. The mission plans to return material from the asteroid to Earth by December 2020.
In addition, there are corporations like Bradford Space (formerly Deep Space Industries) and Planetary Resources who are actively working on technologies to lower the costs of access to space in order to facilitate eventual mining operations on asteroids. These companies are in a race to be the world’s first private company to launch a deep space mission.
Imagine a space-faring society where a prospector might fly out to an asteroid launching from a space station or Mars. At the asteroid they choose to prospect, they map the surface of the asteroid using radar and test out the rock for various metals and minerals and for water levels, then decide on where they want to set up their mining equipment. If the asteroid already has a mine on it, they may refuel with water which the mining facility has already extracted. It would be a bit like California’s Gold Rush in the 1800s, only in space. This scenario is a fictional vignette in the form of a letter from a prospector to an elementary school class on Earth at the beginning of one of the chapters in Mining the Sky, but perhaps one day during my lifetime it could be a real story played out in the asteroid belt.
