Mining in space: can we do it?

While the idea of exploit­ing resources on the Moon and oth­er solar sys­tem bod­ies has been around for many years, with promis­es of lunar bases and colonies on Mars, these ambi­tious dreams have yet to become reality.

The sit­u­a­tion might be chang­ing now, how­ev­er, thanks to the advent of improved tech­nolo­gies, falling costs of space trav­el and the pri­vate sector’s rush to devel­op com­pet­i­tive ener­gies. Com­mer­cial devel­op­ments in the space indus­try and the short­age of chem­i­cal ele­ments need­ed for indus­try also means that we might have to look for resources else­where – on the Moon, aster­oids or, in the longer term, oth­er bod­ies fur­ther out in the solar system.

The aster­oid Psy­che (which is about 200 km wide) could be 50% metal­lic, mean­ing it could con­tain the equiv­a­lent of mil­lions of years of our annu­al glob­al iron and nick­el pro­duc­tion. And it is not only these met­als that are attract­ing future space prospectors.

Oth­er aster­oids are rich in ele­ments that are very rare on Earth. These include plat­inum, irid­i­um, osmi­um and pal­la­di­um, which are all extreme­ly impor­tant for indus­try and are used in prod­ucts as diverse as cat­alyt­ic con­vert­ers, pace­mak­ers and med­ical implants. Impor­tant­ly, they are also present in most mod­ern elec­tron­ic com­po­nents. Since they are a lim­it­ed resource on Earth, their high cost may make the idea of min­ing them in space not such a far-fetched idea.

Clos­er to home, the space indus­try is becom­ing increas­ing­ly inter­est­ed in the Moon. Not for rare met­als, but for two oth­er equal­ly strate­gic resources.

The first is water. Lunar orbit analy­ses from sci­en­tif­ic explo­ration probes such as the US Lunar Recon­nais­sance Orbiter (LRO) and India’s Chandrayaan‑1 have con­firmed that water exists on almost the entire sur­face of the Moon, but espe­cial­ly in the form of ice in craters, per­ma­nent­ly in the shade, at the poles. Once puri­fied, this water could ini­tial­ly be used to meet the water require­ments of astro­nauts on a lunar mis­sion. Once it has been sep­a­rat­ed into its basic con­stituents (oxy­gen and hydro­gen), how­ev­er, it could pro­vide space­craft with fuel (this is what the Ari­ane 5 rocket’s main stage uses today).

What is more, it appears that solar winds have deposit­ed large quan­ti­ties of helium‑3 (a light iso­tope of heli­um) in the equa­to­r­i­al regions of the Moon. This helium‑3 is a poten­tial fuel source for sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion fusion reac­tors that are expect­ed to come into oper­a­tion by the end of the century.

Would we be allowed to freely mine oth­er celes­tial bodies?

The 1967 Out­er Space Treaty explic­it­ly for­bids nations from claim­ing own­er­ship of a celes­tial body. The Moon, for exam­ple, is a ‘com­mon good’. How­ev­er, it is easy to find loop­holes in this text, which was writ­ten at a time of the Cold War when space-relat­ed con­cerns were very different.

One of the ‘ploys’ put for­ward by the US and oth­er nations that want to devel­op space min­ing is that, just as inter­na­tion­al waters on Earth belong to no one, and that any­one can fish in them, coun­tries and com­pa­nies could de fac­to exploit and make their own the resources extract­ed from celes­tial bod­ies – with­out actu­al­ly claim­ing the celes­tial bod­ies themselves.

To address these con­cerns, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion signed the so-called “Space Act” in 2015, allow­ing US cit­i­zens to “engage in the explo­ration and com­mer­cial exploita­tion of space resources”.

In April 2020, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion issued an exec­u­tive order sup­port­ing US min­ing on the Moon and aster­oids. This was imme­di­ate­ly fol­lowed by NASA’s Artemis agree­ments in May 2020. These include the devel­op­ment of ‘safe zones’ sur­round­ing future lunar bases, pre­sum­ably to pre­vent dif­fer­ent coun­tries or com­pa­nies from step­ping on each other’s toes and poten­tial­ly trig­ger­ing diplo­mat­ic incidents.

We must remem­ber that the Unit­ed States is not the only coun­try work­ing on new leg­is­la­tion for future com­mer­cial space activ­i­ties. Lux­em­bourg and the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates are cod­i­fy­ing their own laws on space resources in the hope of attract­ing invest­ment with busi­ness-friend­ly legal frame­works. Rus­sia, Japan, India and the Euro­pean Space Agency are fol­low­ing suite and all have their own space min­ing objectives.

While the real exploita­tion of space resources has not yet begun, this new sec­tor is jam-packed with pri­vate-sec­tor can­di­dates. These come and go, how­ev­er, as agree­ments are made and unmade, fund­ing is found and lost, and com­pa­nies go bankrupt.

Plan­e­tary Resources, found­ed in 2009 with the aim of devel­op­ing a robot­ic aster­oid min­ing indus­try, fell by the way­side in 2020 despite high-pro­file found­ing investors that includ­ed Alpha­bet’s Lar­ry Page, for­mer Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Vir­gin Group founder Richard Branson.

Schak­le­ton Ener­gy Com­pa­ny, a Texas-based com­pa­ny found­ed in 2007 to devel­op tech­nolo­gies for lunar min­ing, failed in 2013 because it was not able to raise enough funds in the two years that pre­ced­ed this date.

Oth­er com­pa­nies have emerged since then, how­ev­er, and are lay­ing their stakes on an impor­tant future space indus­try. One exam­ple is Japan’s iSpace, which aims to ‘help com­pa­nies access new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties on the Moon’ (extrac­tion of water and min­er­al resources). Off­world, a Cal­i­forn­ian com­pa­ny, is devel­op­ing ‘uni­ver­sal indus­tri­al robots capa­ble of doing most of the min­ing on Earth, the Moon, aster­oids and Mars’. The UK’s Aster­oid Min­ing Cor­po­ra­tion is cur­rent­ly fund­ing the devel­op­ment of the ‘El Dora­do’ satel­lite, offi­cial­ly sched­uled for launch in 2023. This satel­lite should con­duct a broad spec­tral sur­vey of 5000 aster­oids to iden­ti­fy the ones most valu­able for mining.

How­ev­er inter­est­ed the pub­lic or pri­vate sec­tor is in devel­op­ing extrac­tive activ­i­ties for extrater­res­tri­al resources, the task will be far from easy.

If we are to mine the Moon, for exam­ple, we will have to over­come a num­ber of spe­cif­ic prob­lems. At the lunar poles tem­per­a­tures go from 120˚C dur­ing the day to ‑232˚C at night, and radi­a­tion from cos­mic rays, which are not deflect­ed by a plan­e­tary mag­net­ic field, like that of the Earth’s, cre­ates a very hos­tile envi­ron­ment. As the Apol­lo astro­nauts also dis­cov­ered, lunar dust is extreme­ly fine and high­ly abra­sive, so mov­ing parts on mechan­i­cal machin­ery must be pro­tect­ed. Lubri­ca­tion and cool­ing are very dif­fi­cult too, as the major­i­ty of oils and coolants dis­in­te­grate or evap­o­rate in a vacuum.

The sit­u­a­tion on aster­oids in not much bet­ter. Although the tech­nolo­gies devel­oped in recent years to reach, fly over and approach the sur­face of aster­oids have evolved con­sid­er­ably, thanks to the devel­op­ment of sci­en­tif­ic explo­ration probes such as Hayabusa 2 (Japan) or Osiris-Rex (USA), the tech­niques for min­ing and har­vest­ing mate­ri­als in zero grav­i­ty have yet to be devel­oped and tested.

Final­ly, we should remem­ber that pub­lic bod­ies are also active in this field. In 2019, Ari­ane­Group signed a con­tract with the Euro­pean Space Agency to study the pos­si­bil­i­ty of going to the Moon before 2025 and start work­ing there. For this study, Ari­ane­Group and its sub­sidiary Ari­ane­space have teamed up with a Ger­man start-up, PT Sci­en­tists, which will sup­ply the lan­der, and a Bel­gian SME, Space Appli­ca­tions Ser­vices, which will sup­ply the ground seg­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment and asso­ci­at­ed ser­vice operations.