Just a couple of years ago, it seemed
that space mining was inevitable. Analysts, tech visionaries and even
renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that space mining was
going to be big business. The first trillionaire they will ever
be, is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids. In a 2017 note to investors, a Goldman
Sachs analyst wrote, "Space mining could be more realistic than perceived. A single asteroid the size of a
football field could contain 25 billion to $50 billion worth of platinum." Space mining companies like Planetary
Resources and Deep Space Industries, backed by the likes of Google's Larry
Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to take advantage of the predicted payoff. After all, the holy grail of asteroids
known as 16 Psyche had an estimated worth of $10,000 quadrillion. But fast forward to 2022, and both
Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have been acquired by
companies that have nothing to do with space mining. And humanity has yet to
commercially mine even a single asteroid. But that hasn't stopped a new
crop of startups from trying. AstroForge's mission, obviously, is to
leave Earth with a vehicle, go out to an asteroid, mine it for its rare earth
elements and then return that to earth to be sold. TransAstra was founded with the mission
of working towards the vision of harnessing the resources of space,
especially the asteroids, for the betterment of humanity. There's enough material in the
asteroids to support a population of a trillion people. So far, the closest we've gotten to
mining an asteroid has been prospecting missions. In October 2020, NASA
collected a small dust sample from the asteroid Bennu as part of its
OSIRIS-REx mission. The sample is not due to return until
2023, but during the mission, scientists were surprised to learn that Bennu's
surface was not as solid as predicted. In December of 2020, Japan's Aerospace
Exploration Agency (JAXA) brought back a sample of an asteroid known as Ryugu,
as part of its Hayabusa2 mission. To collect the sample, the agency fired
a projectile at the asteroid and scooped up the flying material. Like Bennu, scientists found that Ryugu
also had a rubble pile surface. Although these recent advancements by
the likes of NASA and JAXA have provided useful information on the composition
of asteroids. Space mining has yet to become a
commercial endeavor. So what's taking so long? For one, space mining is a long-term
endeavor and one that VC's did not necessarily have the patience to
support. If we had to develop a full-scale
asteroid mining vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to
do that using commercial processes. It would be difficult to convince the
investment community that that's the right thing to do. Take NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, for
example, which is expected to take seven years to complete and cost over $1
billion, all to bring back a handful of asteroid material. And Planetary
Resources, despite its millions in investment, the closest the company
ever got to asteroid mining was launching a satellite to prospect
future targets. In fact, the mining of celestial objects
has become a point of satire, showcasing corporate greed as seen in this clip
from Netflix's 2021 film, 'Don't Look Up.' This comet hurtling towards us from deep
space actually contains at least $32 trillion of these critical
materials critical to technology. I'm sorry, is that why you aborted this
entire mission? Is because you're trying to mine the
comet for rare minerals? Others say mining precious metals to
sell on Earth never made much economic sense. If you look at platinum, the production
cost of platinum is around $1,100 even more, and the price per ounce of
platinum is less than $1,000. So it means that the earth mining is
not profitable right now. When analyst made their predictions,
they were looking at the amount of the precious metals and materials in
the asteroids and they didn't look at the economies of the industries. In today's economics and in the
economics of the near future, the next few years, it makes no sense to go
after precious metals in asteroids. And the reason is the cost of getting
to and from the asteroids is so high that it vastly outstrips the value of
anything that you'd harness from the asteroids. When we think of space mining, precious
metals likely come to mind. But in fact asteroids can contain other
materials, which in the short term could be even more valuable. There is mining materials in space for
use in space, and then there is return to Earth, the return to Earth ideas. They have to compete against
terrestrial markets for those same materials. That would be very
challenging and it may happen someday, but it's most likely in the far future. But in the near term is mining
materials for use in space. The number one item is water. There are certain types of asteroids
that have hydrated minerals. We can process those minerals to
release the water. Our best use of the water is actually
as processing to to make it into our rocket propellant. And then with rocket
propellant, we can move around space more readily. We don't have to launch
all of our propellant from Earth. Gabor Szecsi agrees that when it comes
to mining the cosmos, we should look beyond precious metals. In short term, we should focus on helium
and water. Helium because it's not readily
available on earth and water because it has a potential use in space. An attorney by trade, Szecsi, spent
several years working with the European Space Agency and decided to focus his
legal expertise on advising space startups. He's now an adviser for an
Australian startup that aims to mine water and helium-3 from the moon. And isotope of helium, helium-3 has
applications in national security, medicine and cryogenics. Recent helium shortages have forced
some research labs to suspend their projects and induce national security
concerns. Knowing what we can, mine is one thing,
but figuring out how to mine it is another. Braced with new data from NASA and JAXA,
scientists and companies have had to devise new ways to mine asteroids. In older thinking, landing on asteroids
and anchoring to them and drilling or excavating where the scheme, that may
now look less viable because of what we've learned of asteroids. Scientists typically categorize
asteroids by their composition type. C-type or carbonaceous asteroids are
most common and are made up of clay and silicate rocks and contain water. S-type or stony asteroids are the
second most common and are generally made up of a metallic nickel-iron and
magnesium-silicate mixture. Finally, M-type or metallic asteroids
account for the rest of the known asteroids and are thought to be
primarily made of nickel-iron. What we've learned is that most
asteroids are rubble piles as opposed to one big mountain sized solid piece of
material. Based on this new understanding of
asteroids, TransAstra has been working with Dreyer to develop a technology it
calls optical mining. The optical mining process that we've
invented involves step one, capturing the asteroid in an enclosure, what we
call a capture bag. The asteroids are typically spinning,
because that's what they do in space. Our spacecraft matches the spin with
the asteroid, flies the bag over the asteroid, captures it and cinches it
down tight. So we have positive control. Now, once we contain the asteroid in
our capture bag, then our solar reflectors redirect that concentrated
sunlight into the capture bag and we use it to drill holes in the asteroid and
heat up the material and drive the volatiles, the water and the other
gases, out of the minerals. And then we can capture those volatiles
in an ice trap. TransAstra is initially focusing on
mining water to make rocket propellant, which Sercel says will enable low cost
space travel. But eventually, the company plans to
harvest everything on the periodic table. We've calculated that a single
TransAstra asteroid mining vehicle, one we call the Honey Bee, can fly out to
an asteroid and bring back about 100 tons of water and other ices in a
single mission. It's worth about a billion dollars. And we know that because we have a
contract to deliver 100 tons of ice in geostationary orbit from a
publicly-traded company. But that kind of revenue is still a ways
off. TransAstra is funded by about $5
million in grants and contracts from NASA and several million in venture
funds. To keep itself above board, Sercel says
that TransAstra is focusing on developing its intellectual property
piecemeal, using the tech that will eventually be incorporated into its
mining missions to satisfy already existing market needs. One of the commercial opportunities is
traffic management. With our Sutter telescope technology,
we can turn a small, inexpensive commercial telescope into a powerful
instrument that can see space traffic and orbital debris,
something the size of a toaster oven all the way out to the orbit of the moon. TransAstra has already deployed its
telescope system at two observatories in the U.S., with the technology currently
being used for asteroid prospecting. Eventually, TransAstra also plans to
launch its telescope tech into space to be able to see deeper into the
universe. Likewise, there's a burgeoning orbital
logistics business today for delivering satellites to their orbital
destinations from where rockets leave them off. To do this, TransAstra is developing an
orbit transfer vehicle known as Worker Bee, the body of which can also be used
for its asteroid mining vehicle. But the company has yet to operate any
of its technology in space. Still, Sercel says that TransAstra is
already making a small amount of revenue from startup contracts for its
satellite tugging services and has brought in more than half a million
from its Sutter telescope tech in the form of NASA R&D grants. 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. Our mining process is three stages. We have to do a vaporization of the
material. So we're going to take an asteroid and
essentially vaporize it into a cloud of atoms and then we're going to ionize
it. So we're going to each take that cloud
and positively charge all the atoms. And then once we have a whole bunch of
positively charged atoms, we can sort them. AstroForge is another early stage
company trying to make space mining a reality. Founded in 2022 by a former
space engineer and a former Virgin Galactic engineer, AstroForge still
believes there's money to be made in mining asteroids for precious metals. We have a limited amount of rare earth
elements, specifically the platinum group metals. These are industrial
metals that are used in everyday things your cell phone, cancer drugs,
catalytic converters and we're running out of them. And the only way to access
more of these is to go off world. AstroForge plans to mine and refine
these materials in space and bring them back to earth to sell. The key technology that we're developing
is our ore processing system. So that system consists of the
excavation subsystem that moves the material from the asteroid into the
spacecraft. And then there's that refinery piece
that really that extracts that the valuable material and removes all the
unnecessary material that we can't actually sell on earth. So keep costs down. AstroForge will attach its refining
payload to off-the-shelf satellites and launch those satellites on SpaceX
rockets. There's quite a few companies that make
what is referred to as a satellite bus. This is what you would typically think
of as a satellite, the kind of box with solar panels on it, a propulsion system
being connected to it. So for us, we didn't want to reinvent
the wheel. The previous people before us,
Planetary Resources and DSI, and they had to buy entire vehicles. They had to build much, much larger and
much more expensive satellites, which required a huge injection of capital. And I think that was the ultimate
downfall of both of those companies. SpaceX really allowed a lot of companies
to start in the aerospace world basically because of
the lower cost to access space. So now we can kind of leverage that and
really focus on the just the technology piece. AstroForge says it has raised $23
million in venture capital funding and plans to conduct several test missions
before launching its first official mining mission in 2025. The company is targeting near-Earth
asteroids with a single mission expected to take around two years. Our first mission is to send up a
refinery. So we are going to take an artificial
asteroid, exactly concentrations we've created. So we are going to show that
we can extract platinum from this in zero G in a vacuum. Mission number two for us is a
prospecting mission. This is where we go out to an asteroid,
we make sure we can get to an asteroid, our spacecraft can last for two years
and we can take high-resolution images of it to make sure the surface is what
we expect it to be. The third mission we now introduce our
extraction arm to that to that mission. We're going to go out, we're going to
take a sample of the asteroid, bring that back to Earth, and we'll study on
Earth to understand exactly what the concentrations are of that asteroid. Our fourth mission is when we put all
those pieces together, we send out our our mission with the excavation arm. We put our processing facility on it,
and we repeat those steps in order to get platinum. Like Planetary Resources and Deep Space
Industries before them, today's asteroid mining companies face a large number of
challenges. The first is uncertainty stemming from
the lack of an established international law to govern space mining. At the moment, most space activities
are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which was established during the Cold
War. One of the treaty's principles
prohibits the appropriation by individual nations of any celestial
bodies such as the Moon or asteroids, and requires that any space exploration
in use should benefit the whole of humanity. When it comes to space mining, the whole
discussion is about whether the Outer Space Treaty allows or bans space
mining. One of the interpretation what we
should do with the mined minerals is to share the benefit which is coming of
it, and it's not clear whether the benefits should be to the wealth which
is emerging from mining the space mineral or whether mining can
provide us with some scientific knowledge. And the benefit would be
just sharing the scientific knowledge. In the absence of an established
international law governing space mining, some countries have taken it
upon themselves to establish their own. The Commercial Space Launch
Competitiveness Act, passed by the Obama administration in 2015, raised eyebrows
when it gave property rights to companies for the materials that they
mined from asteroids, though it stops short of granting companies ownership
of the asteroids themselves. In the time since Luxembourg, Japan and
the United Arab Emirates have established their own space mining
laws. But Schmidt says not having an
international law for space mining could be enough to dissuade some companies
from trying to mine the cosmos. I think that the national laws are not
enough for the companies to overcome the legal uncertainty they observe,
especially when you ask about the ownership. If they invest money and go
to the space and mine something and the discussion about the ownership is not
clear, they don't have certainty that what they are going to mine will be
theirs and they will have full freedom to use the material for whatever they
want. But Sercel says there's already
precedent for this. There is limited slots in geostationary
orbit where you can put satellites. Once you have the allocated slot and
the satellite, other countries and other companies are not allowed to go there
and mess with it. So we're certain that when we go to an
asteroid captured in bag and mine the resources from it, that we will own
those resources. Another challenge is even more basic,
deciding which asteroids to target for mining in the first place. Prior to conducting their own missions,
all early stage mining companies have to go on is existing observation data from
researchers and a hope that the asteroids they have selected, contain
the minerals they seek. The most challenging aspect of asteroid
mining is really the asteroid itself. We have a lot of evidence and
observations and scientific data, but we don't actually have a lot of truth
knowledge, meaning there's only been a handful of missions that have actually
gone to the asteroid. So you can design a perfect system, you
can control all of these things, the technology piece, you can control the
operations pieces you can control, but you can't control what the asteroid is
until you get there. If the companies do somehow manage to
extract the materials they're seeking, the next hurdle is selling them. Theoretically, an influx of precious
metals introduced to the commodity market on earth could be enough to
crash it. But AstroForge says this is unlikely. When you look at the supply and demand
curve for platinum group metals, right, the total market cap of these metals is
measured right around $60 billion. We're talking about bringing back $80
million per mission. So for us, it would take quite a bit of
missions to really greatly affect the supply and demand curve as we go
forward. For now, commercial space mining remains
highly speculative, with companies just starting to test out their tech and
business plans. Still, experts believe that some form
of asteroid mining will eventually take place. The question is when? I think we will be able to mine an
asteroid within the next decade. At the very least, this will be done as
a proof-of-concept for a mining process, but possibly also include an actual
sale of most likely water to be then processed into propellant. In terms of the timeline for mining
asteroids, for us, the biggest issue is funding. So it depends on how fast we
can scale the business into these other ventures and then get practical
engineering experience operating systems that have all the components of an
asteroid mining system. But we could be launching an asteroid
mission in the 5 to 7 year time frame. If we have a developed a working space
manufacturing industry, then I can imagine asteroid mining will become a
valuable option. But it's not a ten year time period. I believe that we are going to mine in
space, maybe maybe 20, 25 years from now.
