Asteroid mining may sound like something out of Star Trek, but several companies take it very seriously. They include Planetary Resources, a company set up in 2012 whose advisors include film director James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Whilst this seems impossible mission, USA under Presented Obama in November 2015 passed the so called The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act and Luxembourger the first nation in Europe followed in July 2017. The law might seem like a violation of the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits space ownership, yet the mining of celestial bodies is legal — for now, anyway.
Many asteroids in our Solar System are rich sources of valuable minerals such as platinum and gold. They can also contain water, which could be collected to make rocket fuel and supply future space-based communities.
Mining the skies is an audacious feat of engineering. Accessing small rocky bodies orbiting tens of millions of kilometres from Earth, landing robotic miners on them and transporting back the ore will be both challenging and expensive. To home in on the most valuable asteroids, we will first need to send up fleets of small prospecting probes.
A 2012 Caltech study put the cost of capturing and returning a single 500-tonne, 7m-wide (23ft), near-Earth asteroid to high lunar orbit at around $2.6 billion. It’s a lot of money, though not an unimaginable amount.
And the potential rewards are quite literally astronomical. One platinum-rich asteroid 500m (1640ft) across could supply around 175 times the world’s current platinum output, or more than the world’s entire reserves of platinum group metals, according to MIT’s Mission 2016 project.
The technology is always there to make the earth of full of supply of material at cheap and to reverse the scarce of natural resources as driving factor for high price.
We may not be as far away from mining asteroids as you might think.
Chris Lewicki, CEO of Planetary Resources, expects we’ll be extracting water from asteroids on a commercial scale by ‘the middle of the 2020s’, less than 10 years from now.
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