Cislunar Economy 101 — Part 2: The Resources of the Cislunar Economy

New to the series? You might want to start with Part 1!

After reading Part 1 of this crash course on the future Cislunar Economy, you are hopefully as excited at the prospect of the space economy as I am. You probably have a ton of questions too: which activities will be part of it? What will appear first? Where should I place my bets? Part 2 will present which activities will define the economy as a whole, based on what we know about the Moon, asteroids, and space travel.

There are many approaches to determining the activities that we will perform as part of the cislunar economy, but at function(core), we like to start with the basics. The first question is: what do I need to create an economy?

An Economy in Space

The following is a common definition of economy (or “economic system”):

An economy or economic system is a set of interrelated activities of production, resource allocation, exchange, and distribution of goods and services in a society or a given geographic area.

For our purposes, the geographical area is in cislunar space and includes near-Earth asteroids. We won’t be treating resource allocation or exchange, and will instead focus on production and distribution of goods within that specified geographic area.

What will we produce? Food? Energy? iPads? That question comes down to the timeframe we are dealing with. Ideally, given enough time, the economy in space should be able to sustain itself and produce most of the goods that are required for modern human life. Before we reach this point, we will probably go through a transition period where advanced components (such as iPads for example) may be limited to production on Earth, where our industrial base is highly developed, and some others (such as structural elements) may be limited to production off-Earth, where they are free from the constraints imposed by space launch.

However, let’s get realistic. We don’t want to focus on the long term; we want to focus on the next 15–20 years. This is not a science fiction work, this is about the upcoming development of the cislunar economy, which can be seen with our own eyes and contributed to. This is also the timeframe in which we’ll see the first missions to Mars, and current companies will have had enough time to develop and perfect their technologies. Finally, 20 years is already a long time for investments (venture capital funds last 10 years), so it doesn’t make much financial sense to focus on the longer term, if we want to keep our feet on the ground (this is a bad metaphor, but you know what I mean).

Space resources

The 10–20-year timeframe means we must prioritize the production of those goods that are required to make subsequent activities possible, that use resources that are more readily available on the Moon or asteroids, and have the highest economic benefits. Also, given the lack of any industrial base in space, we’ll have to start with raw resources. The list of raw resources turns out to be very short: water, structural metals, and semiconductors.

• Water: water is the magic sauce of space. This basic compound is as essential to life in space as it is to life on Earth. Water can be used for everything from propellant (as water itself or as oxygen and hydrogen) to sustenance for crew (oxygen, drinking water) to cooling liquid. The most interesting use, however, is as propellant. Propellant accounts for the majority of the mass of our current rockets, and the cost of space activities is currently driven by total mass required in orbit. Also, if you run out of propellant, you’ll end up drifting eternally in space at the mercy of gravity. The lifetime and reach of our current spacecraft is usually limited by how much fuel they can pack to maintain or change their orbit. Having water available in space would reduce costs, increase the life of spacecraft, and provide resources to maintain crews.
  
  If it seems like water is the ultimate resource, that’s because it is. Water could be extracted from asteroids (50–60% of near-Earth asteroids may be water-rich) or from the lunar poles, where it is suspected that water is present in permanently shadowed craters.
• Structural metals: the second most massive thing on a spacecraft is usually the structure (it has to hold all that propellant after all). Because of launch requirements, space structures are also over-engineered for the space environment. Satellites and station modules need to withstand 4–5 g of acceleration during launch, plus strong vibrations that come along with sitting on top of a rocket darting through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound. They then spend the rest of their lives sitting in space, where the largest accelerations they must withstand are those of the maneuvering thrusters (some 2 to 3 orders of magnitude lower), and the structural requirements are completely different, and sometimes in opposition to, the structural requirements of launch. Finally, structures have to fit inside a rocket fairing, so we can’t build really big things. Manufacturing structures in space would allow for lighter and cheaper structures that are better tailored to the space environment, and we could build BIG, allowing us to benefit from economies of scale. We’re in luck though, as structural metals are both abundant on the Moon and on asteroids. The Moon’s surface is rich in titanium, aluminum, and iron, and about 25% of the asteroid population is ferrous metals (iron, nickel, cobalt). All these materials can be used to manufacture structures in space, reducing the amount of mass that needs to be launched from Earth and allowing for more epic constructions.
• Semiconductors: the usefulness of semiconductors in modern life cannot be overstated. The very machine you’re using to read this is based on them, and with the rise of the Internet of Things every single powered machine will carry a microprocessor. In space though, their most interesting use is as a part of solar panels. Unless you want to bring a nuclear power plant (and good luck trying to get people agree on that), you’re stuck using solar panels to produce respectable quantities of power. These panels require big areas, which makes fitting them inside fairings difficult, and power losses through solar panel degradation is the 2nd most important limiting factor for the lifetime of our satellites. Besides, future lunar bases are going to need a lot of panels on the Moon, and it’d be great if you could produce them there. Lunar rocks are about 20% silicon by weight, which is also widely present in asteroids in several chemical compositions. Some asteroids might be up to 7% elemental silicon, ready to be mined out and turned into useful products.

As you can see, there’s not much in space that is useful right now. Space has everything we need, but most of it is so expensive to get that it does not make much economic sense to extract many of those resources yet. Water, structural metals, and semiconductors are among the most common elements on the Moon and on asteroids, and all add great value to our space activities by reducing costs or enabling new capabilities.

If you are familiar with space mining literature, you may be asking: what about platinum? Or rare earth elements? Or Helium-3? Well, there are several reasons why I didn’t include them.

Platinum group metals (iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium) are present in asteroids in concentrations several orders of magnitude higher than on terrestrial mines. Being the most valuable metal on Earth, it’s what people usually think we’ll get first in space. They are valuable enough on Earth to have good value even when brought from an asteroid, and there is enough market deficit for them that they could be brought back without fear of flooding the market and collapsing the price until you’ve mined so many asteroids that you don’t care. However, they are relatively scarce when compared to ferrous metals or semiconductors. This makes them interesting as a side product for other metal mining, and might help you close the business case, but ferrous metals are where the real deal is.

Rare earth elements (the 15 lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium) have applications in many advanced industries on Earth, and are relatively rare on our planet’s crust. This has caused some people to propose mining them from the Moon or asteroids. However, lunar deposits of REE have lower concentrations than those commercially exploitable on Earth, and they are barely present on asteroids. They might be commercially interesting at some point, when the deposits on Earth aren’t enough to cover demand, or when demand moves to space, but for now, we won’t be making money with them.

Helium-3 mining, on the other hand, is not a real thing. Many, many people, including an Apollo 17 astronaut, have proposed that we mine Helium-3 on the Moon and use it to power fusion reactors. This has so many caveats it falls just short of science fiction. To begin with, the presence of He-3 on the lunar surface is extrapolated from the very scarce samples from Apollo, with little ground truth about it. Second, its abundance would be limited to parts-per-billion, meaning you’d have to extract thousands of tons for each gram of He-3, and its presence is most likely limited to a very thin layer on top of lunar regolith, so you’d have to deface the surface of the Moon to extract anything useful. Finally, even if the He-3 is indeed present, you deployed the infrastructure to mine and process large extensions of lunar regolith, and you got permission to completely change the appearance of the surface of the Moon, you would need a helium-deuterium fusion reactor that produced energy commercially. This part is probably even harder than getting the infrastructure to mine He-3. No business here.

There is another type of resource that is usually not mentioned, but that could generate some business, and that is science. Science is constantly being advertised as the reason to go to space, even though we mostly go for military or commercial reasons. Governments and research institutions are willing to pay substantial amounts of money for scientific missions, and providing increased access to science would make for a good, albeit limited, business. Science is also a “resource” that would only be interesting in the short term: even though the scientific value of the Moon and asteroids is immense, governments and other large organizations would only be willing to pay big amounts as long as it has publicity value. In other words, the first and the 1000th mission the Moon may give you equal scientific value, but no one will watch the 1000th landing on TV.

What about distribution?

In the short term, there are only four type of resources that we care about in space: water, structural metals, semiconductors, and science. These will make up the backbone of production activities in our cislunar economy. But in order to create an economy, we also need distribution activities.

Distribution activities are fairly straightforward: how do you move stuff from one place to another? Moving things in space is quite different than on Earth, since our current propulsion technologies limit us to ballistic trajectories constrained by orbital mechanics (we can’t fly in straight lines). However, that’s pretty well understood given Newton’s law of gravity. We can get an idea of what we’ll need:

• Space tugs to move stuff from one orbit to another.
• Lunar landers to access the Moon’s surface.
• Orbital stations as nodes to the network.
• Satellite relays for communications.

And that’s it. Designing a distribution network is easy enough: define your means of transportation, define your nodes to change the vehicle, and you’re set. The real problems come when you begin designing engineering plans for the thing, but we won’t get into that level of detail.

Knowing which resources we’ll be looking for, and how we’ll distribute them, gives us a good picture of the cislunar economy. This is all theoretical up to this point though. Is the current space industry leading to anything like this? Does what we’ve discussed relate to reality?

As it turns out, it does. When something makes logical sense, everyone arrives at the same conclusion.

The next part of the series will present what a cislunar economy will look like given the current state of the space industry. Spoiler alert: it makes complete sense.

References

• Lunar Resources: A Review. I. Crawford, 2015. Progress in Physical Geography 39: 137–167.
• Asteroid Mining 101, J. S. Lewis, 2015.

Enjoyed the article? Then you may like the rest of the articles in the Cislunar Economy Series.