Space Mining Gets 400 Percent Boost From Bacteria, ISS Experiments Show

by Ryan Whitwam

If the next few decades go well, humans could find themselves living and working away from Earth on the moon or Mars. We’ll need lots of raw materials to sustain human endeavors on other planets, and a new project on the International Space Station (ISS) demonstrates how we can make space mining over 400 percent more efficient. All you need is a bacterial care package from home.

Everything we send into orbit comes with a cost, and the numbers are not small. The cheapest option currently available, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, clocks in at $1,500 per kilogram of payload. And this is a discounted bulk rate. If you’re looking to send something smaller into space, the Falcon 9 costs about $2,700 per kilogram. Naturally, this makes collecting resources in space an appealing option, a process called in-situ resource utilization.

On Earth, bacteria are responsible for freeing up minerals like iron and magnesium trapped in rocks, making them easier to extract. Some mining operations have also turned to bacteria as a way to reduce the usage of toxic chemicals, a process called biomining. The lack of such bacteria in space could make an already risky mining operation even more difficult, but a team from the University of Edinburgh spent the last ten years developing a…