Civilization Probably Won’t Survive Without Space Mining
We spoke with Chris Lewicki, Planetary Resources CEO, about prospecting and mining asteroids for raw materials.
Earth is home to many wonderful and useful things: sunsets, narwhales, iron ore, and peanut butter, just to name a few. For most of human history, believing that the Earth’s resources were boundless (or, at the very least, so vast it wasn’t even worth contemplating when the tap might run dry) was easy and all-too-tempting. But that was just species-wide naiveté.
There are simply too many humans (7.5 billion and swelling — including a mushrooming global middle-class) demanding too many resources for civilization and human progress to continue as we know it. Technology will help mitigate these inevitable resource crunches, but unless we find wholly new sources of materials to exploit in addition to new lands to call home, modernity is destined to suffocate itself. (In fact, there’s some data to suggest we may be seeing the first troubling signs of this epic decline right now.)
In short, civilization is doomed unless it expands its footprint. And since we’ve run out of continents, we are forced to turn our expansionist endeavors upward. For most of its history, space exploration was driven by governments for scientific (and let’s be honest, nationalistic) ends. But the past decade has seen the rise of a bustling private and explicitly for-profit space industry.
One of the most ambitious of these corporate entities is Planetary Resources. This Redmond, WA–based company aims to prospect and plunder asteroids for raw materials to power future space endeavors. This may all sound pie-in-the-space-sky to some, but in the wake of a growing list of successful robot missions to the far reaches of the cosmos and Elon Musk’s recently detailed plan to invade Mars, the underlying concept is inexorably inching from science fiction to science reality.
Planetary Resources was cofounded by X-Prize guru Peter Diamandis and includes Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Sir Richard Branson among its early investors. PCMag spoke with Planetary’s president and CEO (and NASA veteran) Chris Lewicki during a recent episode of The Convo, our interactive interview show, broadcast via Facebook Live, in which we talk to the boldest minds in science, technology, and geekdom.
“Asteroid mining sounds like it’s just about the most futuristic thing you could be working on,” says Lewicki. “But 150 years ago, so did working on machines that could fly through the air like birds. And we clearly have contacted that with technology. And now we’re doing the same with space.”
So why do we need to prepare to mine space in 2016 — probably decades before anything approaching a space civilization even exists? “We’re mining in space because we’re going to be in space. We’re seeing a lot of development from folks like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bigelow Aerospace. Space is more and more becoming part of our daily lives,” he explains. “The goal of Planetary Resources is to make sure you have the things that you need when you get into space.”
One of the primary resources the company hopes to mine is water, which — fortunately — appears to be in abundant supply among the asteroids and comets zipping around not-so-far from Earth. Water will be an extremely important commodity in space for a number of reasons. First, we, of course, need to drink it to live. Second, water molecules can be harvested for oxygen, which we will need to breathe. Third, water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which are the chemical building blocks needed to create rocket fuel to power space journey. And finally, water can be used as a shield against the deadly cosmic radiation that permeates extraterrestrial environments.
Beyond water reserves, asteroids are full of raw construction materials such as iron, nickel, and cobalt. To this end, the company has inked an agreement with industrial 3D-printing company 3D Systems to develop machines that can use asteroid metals to “print out” useful objects on site. Back in January the company showcased the first object to be 3D printed from asteroid metals: a small, intricate “spacecraft prototype” made from a chunk of a meteorite discovered in Argentina.
New means of on-site space production is an important trend to watch. Sending materials to space is extremely expensive (Elon Musk’s goal for SpaceX is to bring down the cost to a paltry $1,000/pound — a steal). Once you remove the need to send all your supplies up on the tip of a giant rocket, the cost of getting to space can come down significantly. As a bonus, objects and materials no longer have to be built to withstand the violence of launch and reentry; they can be specifically optimized for a space environment.
“Think about the International Space Station. It’s this Lego block set of things that were designed to fit in a rocket fairing or the now-retired space shuttle payload bay. Imagine if we could build whatever we want in whatever size we want, and we could send it anywhere we need,” Lewicki says. “That’s what being able to 3D print using the iron, nickel, and cobalt allows us to do.”
The company foresees that “the vast majority” of materials obtained through space mining operations will be used to supply populations (and their automated machines) that are already in space. But many asteroids appear to have materials that “are so useful and so valuable” that the company can’t afford not to lug them back to Earth. Lewicki specifically mentions the platinum-group metals, the price of which — as of writing — range anywhere from $42 to $948 per ounce. While there are existential and humanitarian reasons for engaging in these exploratory endeavors, the first people to successfully plunder these resources stand to earn trillions of dollars for their troubles.
This potential economic windfall is far down the line, to be sure, but it’s also not in the unfathomably crazy-distant future either. The company currently has plans to send a “swarm” of its river-tube-size Arkyd 200 satellites out to survey a nearby asteroid by 2020. The Arkyds will be looking for signs of water — that is, to prospect them — to help determine whether it will be worth an eventual return trip.
The company also has plans to launch a pair of its smaller Arkyd 6 satellites “in the next few months,” which have the same advanced sensors as the 200 but will be pointed downward to “measure resources on planet Earth.” This mission will help test the company’s bleeding edge sensors but will also serve as part of Planetary Resources’ near-term business plan; the company will sell access to the Arkyd’s sensors to agricultural and terrestrial mining companies. In the short-to-medium term, Planetary Resources (an unabashedly for-profit company) will maintain its business through contracts with governments and corporations.
In the Stanley Kubrick classic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a character is depicted taking a cushy Pan Am space flight en route to a giant international space station. That’s the kind of adorable space optimism that audiences had in 1968 when the film was first released. Of course, things didn’t really work out that way — by the real 2001, there were no private space ships, space tourists, or large cosmopolitan cities in the sky.
But as it turns out, Kubrick’s predictions weren’t necessarily wrong; they might have just been off by a few decades. Flash forward to 2016, and humanity may finally be on the precipice of building the space civilization that science fiction has long promised — and it might be happening just in the knick of time.
Read more: “Hey Elon, Don’t Make Me Spend 30 Years in a Pizza Hut on Mars”
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
