THE space-age gold rush is dead. Long live the space-age gold rush. On 22 February, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft will touch down on the asteroid Ryugu and start taking samples that it will eventually return to Earth.
The probe will fire a bullet at Ryugu and collect dust thrown up by the impact. Later this year, sampling will get more extreme: Hayabusa 2 will use explosives to blast a large lump of copper into the surface. This will create an artificial crater and reveal the asteroid’s insides.
Would-be asteroid miners will be watching closely. The original Hayabusa mission returned the first ever asteroid samples to Earth in 2010, but its successor will be the first to glimpse the pristine interior of an asteroid, and the potentially lucrative resources beneath the surface.
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The miners could use a boost. Around the time of the first Hayabusa’s return, then US president Barack Obama kick-started a burgeoning space-mining industry by instructing NASA to prepare for a human flight to an asteroid. There were lucrative government contracts to be had, so businesses sprung up in anticipation of an off-Earth economic boom.
But the boom didn’t come. Just as Hayabusa 2 prepares to break ground on a space rock, the asteroid miners are in retreat. So what went wrong?
For starters, asteroid mining is an expensive business and will require many years to turn a profit. “You either need a visionary investor or a visionary customer,” says J. L. Galache, chief technology officer of asteroid-prospecting company Aten Engineering.
Stepping stone to Mars
In 2010, it seemed like NASA would play that customer role. The space agency’s goals were largely scientific rather than commercial: the Obama administration’s plan involved retrieving an asteroid and bringing it back to orbit around the moon, to serve as a test for technology for an eventual human mission to Mars. But the potential economic benefits didn’t go unnoticed. Asteroid-mining proponents pointed out the possibility of gathering valuable materials like platinum and rare earth elements that can be hard to find on Earth.
Asteroids also contain materials that might seem mundane but could be crucial to support a longer-term spacefaring programme – building materials like iron and silicon and, even more importantly, water.
Humans need water to survive, of course, but it has other uses in space. “If you extract water from one source, you can use that as fuel to propel your spacecraft to your next target,” says Amara Graps at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona.
One of the first serious asteroid-mining companies, Deep Space Industries, hoped to do just that. The US firm was founded in 2013 with the goal of creating spacecraft for mining. Its primary accomplishment was designing a propulsion system that used water as fuel.
The other major player in the asteroid-mining business was Planetary Resources, founded in the US under the name Arkyd Astronautics in 2009. Its stated goal was to “expand Earth’s natural resource base”. Two of the firm’s spacecraft, designed to test water-hunting technology, launched in 2015 and early 2018.
A spate of smaller firms also popped up in the following years, many of them working on technology to help enable asteroid mining that might also be useful elsewhere. Some of these firms, like the UK-based Asteroid Mining Corporation, are also designing water-hunting satellites; some, like US-based TransAstra, are thinking up ways to extract resources from asteroids; others are engineering manufacturing systems to use those resources for building in space.
Many of those companies, including Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, set up offices in Luxembourg. The small country bet big on asteroid mining, making itself uniquely hospitable to the industry with generous space property laws. It also created a €200 million fund to invest in space-mining ventures, €12 million of which went to buy a 10 per cent stake in Planetary Resources.
This turned out to be a spectacularly bad bet. In October 2018, Planetary Resources was acquired by, of all things, a blockchain company called ConsenSys. Luxembourg sold its stake in the company and effectively lost the full value of its investment once costs were taken into account.
It isn’t clear what ConsenSys plans for Planetary Resources, or how blockchain technology relates to asteroid mining. The firm declined to speak to żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. “I chatted with a couple of people from ConsenSys and I still don’t know what’s going on,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of space-industry consultancy Astralytical. That sentiment was echoed by others in the industry.
“Maybe it’s something to do with a deep-space internet economy,” says Ian Fichtenbaum, a director of space technology firm Bradford Space, which acquired Deep Space Industries in January, mainly for its propulsion systems. Fichtenbaum says that Bradford Space is not rebranding as an asteroid-mining company and will continue to focus on general spacecraft.
It is a sorry end for two firms with grand ambitions, but one with an air of inevitability. “These companies were limping along,” says Forczyk. “They were either going to fail or they were going to need to really pivot.”
“When Donald Trump cancelled asteroid plans, the customer for mining companies evaporated”
In 2017, US president Donald Trump forced their hands when his first official space policy move was to cancel the Obama asteroid plans. Suddenly, the visionary customer for asteroid-mining companies evaporated.
Without steady government contracts, these firms had no obvious income. “One of the basic problems of trying to sell water from asteroids is who is going to buy it?” says Martin Elvis at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “In space, no one can hear you sell.”
And selling space goods on Earth is equally problematic. A recent economic analysis led by Andreas Hein at CentraleSupélec in France found that mining asteroids for platinum will almost never be worthwhile.
“There is already a platinum market on Earth, which means that if you bring stuff down from space, the terrestrial market will react,” says Hein.
For asteroid mining to turn a profit, terrestrial mining operations would have to decrease their output by 0.85 kilograms for every kilogram brought back from space, or the price of platinum would tank. Even then, it would probably take more than 30 years for a firm to become profitable, the analysis reports.
Putting aside economic issues, the technical challenges of asteroid mining aren’t trivial, either. “To actually pick out a single asteroid that you want to go mine right now would be very difficult because we don’t have that much data on the composition of asteroids,” says Galache.
That’s where Hayabusa 2 and its NASA counterpart, another asteroid-sampling mission called OSIRIS-REx, come in. They should increase our understanding of asteroids. The US mission arrived at asteroid Bennu late last year, and will gather samples some time in 2020. Both Ryugu and Bennu are carbon-rich asteroids likely to contain water, so are probably similar to the first mining targets (see “Diagram”).
Private firms will probably want to piggyback off the information gathered by government missions, says Graps (see “Space prospectors”). By teaching us more about individual asteroids, missions like Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx can give asteroid miners enough information to make educated guesses about which types of space rock might be worth digging into.
“Asteroid mining is like fishing. If there’s nothing on one asteroid, you go on to the next one”
Nevertheless, says Graps, national space agencies won’t visit all of the asteroids, so there will always be unknowns. “Asteroid mining is more like fishing: you go to an asteroid and see what it has, and if there’s nothing you go on to the next one,” she says. “There will definitely be failures.”
If asteroid mining does happen, the returns on investment probably won’t come in the form of troves of precious metal brought down to Earth. “Things that we need on Earth are really hard to mine from asteroids,” says Galache. “Rare earth elements are also rare in asteroids.” Instead, we will be after more common resources like water, iron and silicon. While we have plenty of these things on Earth, they are colossally inconvenient and expensive to ship into space. If we want to expand human society beyond our planet’s surface, mining asteroids for the materials to build in space may be the only way to do it.
In the future, we will probably look back at Hayabusa 2 as the first successful asteroid prospector, while the likes of Planetary Resources and Deep Space industries will get only a footnote in the history books. That isn’t to say they didn’t have value.
“The first two companies may have been premature, but they removed the giggle factor,” says Elvis. “People don’t giggle any more when you bring up asteroid mining – they ask what your business plan is.”
How to mine an asteroid
Suppose an asteroid-mining firm finds the perfect space rock: it is solid enough to land on, relatively near Earth and chock full of valuable elements. How will the company actually extract the goods?
Asteroids are relatively small and have lower gravity than planets, so we can’t just use the same mining rigs we use on Earth. A jackhammer would shoot itself off into space after hitting an asteroid’s surface, and a digger would be more likely to lift itself into the air than penetrate the ground. So, whether it is with a net or a giant claw, or by mining the asteroid from the inside, we will have to figure out some way to stay grounded.
“The biggest issue is actually attaching the craft to the asteroid and then mining something whose properties are changing continually,” says Haym Benaroya at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s getting smaller all of a sudden because you’re mining it, so it’s going to shift its orbit, if it doesn’t disintegrate immediately.” A shifted orbit or rockslide might put the asteroid out of reach or smash the spacecraft altogether.
That means asteroid-mining spacecraft will need to be able to intelligently react to changing circumstances. Most of the likely mining targets aren’t particularly close to Earth, so opportunities for troubleshooting will be limited.
For example, Hayabusa 2’s sampling procedure (see main story) is preprogrammed. Once the spacecraft touches down on Ryugu, it is on its own until it lifts back off again, space dust in hand. If anything goes wrong, it will be too late to do anything about it. That doesn’t mean the entire thing will be a write-off, however. The original Hayabusa spacecraft’s sampler failed to work properly, but when it returned to Earth, it turned out to have gathered a few tiny grains of asteroid dust.
