Asteroid mining in space – from fiction to fact courtesy of Planetary Resources Inc.
The Earth’s natural resources are running low, a decision has been made to send out space shuttles to mine asteroids for their raw materials and transport these back to Earth. Sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster right? That is exactly what Planetary Resources have planned though, it’s a company with some high profile backers including the Google co-founder, Larry Page & James Cameron (director of Avatar & Titanic) that plan on doing some revolutionary things outside of Earth’s atmosphere; using robotic probes to do some cool things to asteroids! What they intend to do is mine near-Earth asteroids that have high stores of Platinum group metals and water and in turn, have a massive effect on the global economy.
You may ask how it’s going to have a massive effect on the global economy, but when one of the company’s creators is quoted as saying “each asteroid is worth about 20 trillion dollars in the platinum group metal marketplace” then you can see why this could have such a massive effect – the global GDP of the entire planet is estimated to be around $63 trillion at present so one asteroid could potentially be worth nearly a third of that at current prices. They’ll be mining for platinum group metals such as ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and of course platinum as well as water, which is going to be sold for use in space. Selling the water found in space will save shuttles having to pull the extra weight of water brought from down on Earth, thus bringing new possibilities when it comes to space travel since you could have smaller shuttles
A mass of unmanned spacecraft will be the machines of choice to carry out the actual mining and they’ll scour and scrape the surface of the asteroids to extract the metals and either store them in storage facilities purposely built in space, or brought back to Earth. How they’re going to bring them back isn’t quite known yet, however it will no doubt require some innovation. At the moment there are roughly 150 asteroids close enough for exploration with the possibility of being mined, with hundreds more just out of reach that with some technological development should be available to mine.
Probes are expected to be sent out to take a look around in the next 18-24 months, this will also serve as a test for future models that will go up and delve deeper into the task ahead. They haven’t however, disclosed when exactly they plan on going up to extract the metals and water from the asteroids but sources say that they could pull a 500 ton specimen into the moons orbit by 2025 at the cost of $2.6billion. That may sound like a gargantuan amount, but when you look at who’s backing the program (Google being one) and the potential return of $20 trillion, it doesn’t seem all that bad.
We’ll certainly look forward to seeing how this project unfolds, a video is being released tonight at 18:30 UK time which you can watch here: https://www.spacevidcast.com/live/ and we wish them the best of luck!