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The final frontier
INSIGHT ASTEROID MINING
The final frontier Would-be asteroid mining firms have flopped, but a Japanese probe may now revive this ambitious industry, says Leah Crane 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.
JAXA
Stepping stone to Mars
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 20 | NewScientist | 23 February 2019
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. The miners could use a boost. Around the time of the first Hayabusa’s return, then US president Barack Obama kick-started a burgeoning
Hayabusa 2 is in orbit around asteroid Ryugu
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?
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
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Rock collection
Ryugu
Earth
Bennu
Ryugu
Bennu
Water
C-type: lots of carbon and a dark surface None detected
Brightness Estimated value (Asterank.com) Risk of hitting Earth in next 200 years
Mostly uniform $82.76 billion 0
B-type: bluer in colour, possibly due to more silicates and clays Water locked in molecular structure of minerals Light and dark spots $670 million 1 in 2700
Type
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 New
general spacecraft. Scientist. “I chatted with a couple It is a sorry end for two firms of people from ConsenSys and I with grand ambitions, but one still don’t know what’s going on,” with an air of inevitability. says Laura Forczyk, founder of “These companies were limping space-industry consultancy along,” says Forczyk. “They were Astralytical. That sentiment was echoed by others in the industry. “When Donald Trump “Maybe it’s something to do cancelled asteroid plans, with a deep-space internet economy,” says Ian Fichtenbaum, the customer for mining companies evaporated” a director of space technology firm Bradford Space, which acquired Deep Space Industries in either going to fail or they were January, mainly for its propulsion going to need to really pivot.” In 2017, US president Donald systems. Fichtenbaum says that COPY SUB Trump forced their hands when Bradford Space is not rebranding his first PAGE official SUB space policy move as an asteroid-mining company was to cancel the Obama asteroid and will continue to focus on OK for press plans. Suddenly, the visionary customer for asteroid-mining companies evaporated. mining targets aren’t particularly Without steady government close to Earth, so opportunities for contracts, these firms had no troubleshooting will be limited. obvious income. “One of the For example, Hayabusa 2’s basic problems of trying to sell sampling procedure (see main story) water from asteroids is who is is preprogrammed. Once the going to buy it?” says Martin spacecraft touches down on Ryugu, Elvis at the Harvard-Smithsonian it is on its own until it lifts back off Center for Astrophysics in again, space dust in hand. If anything Massachusetts. “In space, goes wrong, it will be too late to do no one can hear you sell.” anything about it. That doesn’t mean And selling space goods on the entire thing will be a write-off, Earth is equally problematic. however. The original Hayabusa A recent economic analysis led by spacecraft’s sampler failed to work Andreas Hein at CentraleSupélec properly, but when it returned to in France found that mining Earth, it turned out to have gathered asteroids for platinum will a few tiny grains of asteroid dust. almost never be worthwhile. >
Asteroid_comp_230219
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
500 metres
900 metres
SOURCES LEFT TO RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA; JAXA; NASA
Ryugu and Bennu look surprisingly similar, but there are key differences
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
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
23 February 2019 | NewScientist | 21
INSIGHT ASTEROID MINING Space prospectors Dedicated asteroid missions past, present and future will all help would-be miners US
Japan
Europe
Brazil
Spacecraft (bold) A
Spacecraft (bold, coloured) Asteroid name (bold) Launch date
1996 NEAR Shoemaker landed on Eros (in 2001)
1998 Deep Space 1 fly-by of Braille (1999)
2003
2007 Dawn orbited Vesta (2011) and Ceres (2015), the two largest objects in the asteroid belt
2014 Hayabusa 2 currently sampling Ryugu
2016 OSIRIS-REx currently orbiting Bennu, planned sample in 2020
2021 Lucy will study six asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit ASTER will orbit triple asteroid 2001 SN263 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will smash into the smaller half of binary asteroid Didymos in an attempt to change its orbit
2022 Psyche will orbit the metal asteroid Psyche DESTINY+ fly-by of Phaethon
2023 Hera will orbit the larger half of Didymos and observe the effects of the DART mission 22 | NewScientist | 23 February 2019
BRYAN VERSTEEG
Hayabusa landed on Itokawa (2005), brought asteroid dust back to Earth
“There is already a platinum contain water, so are probably market on Earth, which means similar to the first mining targets that if you bring stuff down from (see diagram, page 21). space, the terrestrial market will Private firms will probably want react,” says Hein. to piggyback off the information For asteroid mining to turn gathered by government a profit, terrestrial mining missions, says Graps (see “Space operations would have to decrease prospectors”, left). By teaching us their output by 0.85 kilograms for more about individual asteroids, every kilogram brought back from missions like Hayabusa 2 and space, or the price of platinum OSIRIS-REx can give asteroid would tank. Even then, it would miners enough information to probably take more than 30 years make educated guesses about for a firm to become profitable, “Asteroid mining is like the analysis reports. fishing. If there’s nothing Putting aside economic on one asteroid, you go issues, the technical challenges on to the next one” of asteroid mining aren’t trivial, either. “To actually pick out a single asteroid that you want which types of space rock might to go mine right now would be worth digging into. be very difficult because we Nevertheless, says Graps, don’t have that much data on national space agencies won’t the composition of asteroids,” visit all of the asteroids, so there says Galache. will always be unknowns. That’s where Hayabusa 2 and “Asteroid mining is more like its NASA counterpart, another fishing: you go to an asteroid asteroid-sampling mission called and see what it has, and if there’s OSIRIS-REx, come in. They should nothing you go on to the next increase our understanding of one,” she says. “There will asteroids. The US mission arrived definitely be failures.” at asteroid Bennu late last year, and If asteroid mining does happen, will gather samples some time in the returns on investment 2020. Both Ryugu and Bennu are probably won’t come in the carbon-rich asteroids likely to form of troves of precious metal
Asteroid_mining_230219
Deep Space Industries had grand visions for the future of mining
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 backSUB at Hayabusa 2 as the COPY first successful asteroid PAGE SUB prospector, while the likes of Planetary Resources and OK for press 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.” ■
The final frontier Would-be asteroid mining firms have flopped, but a Japanese probe may now revive this ambitious industry, says Leah Crane 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.
JAXA
Stepping stone to Mars
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 20 | NewScientist | 23 February 2019
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. The miners could use a boost. Around the time of the first Hayabusa’s return, then US president Barack Obama kick-started a burgeoning
Hayabusa 2 is in orbit around asteroid Ryugu
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?
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
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Rock collection
Ryugu
Earth
Bennu
Ryugu
Bennu
Water
C-type: lots of carbon and a dark surface None detected
Brightness Estimated value (Asterank.com) Risk of hitting Earth in next 200 years
Mostly uniform $82.76 billion 0
B-type: bluer in colour, possibly due to more silicates and clays Water locked in molecular structure of minerals Light and dark spots $670 million 1 in 2700
Type
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 New
general spacecraft. Scientist. “I chatted with a couple It is a sorry end for two firms of people from ConsenSys and I with grand ambitions, but one still don’t know what’s going on,” with an air of inevitability. says Laura Forczyk, founder of “These companies were limping space-industry consultancy along,” says Forczyk. “They were Astralytical. That sentiment was echoed by others in the industry. “When Donald Trump “Maybe it’s something to do cancelled asteroid plans, with a deep-space internet economy,” says Ian Fichtenbaum, the customer for mining companies evaporated” a director of space technology firm Bradford Space, which acquired Deep Space Industries in either going to fail or they were January, mainly for its propulsion going to need to really pivot.” In 2017, US president Donald systems. Fichtenbaum says that COPY SUB Trump forced their hands when Bradford Space is not rebranding his first PAGE official SUB space policy move as an asteroid-mining company was to cancel the Obama asteroid and will continue to focus on OK for press plans. Suddenly, the visionary customer for asteroid-mining companies evaporated. mining targets aren’t particularly Without steady government close to Earth, so opportunities for contracts, these firms had no troubleshooting will be limited. obvious income. “One of the For example, Hayabusa 2’s basic problems of trying to sell sampling procedure (see main story) water from asteroids is who is is preprogrammed. Once the going to buy it?” says Martin spacecraft touches down on Ryugu, Elvis at the Harvard-Smithsonian it is on its own until it lifts back off Center for Astrophysics in again, space dust in hand. If anything Massachusetts. “In space, goes wrong, it will be too late to do no one can hear you sell.” anything about it. That doesn’t mean And selling space goods on the entire thing will be a write-off, Earth is equally problematic. however. The original Hayabusa A recent economic analysis led by spacecraft’s sampler failed to work Andreas Hein at CentraleSupélec properly, but when it returned to in France found that mining Earth, it turned out to have gathered asteroids for platinum will a few tiny grains of asteroid dust. almost never be worthwhile. >
Asteroid_comp_230219
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
500 metres
900 metres
SOURCES LEFT TO RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA; JAXA; NASA
Ryugu and Bennu look surprisingly similar, but there are key differences
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
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
23 February 2019 | NewScientist | 21
INSIGHT ASTEROID MINING Space prospectors Dedicated asteroid missions past, present and future will all help would-be miners US
Japan
Europe
Brazil
Spacecraft (bold) A
Spacecraft (bold, coloured) Asteroid name (bold) Launch date
1996 NEAR Shoemaker landed on Eros (in 2001)
1998 Deep Space 1 fly-by of Braille (1999)
2003
2007 Dawn orbited Vesta (2011) and Ceres (2015), the two largest objects in the asteroid belt
2014 Hayabusa 2 currently sampling Ryugu
2016 OSIRIS-REx currently orbiting Bennu, planned sample in 2020
2021 Lucy will study six asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit ASTER will orbit triple asteroid 2001 SN263 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will smash into the smaller half of binary asteroid Didymos in an attempt to change its orbit
2022 Psyche will orbit the metal asteroid Psyche DESTINY+ fly-by of Phaethon
2023 Hera will orbit the larger half of Didymos and observe the effects of the DART mission 22 | NewScientist | 23 February 2019
BRYAN VERSTEEG
Hayabusa landed on Itokawa (2005), brought asteroid dust back to Earth
“There is already a platinum contain water, so are probably market on Earth, which means similar to the first mining targets that if you bring stuff down from (see diagram, page 21). space, the terrestrial market will Private firms will probably want react,” says Hein. to piggyback off the information For asteroid mining to turn gathered by government a profit, terrestrial mining missions, says Graps (see “Space operations would have to decrease prospectors”, left). By teaching us their output by 0.85 kilograms for more about individual asteroids, every kilogram brought back from missions like Hayabusa 2 and space, or the price of platinum OSIRIS-REx can give asteroid would tank. Even then, it would miners enough information to probably take more than 30 years make educated guesses about for a firm to become profitable, “Asteroid mining is like the analysis reports. fishing. If there’s nothing Putting aside economic on one asteroid, you go issues, the technical challenges on to the next one” of asteroid mining aren’t trivial, either. “To actually pick out a single asteroid that you want which types of space rock might to go mine right now would be worth digging into. be very difficult because we Nevertheless, says Graps, don’t have that much data on national space agencies won’t the composition of asteroids,” visit all of the asteroids, so there says Galache. will always be unknowns. That’s where Hayabusa 2 and “Asteroid mining is more like its NASA counterpart, another fishing: you go to an asteroid asteroid-sampling mission called and see what it has, and if there’s OSIRIS-REx, come in. They should nothing you go on to the next increase our understanding of one,” she says. “There will asteroids. The US mission arrived definitely be failures.” at asteroid Bennu late last year, and If asteroid mining does happen, will gather samples some time in the returns on investment 2020. Both Ryugu and Bennu are probably won’t come in the carbon-rich asteroids likely to form of troves of precious metal
Asteroid_mining_230219
Deep Space Industries had grand visions for the future of mining
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 backSUB at Hayabusa 2 as the COPY first successful asteroid PAGE SUB prospector, while the likes of Planetary Resources and OK for press 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.” ■