we all want to live in a world of abundance but in order to find that dream we will need to go far beyond our own world mining in space the final frontier of resource extraction because everything that we could ever need every rock metal and gas to support a boundless human civilization from now until the day that the sun explodes it's all out there in our own planetary neighborhood so close yet so far this is the big problem with space mining in theory it's a simple idea we go to a nearby asteroid that's full of
valuable metal we break it open extract the good stuff bring it home and boom unlimited wealth and prosperity Neil degrass Tyson once said that the first trillionaire will be the person who mines Asteroids for resources but there's more to this than just getting rich taking resource extraction into space could take pressure off of the environment on our own Planet it could even be the key to us reaching new planets or even new solar systems but it's not just easy money out there Among the Stars this is a logistical nightmare to say the least it's going
to be spectacularly difficult preposterously expensive and more than a little dangerous the first place that we are going to want to look when scouting for our mining location in space will be asteroids they are the closest and most worthwhile resources in our solar system the surface of the Moon or Mars is just not going to be dense enough with the good stuff to be worthwhile planets are actually the worst places in the solar system to mine because all of the best resources are buried too deep under the surface the reason we like asteroids is because
they are essentially leftover raw materials from billions of years ago when the solar system was formed all of the metal rock dust and gas that never got the chance to become a planet instead became an asteroid that means that asteroids are made up of the same stuff as planets but in a much more concentrated and accessible format when a planet forms everything gets very hot and molten which means that the heavy metals will sink down into the structure and the heaviest elements will Gather in the middle and form the core that concentrated Mass creates a
gravity well which then pulls in more stuff and eventually makes a planet many asteroids never went through that melting and settling process so you can still find massive chunks of heavy metals just floating around out there and these are the most interesting in terms of mining them for resources mtype or metallic asteroids are typically composed of 80% iron and a 20% mixture of nickel idium padium platinum gold magnesium and other precious metals that are obscure and difficult to pronounce but still very important there are single asteroids out there that contain more nickel than all of
the available Nickel in the Earth's crust put together even more interesting than that is the presence of these rare earth metals like Platinum Palladium and rodium these elements are the reason that catalytic converters from gasoline powered vehicles have become such a hot commodity in recent years and why yours may have been saw off in the middle of the night and stolen by a bunch of gangsters rare earth metals aren't exactly rare on Earth so much as they are just very difficult to find Platinum Group Metals don't concentrate into large veins the way the gold ones
do they're just scattered all over the place in small amounts but this isn't the case on a metallic asteroid again just one space Rock a few hundred met across might yield more Platinum than has ever been produced on Earth or will ever be produced on Earth and wouldn't it be amazing if we could just Source all of the Exotic Metals and things that we would need from asteroids if we could just stop mining the Earth and mine outer space Instead This is 16 psyche possibly the most valuable asteroid in the solar system and likely also
the largest this one lives in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter it's widely believed that that psyche is actually the formed core of a dead planet that somehow lost its outer layers so remember how we said that all of the metals get pulled into a planet's molten core as the planet forms well that means psyche is a concentrated mass of heavy metal the estimated value of 16 psyche is something like $10,000 quadrillion dollar which is just an unfathomable value and that's the dragon that would be space miners are chasing one big score or that
unlocks more wealth than the entire global economy put together that raises some interesting legal questions can you own an asteroid well no but there is actually something called the United States space act that was written in 2015 and it says that American companies are allowed to own the materials that they mine from bodies in space so it's a finders keepers first come first serve kind of deal meaning that the race is on and the Stakes are high but before we even get into the logistics of mining on an asteroid which are insane there's one fundamental
problem that can bring the whole operation into question once we unlock an unlimited supply of a resource like nickel then it stops being rare and by extension stops being valuable of course it's more difficult than that because while the supply would be abundant the access to it would still be restricted because it requires flying through space to collect and bring back add to that the limitations of carrying capacity of a spaceship so far the closest thing that we have to a functional interplanetary cargo vehicle is the SpaceX Starship with an estimated cargo capacity of 100
metric tons the annual nickel production on Earth in the year 2020 was 2.5 million metric tons which would equal 25,000 Starship loads of pure nickel per year for asteroid mining to even match Earth mining which would be on average 70 Starship launches per day every day on a round trip that would probably take two or three years to complete so that's not exactly a scenario that we would call practical it's a real head scratcher of a problem and even with a confirmed jackpot on our hands reaching these asteroids will be incredibly difficult most of the
metallic mclass asteroids orbit right in between Mars and Jupiter at the center of the main belt that's pretty far away from Earth not on the cosmic scale but on the human scale that's a lot further than we typically Venture we are already pretty good at sending refrigerator sized probes into deep space and we can land a Rover as big as a car on the planet Mars but asteroids present a unique challenge we know that we can land propes on asteroids that's been accomplished already the Japanese space agency began their Hayabusa or paragan Falcon mission in
2003 to explore near Earth asteroids hiusa 1 landed on the iawa asteroid in 2005 this is a fairly small object at less than 1 km in diameter the probe landed on the asteroid and collected samples in the form of tiny grains of material which were returned to Earth aboard the spacecraft on June 13th 2010 now this wasn't the first probe to land on an asteroid but it was the first to land take samples and then come back the hyabusa 2 launched in 2014 on a mission to the asteroid ryugu again the probe surveyed The Rock
collected samples and returned them to Earth the payload from that mission arrived in December 2020 and then NASA got in on the action with Osiris Rex this sample return Mission which launched in 2016 to the asteroid benu which is not a metalic asteroid it's the more common S-Class or Stony asteroid the sample was returned to Earth in 2023 and in January 20125 the first research paper was released with analysis of the asteroid material both the ja and NASA asteroid missions have been focused exclusively on science and not identifying resources for space mining but these Close
Encounters have been incredibly valuable in helping us to understand the true nature of asteroids and that's going to inform the approach that needs to be taken when it comes to mining them the biggest change in our perception of asteroids is that we don't see them as giant rocks in space anymore what we've learned is that most asteroids are actually more like loose piles of Rock dust and metal that are held together by a weak force of gravity out there in deep space far from the influence of any planets and their gravity well objects with significant
mass will draw in other objects via the force of gravity kind of like a magnet but it's a very weak pull this leads to a slow process of asteroid formation that plays out over millions and billions of years as the asteroid moves through space it accumulates more loose rocks in dust like the roombas of the solar system them and as a result there's not enough energy being pulled together to cause the melting and combining necessary to produce a solid rock anyway if we've successfully visited asteroids before can we just scale up these small probe experiments
into full-blown resource extraction well not really the reason that it's pretty easy to get a probe to an asteroid and make contact is because the probe is super small and lightweight NASA's Osiris Rex probe is just 2 and 1/2 M High High by 3 m wide it weighs just over 2,000 kg just try and imagine the scale of the spaceship that we would need to launch a mining industry on 16 psyche it would be humongous and the weight of it would be unprecedented the mining rig would have to be assembled in orbit because it would
be far too massive to reach escape velocity from the Earth's surface so that's going to need an equally massive rocket engine to burn with enough Force to get this ship up to the velocity it needs to reach the asteroid belt in a reasonable amount of time then on the other end that engine needs to burn again with the power to bring this whole thing to a stop when we land a spaceship on Earth we rely on the atmosphere to handle the majority of the deceleration energy but asteroids don't have atmospheres to help with that and
they don't have gravity either which is another problem psyche might have enough mass for microgravity but it's believed to be just 1 and a half% the gravity of Earth that's even significantly lower gravity than the moon and that's the biggest most dense asteroid we know all the others have even less gravitational force which is to say they basically have none so remember that climatic scene in Armageddon when Bruce Willis has to dramatically pull himself up out of the hole on the surface of the asteroid just in the nick of time to set off the explosion
and save the world well that would never be the case in real life Bruce Willis would actually have the opposite problem of struggling to keep himself and his stuff from just floating away into space and that's a really big problem for trying to mine an asteroid the easiest way that we know how to mine rocks on Earth is to drill a long hole put explosives in it and then set off a huge explosion that breaks up the Rock and then we extract the rubble but if we did that on an asteroid all the rubble would
just shoot straight out into space any rock that we break free from the mass of the asteroid will not be sticking around so that's just logistical craziness to try and figure out we need some kind of a combination Rock Crusher and vacuum machine thing so here's the more practical approach we capture the asteroid in a giant bag and melt it in this strategy we don't have to worry about landing on the asteroid at all our spacecraft would approach the Target and match its orbit then deploy a large plastic containment bag that would envelop the entire
asteroid once we have the asteroid in the bag now we need to heat it up that can be done by either using a giant reflector to concentrate sunlight or by blasting it with a laser regardless of the method the goal here is to vaporize the material in the bag until it becomes a big cloud of atoms now we sort those atom separating the valuable resources from the plain Rock and dust then only the most important material in a pure form is returned to the Earth compared with a traditional digging method or trying to pull an
entire asteroid back to Earth orbit the contain and vaporize method is the most likely to succeed in a way that's both effective and affordable we have to figure out not just mining in space but refining as well to make sure that only the most valuable resources return to Earth for sale it's not that Neil degrass Tyson was necessarily wrong when he said that asteroid mining was the path to trillion dollar fortunes but he didn't really specify that this only works as a long game it's not easy money The Upfront cost cost will be enormous the
cost for NASA to return just 1 kg of loose material from the surface of asteroid benu was around $1 billion by comparison 1 kg of platinum metal is worth about $32,000 that math is pretty far from making sense at this point consider this there are 20 million tons of gold at the bottom of the ocean no one has been interested in going down there to get it and even mining the ocean floor would be a lot easier than mining an asteroid so to get the real value of asteroid mining we need to take money out
of the equation this isn't making money it's about saving the world mining on Earth sucks it's bad for the environment it's bad for the people involved and it's not a sustainable practice that we can just continue on for thousands of years into the future eventually we run out and asteroid mining is the answer but it's not an easy one and it's only going to work when done for the right reasons not necessarily for wealth but for the good of the earth and the people living on it
