Tue, 07/27/2021
This post is a summary of Episode 29 of The Nebraska Governance & Technology Center’s (NGTC) Podcast Series, Tech Refactored. In this episode, hosts NGTC Executive Director Elsbeth Magilton and NGTC Director Gus Hurwitz were joined by Kristi Bradford from In-Q-Tel to learn about the economic and business development side of space resources.
When it comes to space resource extraction and lunar habitation, both are substantive areas that have moved from fantasy to feasibility in a remarkably short amount of time. While space skeptics might imagine that the barriers to lunar and asteroid mining are insurmountable within our lifetimes, the amount of thought and resources that have been devoted to making celestial mining a medium-term reality bely that argument. Today’s guest Christie Bradford has made a career out of moving these projects closer to realization, starting her career in academia before working at a series of entities focused on developing plans for space mining projects..
Turning first to the question of mining (particularly asteroids) for rare earth minerals, those unfamiliar with the idea might reasonably ask why those resources can’t be mined on earth rather than going to all the effort and expense of mining in space. Surprisingly, Bradford agreed with the basic premise of the question: mining rare earth minerals is probably not the “low hanging fruit” of space resource extraction. The reasons for this are essentially an interlocking series of constraints, “not just the technological constraints, but the economic constraints, the scientific constraints, and the political constraints.”
One of the principle issues that limits the near-term attractiveness of mining asteroids for rare earth metals is uncertainty - although it is believed that some asteroids contain rare elements, their exact composition is far from certain. A second barrier to space mining is the substantial upfront R&D costs - it's one thing to operate a commercial mining operation once all the technological and logistical hurdles have been surmounted, and at that point mining for rare earth metals may be practicable, but it's a difficult proposition to sell the private sector on incurring the such large development costs for a potential upside that is far from certain. For that reason, Bradford believes that, in order to cover those initial upfront development costs, “you are going to have to have the government involved.”
In order to meaningfully estimate the costs of celestial mining in order to assess its feasibility, an important variable is where the materials that are extracted are to be used. While the common assumption among those unfamiliar with space mining projects is that the materials would be returned to earth to be used, that isn’t necessarily the case. In a future where human habitation and other endeavors might be taking place on the moon, all sorts of materials, from water to aluminum, might be utilized in manufacturing operations that themselves are taking place on the moon or in space. The benefit here would be the much lower transportation costs that are generally involved in moving in and out of earth’s atmosphere and gravitational well.
On the question of who the end users of those materials are likely to be, Bradford thinks it's likely that “the first users of space resources on that demand side are likely going to be governments. And the reason I say that is because (materials extraction) is likely going to be occurring on the moon and it’s likely going to be sold to others on the moon.”
In terms of the necessary technologies for space resource extraction, many of those technologies are already being developed now, for use in other contexts. These include “technologies like rendezvous and proximity operations technologies, hyperspectral sensors, as well as advanced robotics.” In particular, recent attention has been paid to the unique challenges posed by the use of robotics in space environments.
Some of the uncertainty surrounding the feasibility of space mining has been lessened as of late as a result of two missions that recently traveled to near-earth asteroids, named OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2. Both of these missions visited carbonaceous asteroids (asteroids with a high degree of carbon), took samples, and Hayabusa2 has already returned with its payload, allowing scientists to conduct analyses of the asteroids composition. This has led to a greater interest in space resource extraction in the academic community, something Bradford sees as a positive development toward enabling space resource extraction in the future.
Finally, Bradford and Magilton touched on the idea that, for further exploration and use of space to be sustainable on a large scale, humanity can’t continue to rely on materials that it sends into space from earth. As Bradford explained, “if space exploration remains entirely dependent on what we can manufacture on earth, then we’re going to remain incredibly limited.” Bradford employs an economic analysis model in explaining the trajectory of space habitation and resource extraction. As we begin to be able to use materials that originate in space in furtherance of goals that are also taking place in space, then that pushes the costs down while also creating a greater demand for additional technologies, research, and thought that enables the further utilization of space. In that sense space mining is just one stop on a self-reinforcing feedback loop wherein supply creates demand, which then creates supply - and space mining becomes only one element of a space “ecosystem” that works together to make every other element possible. Thus individual elements of the utilization of space, like habitation or resource extraction, are best understood as a complex interlocking web; and only by viewing the use of space in that broad way can we fully comprehend the ways in which humanity’s collective use of space can evolve and grow.
Tags: Tech Refactored Review
