Space: the final (mining) frontier
Can asteroids be exploited?
Mining asteroids? You’re kidding, right?
That sounds like the stuff of grade-B Hollywood sci-fi flicks like Space Cowboys or Armageddon.
But Chris Lewicki isn’t joking. He’s perfectly serious, and he’s got the scientific cred to back him up.
The president of Seattlebased Planetary Resources Inc. says drilling space rocks is not just feasible.
It’s going to happen, he vows, and his firm aims to lead the way.
“It will very likely be done entirely robotically,” says Lewicki, a former NASA engineer who is in Edmonton at the invitation of the University of Alberta’s department of earth and atmospheric sciences.
“Now, if I had given you that answer 20 years ago, it would have been absurd.
“But now we’ve got robots cleaning our floors, driving our cars and building other robots,” he notes.
“Could anyone have imagined the iPhone 5 in 2002? People would have said that’s a magical piece of science fiction fantasyland, it won’t exist until 2050,” he says.
“So, for me to project that 10 years from now we’ll be able to undertake robotic mining activity in space is a foregone conclusion.
“It’s just obvious to me that’s the way we’ll be doing it, although we’ll certainly have humans involved.”
Lewicki, who served as flight director for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, has some high-powered colleagues and backers who share his otherworldly vision.
Planetary Resources’ investors include Google co-founder Larry Page, executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former Goldman Sachs CEO John Whitehead and Texas industrialist Ross Perot Jr. Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) is an adviser and the company’s co-founders include famed Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis.
Although the company is private, it will cost billions of dollars to pursue its ambitious plans, says Lewicki, and that may eventually lead to an IPO (initial public offering) of shares. But for now, that’s not on the agenda.
“Near-term, we’re working on remote sensing and asteroid prospecting capabilities. So in about two years we’ll be launching our Archid 100 space telescopes,” he says.
“And in another four or five years we’ll be sending out our first (Archid 200) missions. These spacecraft will go right up close and personal with near-earth asteroids by 2016-17 or so.”
Initially, Planetary Resources’ spacecraft will simply orbit asteroids of interest, but by the end of the decade it expects to begin “interacting” with them by landing and taking core samples.
Although the company will be looking for such finds as rare platinum-group metals, Lewicki says its initial target is likely to be a commodity that is abundant here on earth: water.
That’s because water will be essential to any future space exploration missions and if Planetary Resources can develop the technology to extract it from asteroids, it will be worth billions, perhaps even trillions of dollars commercially.
“Today, a single litre of water where you would need it in higher Earth orbit costs about $20,000 a litre. That is what water is worth in space today, so it’s as valuable, actually, as platinum by mass,” says Lewicki.
Not only is water needed to sustain human life, it is also essential to many industrial processes — including mining — and can be used to propel spacecraft, he notes.
So that’s the big draw. But there’s also a big push factor, too. As the global population grows and demand for earth’s finite resources increases, Lewicki figures political and socioeconomic forces will only make extraterrestrial mining — à la Avatar — more viable and attractive. Which is why some of the world’s major mining companies have begun to show interest in the idea.
“We’ve been in talks with a lot of major mining companies,” he says,” including one that ranks among the 10 largest in the world.
“This is mining with a capital M. So while the specific implementation may be different in space, the overall business is the same as in mining here on Earth. So we’ve got lots to learn from forward-looking mining companies.”
As for the number of asteroids that may be attractive targets for future mining activity, Lewicki says there is no shortage.
“In space, accessibility is not necessarily measured in distance, it’s measured by energy or velocity. So about 15 per cent of the asteroid population we’ve discovered so far, from an energy standpoint, is easier to get to than it is to land on the moon,” he says.
“To land on the moon you have to slow down a lot so you don’t crash into it. But with an asteroid, its gravity is light, so you can simply dock with it. So that 15 per cent works out to about 1,500 near-Earth asteroids that are easier to land on than the moon, even though many are actually farther away than the moon.”
Although he describes the future in business-like, matter-of-fact language, Lewicki — who has an asteroid named after him, dubbed 13609 Lewicki — clearly hasn’t lost his sense of awe.
“It’s an absolute privilege to be able to work on this stuff,” he says. “It’s a fascinating time to be alive.”