Orbital Mining

Is mining in space viable? Perhaps it's just only a few steps away?

It was thought until a few years ago, that to perform such a feat as mining in space, a lengthy trip to asteroid belt would be required.

Now it seems it might not really be that hard.

I've just stumbled upon a bunch of various web pages and such following reading an article in "Focus" monthly magazine (Polish language), which was a translation of "New Scientist" magazine article by Stuart Clark, discussing Earth's additional moons.

And from looks of it, we might be reaching for what yesterday seemed like science-fiction, to have it happen tomorrow in reality.

It starts from a story of 'meteors' or 'falling stars' path of which was observed across 9200km on Earth, which means that instead of falling straight onto Earth like normal asteroids do, they just glanced on our planet's atmosphere with speed similar to Earth's rotation speed. And that in turn means that they must have been orbiting it, possibly being pieces of a small moon.

Now with development of better telescopes we know that it's nothing exceptional - all the time small asteroids get caught by Earth's gravity and start orbiting it, often doing just a few circles around it to escape later, sometimes entering a bit more stable orbits. Even now probably one or more such miniature moons are above our heads. And thousands of smaller pieces of space rock are orbiting Earth in orbits similar or smaller to our Moon orbit.

With our planet's dwindling resources getting less and less easily available 'importing' some resources from space would be great for our industry (and for us, consumers - hey, cheaper goods!). 

Especially that such asteroids may contain big percentage of gold, platinum and rare earth elements - metals on which most of modern technology depends. While of course, it is very expensive to launch into space, just one single asteroid may contain hundreds of millions to trillions of dollars worth of materials. William Hartmann in Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon estimated that asteroid of 2km diameter (so not very rare size) would be worth 25 trillion dollars (current public debt of USA is at level of 15,78trillion$).

And not just those rare and hard to get metals are worth mining. There are ice asteroids primarily made up of water. 

Exporting water into space - for use in space stations and on space vessels (possible Mars expeditions and other) is extremely costly. And water is vital not just because it's needed for humans to drink, but also it can be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen giving good supply of breathing oxygen as well as very good fuel for rocket engines.

That's why 500-meter water asteroid could be worth 5,5 trillion dollars.

They may also contain large amounts of helium which can be used in ion engines and in future could possibly be used in safe thermonuclear reactors to power ships and stations.

Now with NASA budget cuts and governments in general not spending money on science and space exploration so generously as on military budgets, it seems that progress of space conquest must slow down considerably.

But there is new hope, because private sector has started noticing the opportunities presented by space exploration. Such companies which want to specialize in space business like Planetary Resources start sprouting, space tourism seems to be an interesting idea for private sector too, because there are many people who would love to pay for even just a few hours in space. 

That all means that development of new technologies - more efficient and cheaper now shifts towards private sector, which wants to profit from it.

So making it cheaper will probably get much faster and easier than when government agency pays for things on governmental budget, not for getting monetary profits, because now it's in private sector companies own interest to make it cheap.

There's a huge potential for development in space - with abundant solar power supply, with abundant supply of water needed for living beings (so humans and for possibly later space farms so all food doesn't need to be imported), with iron and other metals needed for construction of stations, spaceships, probes, with all elements needed for electronics.

It seems that when we make just the first effort to colonize the space, make our first beachhead and industrial infrastructure, we'll be able to quite easily develop in space without getting all resources from Earth like it is now.

Those taking part in this first effort might reap huge benefits later on too - as it often happened in all freshly opening areas of market.

That will really open doors to new era of space exploration, and make science-fiction really come true.

It's just another another thing that signifies the fact that we are actually living in the yesterday's science-fiction now ;)