Just a few years ago, space mining seemed inevitable. Analysts, technology visionaries and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predict that space mining will be a huge undertaking.
Supported by space mining companies such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries GoogleLarry Page and Eric Schmidt advanced the use of estimated fees.
Fast forward to 2022, and both the planetary resources and deep space industries have been bought by companies that have nothing to do with space mining. Mankind has yet to work for business. Even mine is an asteroid. So what is taking so long?
Space mining is a long-term venture that investors are impatient to support.
“If we were to build a full-scale asteroid production vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to do it using commercial processes. It’s hard to convince the investment community that this is the right thing to do,” Joel said. Sercel, president and CEO of TransAstra Corporation.
“In today’s economics and in the economics of the near future, in the next few years, it doesn’t make sense to go after precious metals in asteroids. The reason is that the cost of getting to and taking asteroids is so expensive that it’s so much more than the cost of anything you’re going to use from an asteroid,” Sercel says.
That didn’t stop Sercell from trying to mine the cosmos. TransAstra will initially focus on extracting water asteroids for rocket propulsion, but eventually wants to mine “everything on the perimetric table.” But Sercel said such a mission is still a way off.
“The biggest issue for us in terms of production time for Mining Asteroid is funding. So it depends on how quickly we can grow the business into these other ventures and then get practical engineering experience operating systems that have all the components of the Asteroid mining system. But within 5 to 7 years.” We can launch an asteroid mission.
Sercell hopes these other enterprises will keep him afloat until he develops the asteroid mining business. The idea is to eventually use the technology included in TransAstra’s astroid mining missions to satisfy existing market needs, such as using space tugs to get satellites into their correct orbits and using satellites to help with traffic management as space grows.
AstroForge is another company that believes space mining will become a reality. In the year Founded in 2022 by a former SpaceX engineer and former Virgin Galactic engineer, Astroforge believes there is still money to be made for precious metal asteroids.
“On Earth, we have a certain amount of rare earth elements, especially the platinum group metals. These metals are used by industry for everyday things like your cell phone, your cancer, your medicine, catalytic converters. The only way to get more of these is to go off-world,” said AstroForge Associate. said founder and CEO Matt Gialich.
AstroForge plans to mine and refine these metals in space and then sell them back on Earth. To keep costs down, AstroForge attaches its refining operations to off-the-shelf satellites and launches those satellites on SpaceX rockets.
“There are a few companies that make what’s called a satellite bus. It’s what you normally think of as a satellite, a box with solar panels on it, a transmission system connected to it. So for us, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel there,” Gialich says. “The ancients before us, Planetary Resources and DSI [Deep Space Industries], they had to buy complete vehicles. They had to build very large and very expensive satellites, which required a large capital injection. And I think that was the ultimate downfall of both companies.
The biggest challenge, according to AstroForge, is deciding which asteroids you want to mine. Before embarking on their own missions, all early-stage mining companies have to rely on the researchers’ observational data and hope that the asteroid they’ve chosen contains the minerals they’re looking for.
“It’s a piece of technology that you can control, parts of the operations that you can control, but you can’t control what an asteroid is until you get there,” says Jose Akain, AstroForge Co-Founder and CTO.
Watch the video to learn more about the challenges space mining companies face and their plans to make space mining a real business.
