Space Mining for Fun and Profit

Asteroid Ida and Its Moon Dactyl

This week in Seattle a new startup called Planetary Resources Inc. is unveiling its plans to mine the solar system for natural resources.

The venture is backed by Google luminaries Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, by filmmaker James Cameron and by Ross Perot’s entrepreneur son, among others.

Few specifics are available so far, apart from a bare-bones press release that says the company it would "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and "help ensure humanity's prosperity."

Also involved in the project are several former NASA officials who have spoken out on the subject of space mining, particularly extracting minerals from asteroids and other space objects.

The Wall Street Journal notes that NASA has done its own studies on the subject:

Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.
 The estimated cost doesn't include the billions of dollars that it might take to extract minerals.
 "[W]ith the right ground-based observation campaign approximately five attractive [asteroids] per year could be discovered," said the NASA study, published by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. It also said that by exploring asteroids people may be able to gain information or find raw materials that would allow humans to travel far beyond the moon.

Cameron’s blockbuster film “Avatar” involved the mining of a precious (fictional) mineral called “unobtanium” on a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.

There was a flurry of discussion about six years ago on the subject of space mining and its possible benefits in two key areas: the energy sector and the environment.

Wired magazine published an article in 2006 on the environmental and energy implications of mining lunar helium-3 on the Moon:

NASA's planned moon base announced last week could pave the way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries may be the terrestrial energy industry.
 Nestled among the agency's 200-point mission goals is a proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors -- futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment.
 Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon.
 As a result, scientists have begun to consider the practicality of mining lunar Helium-3 as a replacement for fossil fuels.
 "After four-and-half-billion years, there should be large amounts of helium-3 on the moon," said Gerald Kulcinski, a professor who leads the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Way back in 1997, former U.S. lunar astronaut Harrison Schmitt, also associated with UW-Madison, wrote a paper for the Journal of Aerospace Engineering on the proposal to mine helium-3 on the Moon and Mars as an alternative to conventional fossil and fission fuels:

The corporate vision of a proposed Interlune-Intermars Initiative encompasses commercial enterprises related to resources from space that support the preservation of the human species and our home planet. Within this vision, the major mission objectives of the Initiative are to provide investors with a competitive rate of return; protect the Earth’s environment and expand the well-being of its inhabitants by using energy from space, particularly lunar ³He, as a major alternative to fossil and fission fuels; develop resources from space that will support future near-Earth and deep-space activities and human settlement; and develop reliable and robust capabilities to launch payloads from Earth to deep space at a cost of $1,000/kg or less (1996 dollars). Attaining a level of sustaining operations for the core fusion power and lunar resource business requires about 15 years and 10–$15 billion of private investment capital as well as the successful marketing and profitable sales of a variety of applied fusion technologies.

Schmitt, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico and now an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, set up a commercial company in 1997 called Interlune-Intermars Initiative Inc., whose mission was to “protect the Earth's environment and increase the well-being of its inhabitants by using energy from space,” particularly helium-3 mined on the Moon.

There is no evidence Schmitt’s proposal made much headway. Wikipedia claims “[t]he idea of generating significant power from helium 3 obtained from the moon is regarded as wildly impractical,” but the only support cited for this contention is an outdated MIT master’s thesis published in 1994.

Despite his interest in helium-3 as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil and conventional nuclear fuels, Schmitt was attacked by environmentalists at the time as a “climate science denier” and “crackpot.”

We shall see if Planetary Resources Inc. has any better luck.