The world's fossil fuels are in limited reserves and are also in quick depletion. In 2004 Lawrence A. Taylor, director of the U.S. Planetary Geosciences Institute, told the AFP, "Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the U.S. for one full year," noting that only 10 kilos of helium 3 are available on Earth. He added, "By 2050 the whole world will have a major problem. We need to be thinking ahead." Helium 3 is a potential pollution-free nuclear fuel. It is believed that the Moon contains 10 times more energy (in the form of helium 3) than all the fossil fuels on Earth.
The exhaustibility of mineral resources on Earth and their almost infinite deposits on other planetary bodies in our solar system are fast leading to the development of a whole new industry spearheaded by exploratory-entrepreneurial visionaries. These space merchants, like the British who prospected North America for tobacco plantations, believe that space holds the best prospects for finding valuable minerals that could be exploited for usage here on Earth and beyond.
Asteroid Mining
On April 24 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Planetary Resources, Inc. made public its plan to mine near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) for resources. Series of robotic probes and unmanned spacecraft are to be launched, starting with their Arkyd-100 Earth-orbiting telescopes, to prospect candidate NEAs. Subsequently, they plan to launch new spacecraft to mine precious metals and extract water, which can be used for fuel and life-support systems for onward space exploration by humans.
Considering the array of various industry leaders backing this endeavor, it might as well be termed feasible and a done deal even before the start. Financiers of the asteroid-mining venture include Ross Perot, Jr. (chairman of Perot Systems) and Larry Page (CEO of Google). Planetary Resources was founded in 2009 by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, who launched the phenomenon of "tourist astronauts" by pioneering the space tourism business with their company, Space Adventure. Backers of Planetary Resources include tourist astronaut Charles Simonyi, Google executives Eric Schmitt and Ram Shriram, and billionaire filmmaker James Cameron.
Diamandis said Planetary Resources "is establishing a new paradigm for resource utilization that will bring the solar system within humanity's economic sphere of influence by enabling low-cost robotic exploration and eventual commercial development of asteroids." This is certainly not the first time entrepreneurs are actively looking toward space with bold plans to prospect, exploit, and utilize its resources.
Moon Mining
Moon Express, Inc. which Forbes selected in 2011 as one of the 15 "Names You Need to Know," has made known its interest in prospecting space for resources. On April 23 in Mountain View, Calif., MoonEx, the leading contender for the Google Lunar X Prize, announced that it had successfully delivered its Preliminary Design Checkpoint Technical Package to NASA under its $10-million Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data (ILDD) contract, providing NASA continuing data on the development of the company's commercial lunar robotic missions and plans to mine the Moon for precious resources. MoonEx was selected in 2010 for this contract, which is granted only after technology is demonstrated, at the company's own risk. Technology luminaries Naveen Jain (called the greatest entrepreneur on the planet) and Barney Pell teamed up with space visionary Robert Richards to form MoonEx in 2010. It is based at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley.
In answering my question regarding what similarities or distinctions exist between these planetary mining companies, Richards said, "Basically, Moon Express plans to mine asteroids too. The main difference is that MoonEx is planning to mine asteroidal material on the Moon." He further expatiated on the rationale for the Moon, listing reasons that included "proximity, shorter horizon, less risk, existing technology, known destination sampling, and distributed materials." Asteroids, he said, "are far, far away, longer horizon, high-risk, no existing technology, no destination sampling, and concentrated materials." From Richards' analysis, the Moon has clear advantages from both business and technical perspectives.
Under a special partnership agreement with NASA, MoonEx in a way has hired NASA to help create a small, high-performance lunar lander system. "This will be launched starting from as early as 2014," Richards said. If this launch date is accomplished, it will be the first time a commercial company will travel out of the Earth's orbit to another world.
The Gains to Humanity
No matter how difficult mining these planetary objects might get, our corporate entities here on Earth are bound to benefit hugely from this new space industry when it succeeds. As I stated earlier, mineral resources are exhaustible, such that reserves here on Earth are fast being depleted by continuous exploitation, causing a lot of resource concerns. A new window to the infinite reserve of such minerals and more will do humanity much good in terms of abundance and prosperity.
New direct industries will be created and developed as a result of this planetary mining. In the past, space activities relied heavily on measuring "spin-offs" when counting the gains from space exploration, but this is bound to change. There is a huge prospect of new metals to be mined, which may lead to whole new industries and products and the driving down of product costs thanks to abundant supplies of primary resources. As a result, new hands and skills will be needed and developed, creating jobs for the entire economy.
Consciously or unconsciously, the activities of these planetary miners may further open up the final frontier and will enable human spaceflight. Planetary Resources already noted that "water-rich NEAs will serve as 'stepping stones' for deep space exploration, providing space-sourced fuel and water to orbiting depots. Accessing water resources in space will revolutionize exploration and make space travel dramatically more economical."
In essence, mining planetary bodies has both short- and long-term, known and unknown economic potential to meet humanity's needs on Earth and for the development of outer space.
Ad astra.
Follow Ayodele Faiyetole on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Faiyetole
Personally, I hope they succeed. Where there is a dollar to be made, people will be there. My largest concern, though, is that the volume of platinum group elements specifically (Which is one of the focuses of Planetary Resources, according to the speech by Peter Diamondias in the public offering of the company), will not be sufficient to justify recovery, without somehow safely delivering the asteroids back to earth. I say this only because of the scarcity of said elements in the earth. Simply put, things near earth will have similar compositions to things actually present on our planet.
Still, as I said, I really hope I'm wrong to be concerned.
I was one of several scientists who were given samples of the Apollo 11 regolith fines to determine their concentration of He-3. I assure you that mining of He-3 on the Moon is nonsense because here are the numbers. 1 gram of the Apollo 11 fines contains about 0.00009 mL of He-3 or 0.00000000-4 mol of He-3. To obtain 1 mol or 3 gram of He-3 you must heat 25 billion gram or 25 million metric tons of Apollo 11 fines. I leave it to you to calculate how many tons of Apollo 11 fines must be heated to extract 20 metric tons of He-3. Quite aside from the work that must be done to mine, transport, and sieve the lunar regolith to obtain the more gas-rich fines, the amount of energy required to heat these fines to release the He-3 is exorbitant. If that is to be done with the energy from He-3 fusion you must also maintain a sizable workforce on the Moon. You must then calculate the energy for transporting the 20 tons of He-3 to Earth, preferably in the liquid form. Transporting the required mass of lunar fines to Earth is totally out of the question. Anyone who believes that He-3 can be profitably mined on the Moon has his/her head screwed on wrong.
http://members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=bccmeteorites
He3 isn't a renewable resource, either -- it has taken 4.5 billion years for what little there is on the Moon to accumulate -- and these plans would use it up in just a few hundred years, exactly like we've done with fossil fuels. Finally all of this assumes we can do He3 fusion, which has never been demonstrated on a net-positive power generation basis. Pipe dreams fueling the short-term destruction of the cosmic environment...
The engineers and scientists working for these entrepreneurs ought to be devoting their time and efforts towards figuring out how we can just simply use less, not how we can go on using more and more and more.
Mining on the Moon will also create a space based infrastructure that could be used to extend human civilization to other planets. It's extremely unlikely that corporations will just mine He3 once on the moon. They'll mine other materials as well including: oxygen, silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminium, manganese and titanium. Among the more abundant are oxygen, iron and silicon. Transporting elements other than titanium back to Earth just wouldn't be economically feasible, but instead could be used to build space based infrastructure as well as future transport ships. Launching the amount of iron, aluminum, and silicon (glass) from Earth to create this space based infrastructure would not be feasible, but it would be feasible to launch from the Moon due to the much lower escape velocity.
Second, it has yet to be proven that there is no life on (or in) the Moon, or Mars, or anywhere else that's not Earth. In addition, we have hardly any understanding of the Moon's climate or geology at the moment, so the consequences of development are far from clear. Acting as if the Moon is not an environment does not prove that it isn't one -- in fact, there is little doubt that the Moon (and Mars, etc.) are environments, even if they're of a different kind from Earth's. Since we know well the deleterious effect man's actions can have on a planetary environment, doesn't it behoove us to learn our lessons, rather than to continue to make the same kinds of mistakes?