Need data faster and a cleaner planet? Start developing asteroids

The development of asteroids may seem like a science fiction topic to you, but several companies and governments are already working on making it happen. And this is not surprising - compared to the amazing bridges that engineers build on Earth, the extraction of asteroid minerals seems to be a simple and small operation that does not require advanced technologies. If something is missing, it is the imagination that can tell how this activity has become possible. I am only afraid that it will not start fast enough to help the world cope with the already existing resource difficulties.

As a scientific researcher, I work with several asteroid development companies, obeying the urgency of this task. I depend on their financing, so I have production secrets that I cannot share. However, I can reveal the main reasons for my optimism about the development of asteroids as a business, and tell what it will mean for us in the future.

Many people are skeptical about the development of asteroids, as they see the ultimate goal of this process in the form of delivering platinum back to Earth for sale in the metal market. Journalists constantly cite inexorable statistics indicating that platinum mined on an asteroid can cost trillions of US dollars, and anyone familiar with the economy will understand that if you return home with a huge amount of precious metal, you will collapse the market and reduce the value of the asteroid.

On the other hand, if you plan to mine platinum a little bit to keep its cost high (as is the case in the diamond industry), then asteroid companies will be able to compete with land mining companies that benefit from an established ground supply chain and transport networks?

That is why the development of asteroids do not consider platinum. Instead, the first product mined on asteroids will be something whose value is not so obvious: water.

For rocket specialists, water is the raw material for rocket fuel. It takes a lot of fuel to launch water from Earth into space, which is why this concept devalues ​​itself. Fortunately, there is plenty of water in space, and it is much easier to move it from place to place. Water can be quickly extracted from clay minerals of a widespread class of small objects known as class C asteroids or carbonaceous. Water separated from minerals can be split with electricity (in the process of electrolysis ) into hydrogen and oxygen, and put into the key ingredients of rocket fuel.

The use of space-derived rocket fuel will reduce the cost of working on everything else, which will start a cycle of positive communication for the supply chain beyond Earth and cargo delivery. But before that, we need to find customers who can run this process.

Who will buy the rocket fuel created from asteroid water? One of the concepts is to sell it to telecommunications companies for launching satellites into orbit. A decade ago, most of the satellites launched into space were equipped with a rocket attached to the satellite. According to this scheme, the satellite is first displayed on a transitional geostationary orbit, an extremely elliptical shape, the perigee (lower point) of which is only a few hundred kilometers from Earth, and its apogee (upper point) is 36,000 km higher. After that, the spacecraft moves to the apogee, where the rocket is launched and corrects the orbit to a more rounded, so that the satellite can begin to sell the data to customers. But the cost of such a rocket is quite high.

Today, most satellite owners place light electric rocket engines on them. They are cheaper and more efficient, but extremely weak. The satellite may take 6 to 12 months to reach the final orbit. Time is money, so this delay is costing owners of satellites hundreds of millions of dollars in lost profits.

Asteroid development will provide a third option. The mining company will sell the water of the company involved in space transportation, and it will use it to refill a space tug parked in Earth orbit. The tug will dock to the newly launched satellite in transition geostationary orbit and lift it to the final orbit very quickly, in just one day.

According to our calculations, the total cost of such a service, including reimbursement of initial costs, loan costs, insurance and profits to all participants will be less than the lost expenses arising from the current methodology, so this is a workable business. The only problem is to find a lot of early customers so that the service can stand up.

This is how government agencies like NASA can help. If they develop a space station refueling to reduce the cost of the missions to study the Moon or Mars, and if they distribute commercial contracts for space water, they will reduce the size of the required investments and the risks of new mining companies. In this way, agencies can guarantee the early success of a private space industry. This is a sensible job for the government, since taxpayers will benefit from it.

Asteroid development infrastructure can help solve the problem of resources impending on us. After a couple of decades, the existing satellite and fiber optic system will not be able to cope with requests for wireless services and Internet access. I don’t know the solutions to this problem, except for proposals to build giant antennas in space that are too large to be launched on rockets, because other options are not able to scale quickly enough to meet the demand for data that will grow exponentially by the end century. Metal from asteroids will not be sold on Earth, then it will be too expensive. It will remain in space, and will transmit valuable data to the digital market.

In a similar way, it can be proved that obtaining solar energy in space already this century will be cheaper than obtaining energy on Earth by any known means. Then this energy can be sent along the beam to the earth in the form of microwaves. Moving most of the energy sector to space will unload the planet from the environmental impact of energy generation and its supply chain. Even the use of wind and solar energy destroys large areas.

According to some estimates, extra-planetary energy generation can eliminate a quarter of the impact of industry on nature by 2100. And they do not even take into account the exponentially growing impact on the environment of production and operation of computing equipment, terrifying from the point of view of ecology.

Note that none of these ideas implies the return of asteroid material to Earth. The real value of space development will be in creating the space industry, from which we all will benefit. The main imports from space will be massless photons carrying data and energy.

An important thing that leaders of our governments should realize is that the investment in space development is a guaranteed rate for the future, one of the most reliable rates that they can make. NASA and other agencies will get more scientific and research data, an increased geopolitical presence, and all - for less money than current methods of doing business allow. Saving the Earth and improving our quality of life can be free side effects.