32 | You have to go back to 1898 for the first mention of asteroid mining. It comes in Garrett P. Serviss’s science fiction work Edison’s Conquest of Mars. Science fiction may be where it remains for many of us, but in the intervening 127 years, much thought has gone into the subject. From a science fiction trope, it became more prominent in science and military writings, particularly during the Cold War. With the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the threat of nuclear war, and how to avoid it, discussions turned to creating space bases. In 1963, Dandridge Cole was the first to estimate the potential worth of an asteroid, using spectroscopy. That method allows you to work out if it is an M-Class asteroid (metal-based), or C-Class (carbon-based). Among Cole’s proposals was that you could hollow out an asteroid, mine its materials, then use the hollowed-out object as a base. This was – and still is – theoretical, but the contemporary manifestation of asteroid mining is much closer than you might think – if still not as close as its proponents might like us to believe. A NEW FRONTIER Asteroid mining as a private sector endeavour started in 2012 when the first two asteroid mining companies announced themselves – Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources. Both were bought out in 2018, but they have done the most in terms of shifting contemporary discourse around what asteroid mining is and what it can supposedly be used for. The focus has been largely twofold – on finding water and on mining platinum group elements, shiny metals that can be brought back to Earth and used for multiple purposes. Deep Space Industries’ website had a whole page dedicated to discussing water. Their plans were to scan and show what percentage of each asteroid’s surface was water and use that to rationalise their targeting. You need water to live, and it would be very expensive to take it there from Earth. Astronauts would also get sick of drinking their own recycled fluids. Another part of the argument is this water could be potentially used for offEarth agriculture. They have been testing this on the International Space Station, to see how it would work, and there has been discussion around what would be needed to set up agriculture on the Moon if we were to have a lunar base. A lot of this is discussed as in-situ resource utilisation, the idea being that the resources are already there, so you utilise them rather than taking everything with you. There are questions of expense, the amount of fuel it would take, the rocket space needed – you want to pack as much stuff onto a rocket or a payload as possible to make the operation viable, so anything already there is a big saving. You can also break water down into oxygen and hydrogen for fuel and life support systems. The second material group the firms look for are construction group elements, so you can use an additive manufacturing process, like 3D printing, using these different construction metals from the asteroid. The third group is volatiles, fun little gases. One potential use is as fertiliser, because you can use nitrogen and hydrogen in ammonia. The fourth material grouping is that of platinum group elements and rare earth metals. This is the main material group that is often discussed as being
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