Asteroid Mining And Space Colonization a Question of When Not If

A new age of space exploration has begun, one could say just in this current decade as several new private space companies are starting real business outside of Earth. SpaceX is probably the most visible with their Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft, and the stated goal by founder Elon Musk to bring down the cost for a ticket to Mars to under one million dollar. The most recent launch was by Swiss Space Systems presenting their ambitious but viable concept to revive a European space shuttle design to launch small satellites with a fully reusable system. A common driver that makes these new ventures possible all of a sudden are the advancements in manufacturing technology, computer systems and robotics. Increased automatisation and higher precision makes it possible to construct much cheaper and more compact components for spacecraft, and equip them with more powerful intelligence and autonomous abilities.

One of the earlier innovative commercial space companies, apart from the ones constructing satellites and providing launch services for them, is Space Adventures, standing out for facilitating the trips of the very first space tourists in history, and planning a Lunar exploration trip. Their chairman and co-founder Eric C. Anderson, shared his thoughts and hopes for space exploration in this century with The Atlantic last week.

One of the most notable things we will probably see is a permanent colony on Mars, Anderson said. This could happen within 30 to 60 years, about a generation's time, when there would be an "irreversible migration" of humans from Earth to permanent space colonies. "This Mars colony will start off with a few thousand people, and then it may grow over 100 years to a few million people, but it will be there permanently. That should be really exciting, to be alive during that stage of humanity's history," Anderson told The Antlantic.

A major motivation, besides human curiosity, and also economic enabler for this is of course the opportunity of gain. And this is given by the enormous riches of the strategic metals present in asteroids very close to Earth. Deposits on our planet are finite and are also becoming more difficult and expensive to mine, while our solar system holds nearly unlimited resources in its asteroid belts, already highly concentrated and ready to pickup, as soon as a few hundred thousand people will install the necessary infrastructure in space.

Just like the European explorers had to first build their fleets to conquer the world, and the American settlers forged their own tools and laid railroads to conquer the Continent, the first phase of conquering space is one of preparation and self-sufficiency. As Anderson notes, asteroids near Earth contain many resources that would be useful for people who would aim to explore Asteroids, live on the Moon, or settle Mars. Essential resources provided include water, rocket fuel, and certain metals.

In order to make asteroid mining viable, however, Anderson says that there is a need to make space travel cheaper both in terms of launching and operations.

The asteroid mining company Planetary Resources was officially started in 2012 and plans to launch their first space missions which will focus on asteroid reconnaissance already within the next two to three years, during which they will launch several small spacecrafts, weighing about 30 kilograms, that will send back imagery and map the gravity fields as well as use remote sensing and spectroscopy to detail what materials are in the asteroids.

Because of the small size and off-the-shelf components, the small explorers of the ARKYD series will be much cheaper than conventional probes. The company envisions to get robotic exploration of space in line with Moore's Law [the tech-world maxim that the price for computing power falls by half every 18 months]. Since asteroid mining doesn't involve people, it is possible to transition space exploration from a linear technology into an exponential one, and create an industry that can flourish off of exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

"It will be possible to know more about an ore body that's 10 million miles away from us in space than it would be to know about an ore body 10 miles below the Earth's surface," Anderson said, adding, "We're really not talking about if; we're talking about when."