Things Are Looking Up for Asteroid Mining

Asteroids are rich with the metals used in clean energy technologies. As demand soars, advocates argue that mining them in space might be better than mining them on Earth.

Everyone’s into asteroids these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and Karman+ are preparing to test their tech in space before venturing toward asteroids themselves.

It’s getting serious enough that economists published a series of papers on October 16 considering the growth of economic activity in space. For instance, a studyby Ian Lange of the colourado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries. While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.

Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow. They find that in 30 to 40 years, the production of some metals from space could overtake their production on Earth. By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton. Asteroids also have significant concentrations of cobalt, iron, platinum, and other metals. And thanks to reusable rockets developed by SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and other companies, since 2005 launch costs for payloads have plummeted by a factor of 20 or so per kilogram—and they could drop further.

One day, robots may mine minerals to be used in space, such as for building spacecraft or habitats for astronauts. But current refining methods, which extract useful metals from dirt, depend on fundamentals like gravity, Lange says. It might be better to try to find a way to bring those resources down to Earth, he says—where there would also be plenty of demand for them.

While no one has ever tried to put a price on an asteroid, critical metals get reappraised by markets every day. Cobalt currently goes for about $33,000 per ton, and nickel for $20,000 per ton. Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities. Nickel's also necessary for solar panels, and cobalt’s needed for wind turbines. Demand for cobalt could rise sixfold by 2050, eventually reaching a million tons per year, while demand for nickel could increase fourfold, according to the International Energy Agency, depending on how seriously governments and industries try to achieve a clean energy transition. Demand for platinum-group metals is expected to grow as well, both for catalytic converters and fuel cells.

Lange’s study also highlights the social and environmental costs of mining on Earth. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals. Many mining sites in these nations have been reported for systemic use of child labor, forced labor, and human rights abuses, especially for the cobalt supply chain, according to the International Energy Agency. Indonesian nickel mining operations have also been blamed for cutting down forests and polluting water supplies.

While deep-sea mining could present the next frontier in mining these metals on Earth, that entails environmental risks like the disruption of aquatic life, noise and light pollution, and harm to ecosystems. Even the most barren patch of the ocean floor is teeming with life in comparison to asteroids, which—as far as scientists know—are lifeless rocks. Lange argues that mining asteroids will be a more acceptable trade-off to the public: “This [space] rock won’t look like it has looked for the last X million or billion years,” he says, but few people will care if no wildlife are at stake.

Space mining will have its own environmental issues, and currently there is no legal framework to regulate it. Space ethicists want to make sure companies don’t pulverize asteroids as they mine them, or take resources without leaving plenty for others and for future generations. The closest thing so far is the US-led Artemis Accords, a set of rules being crafted for lunar exploration. The moon doesn’t have much in the way of minerals, but it is likely that space agencies and private entities will compete to mine water ice at its poles. While the Outer Space Treaty states that no one can claim territory in space, the accords will allow them to set up “safety zones” around lunar activities.

Still, many technological and economic hurdles have to be crossed before mining begins anywhere. “What kind of manufacturing or refining activity is happening in space right now? Zero. You don’t go from zero to the state of the current economy quickly. You’ve got to crawl and walk first,” Lange says.

These studies attempt to answer questions about the role that space exploration—and related technologies like GPS and satellite imagery—will play in the growth of modern economies, and the potential for government-industry partnerships. Such questions remain “under-scrutinized,” says Luisa Corrado, an economist at Tor Vergata University of Rome, who organized the project. In her own study, she argues that economic and technological spillovers—when space activities stimulate advances on Earth—were more significant during the heyday of the Apollo program and the Cold War’s space race than they are now. But that could soon change. “In my view, we will gradually shift from a ‘space-for-Earth’ to a ‘space-for-space’ economy, providing more opportunities for the production of goods and services in space,” including mining for precious metals, she says.

Even if there’s potential, for now, space mining remains economically risky, and its future depends on increasing demand for certain minerals. In the 2010s, the companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries boldly claimed they’d be visiting and mining asteroids by the 2020s. Planetary Resources was backed by Google cofounder Larry Page and famously included filmmaker James Cameron on its board, as well as Dante Lauretta, the head of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Both companies received lots of hype (including from yours truly and this publication). But in late 2018 and early 2019, both quietly disappeared after being acquired by other companies and ceasing to exist as mining operations.

And before anyone can drill in space, the industry needs much more information about potential asteroid targets, including their abundances of minerals, how hard it would be to wrest them from the rocks, and the obstacles involved in bringing ore back to Earth. It’s hard to get this information; you can’t send a prospecting team to asteroids to take high-resolution photos or dig up core samples. While companies can use data collected by Earth-based telescopes, the next step will be sending spacecraft to examine them in detail.

AstroForge and its competitors may eventually succeed where their predecessors failed. The Los Angeles-based company plans to focus on metallic, M-type asteroids, which are lucrative ore sources for platinum-group metals, says CEO Matt Gialich. Meteorites—which are usually broken bits of asteroids—fall to Earth all the time, offering a glimpse of the makeup of asteroids in space. The concentration of platinum-group metals in iron meteorites ranges between 6 and 230 parts per million, higher than terrestrial ores, according to a recent studyGialich coauthored with a colleague of Lange’s at the colourado School of Mines. Their plan is to bring refined material from such an asteroid back to Earth by the end of the decade.

AstroForge's business model is designed around current technologies and market demand for these metals, not future ones, Gialich says: “We don’t need the market to grow at all. The space economy is already here.”

The company launched a 6U CubeSat into Earth orbit earlier this year, which they’re using to assess how their extraction and refining tech work in microgravity. They’re testing it on a hunk of metallic rock similar to what would be found on an asteroid. AstroForge also has a major test coming in early 2024, when they plan to deploy a spacecraft to closely observe a target asteroid—Gialich won’t name which one, but says it’s a metallic near-Earth object. If all goes as planned, the craft will measure the asteroid’s composition, preparing for a future mission to retrieve material from it. Engineers recently conducted a successful hot fire test of that mission’s flight propulsion system, the company announced on October 18.

Rather than hunting for limited precious metals, Karman+, a Denver-based company that incorporated last year, plans to collect the kind of regolith that can be found on most asteroids. For example, the Japanese space agency’s sample of the asteroid Ryugu showed that it contains hydrated phyllosilicates, a kind of clay that’s thought to be common. Daynan Crull, a Karman+ cofounder, says that large quantities of such raw material from similar asteroids could be used for manufacturing in space—to build things like satellite-servicing infrastructure and space-based solar power. “We’re talking about bringing about the age of regolith. Water and clay don’t grab the headlines like platinum does, but we truly believe this is a new frontier,” he says.

A third company, LA-based TransAstra, is developing asteroid mining technologies with support from NASA grants for far-out projects. It’s also working on spacecraft that could position satellites in Earth orbit or remove orbiting space junk. TransAstra representatives did not respond to WIRED’s request for an interview.

Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School economist and author of one of the new studies, has a positive outlook for the space economy. He believes industries using Earth-observing satellites, and satellite internet companies like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, are the least risky bets in the near term. The potential scale of space mining, manufacturing, and other new industries remains to be seen, he says, but massive government investment, on the scale of the Apollo era, would lead to more private sector investment, which could really affect the macroeconomy. “There’s a lot of optimism in some quarters,” Weinzierl says.

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