A scene from NASA Robotics Mining Competition 2015. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA. You can see more of Meredith’s excellent photographs here: https://plus.google.com/collection/QN3Mb

We just completed the 6th annual NASA Robotics Mining Competition, and like always it was awesome! This year, 46 universities from around the United States brought robots to mine the simulated Martian soil and win the coveted Joe Kosmo Award. Every year it has been an amazing success. We have learned valuable lessons that will make it possible for humans to go to Mars safely and affordably.

Why Mine on Mars?

A Mars mining robot by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA

Studies have shown we can dramatically cut the cost of human missions to Mars if we use local resources: the water ice beneath the Martian soil and the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.  With these we can create methane and oxygen for rocket propellants, and we can provide air and water for the crew. Water ice is easier to excavate at the Martian poles where it lies right on the surface. At lower latitudes it is buried beneath the soil that shades it from the sun. For affordable human missions to Mars, we need mining robots that can dig up the ice and haul it to chemical processors.

Mars mining will be difficult for several reasons: small digging force, abrasive dust, getting stuck, long communications delay, and nobody to fix them.

Mini-Me Mining

A Mars mining robot by Kent State University. Image credit: Meredith Chandler, NASA

Why would these robots have only a small digging force?  Because we can’t afford to build super enormous rockets capable of launching giant mining trucks to Mars. We have to send mini-mining trucks, instead.  When they get to Mars, the gravity there is much less than it is on Earth.  With both low mass and low gravity they will have a very low weight, which means they have very low traction on the ground beneath their wheels or treads, so they won’t have much force to push a digging bucket into soil or ice. We need innovative digging systems that can work with very low force!  In the next post I will show some of these innovative designs that students have built for the NASA Robotics Mining Competition.

Nonplussed by the Dust

Some dust raised by the West Virginia robot in the 2012 competition. Image credit: Phil Metzger, NASA

And what’s so bad about the Martian dust?  Because it is very abrasive and gets into everything, and eventually it will jam up the mechanisms of mining robots and make them stop functioning.  How long do they need to keep functioning?  Studies have shown that there is so much digging to do that it will take them more than a year to get it finished.  Fortunately, they will have enough time.  We send missions to Mars only once every two years when the planets line up, and then it takes 6 months of travel time to make the journey.  That leaves 18 months for robotic mining before we send the humans.  We want to know all the fuel is successfully made before the humans are committed onto the interplanetary trajectory.  It’s good we have that much time, because the robots are small and won’t be nearly as fast as the giant mining trucks on Earth. If only they can keep mining in the harsh martian dust for 18 months! We need to develop innovative methods for keeping dust out. At the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, robots are awarded points if their mechanisms are enclosed to keep out the dust, if they use brushes or other devices to remove dust, and if they avoid throwing dust on themselves while operating.

Little Wheel Keep On Turning

The heartbreak of getting stuck. As far as I can tell, no robot is immune. This is the North Dakota robot in the 2014 competition. Image credit: Phil Metzger, NASA

Getting stuck in the regolith is a constant threat. Regolith, like all granular materials, is a complex fluid that can transition from solid-like to fluid-like behaviors, and the scientists and engineers who study it (like I do) have not gotten the physics all figured out yet. I’ve even heard eminent colleagues laugh at the idea that we could get it figured out within the next 50 years! It’s amazing that such a common material has evaded an explanation for so long.  The French scientist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb did the first soil mechanics experiment way back in 1776. We have lots of experience working with regolith here on Earth so we have learned how to design wheels pretty well, but not so much for small robots in low-gravity worlds like Mars, nor with fluffy extraterrestrial soil that cannot simply be taken into a geotechnical lab and measured.

Nevertheless, we must do our best. Whenever the wheels push regolith in the wrong way, it switches to its fluid-like behavior and flows around the wheels freely, providing no traction for the robots to move. In other words, the robots get stuck. In the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, getting stuck is an all-too-common, heart-breaking occurrence. Of the robots that don’t suffer communications or computer failures, about half get stuck. By studying them over the years, we have learned a lot of tricks to design better robots. Unfortunately, the competition is still at Earth’s gravity, but at least we are using realistic regolith and small robots so much of the physics is relevant. Eventually, we will take our mining robots into reduced gravity aircraft for their final tests.

Robots on a Long Leash

The communications time delay between Earth and Mars can be large, as much as 21 minutes one-way. The means, if the operators on Earth see from the robot’s cameras that it is driving toward a cliff, their “STOP” command will get back to the robot over 40 minutes too late. Obviously, we can’t operate Mars mining robots using joystick commands from Earth. We need autonomous mining.

Now one idea is to put humans on Mars’ lower moon, Phobos, and let them teleoperate the robots that are down on the Martian surface using joystick commands.  Communication satellites around Mars will relay the control signals from Phobos (as it quickly circles the globe) to the future landing site on the surface.  The time delay will be no more than a second or two. I think that is a grand idea!  NASA wants to send humans to Mars by the 2030’s, and it’s likely (considering the budget shortfalls and the amount of other things we have to develop before then) that we won’t have fully autonomous mining ready in time. By doing the mining from Phobos, the surface missions can proceed on time. And while they are mining from Phobos, we will be learning more about how the robots function in the Martian regolith and gravity, so that our automation software can be perfected. Then, additional missions to Mars won’t need missions to Phobos each time.

Robots Helping Robots

The robots on the surface of Mars will need to do all this without breaking down for about a year and a half. If they do break down, there won’t be a robot repair shop to fix them. They need to be very reliable designs.

One solution is to send a swarm of small robots, so even if a few break down then there will be more to complete the task. This year at the NASA Robotics Mining Competition, five different teams brought multiple-robot systems. Every one of these was a completely different concept. This is why we have this competition. It brings in the vast creativity of college students and gives them the freedom to take risks and try new things.

Another strategy is to put a robotic repair shop on Mars. Many minerals contain metals that can be extracted and refined. This metal could be used by a 3D printer to make spare parts, and a robot with some dexterity could replace parts to fix a broken robot. We probably won’t build a robotic robot repair shop for the earliest Mars missions, but it is the eventual goal.

Next Steps

So what is the next step for Mars mining?  Every year, the head judge of the competition, Rob Mueller, has been evolving the rules to push it towards more realism. In the first years of the competition there were no rules about dust, for example. Just this year, simulated ice was added to the regolith beneath 20 cm of dry soil, and teams that dug down into the ice got extra points. I think the competition will continue to evolve as we get closer to building the actual mining robots for Mars. Eventually, the in-house NASA team will build some flight-like prototypes and put them through final tests. Then, it’s off to Mars.

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Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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Artist concept of a mission to bring an asteroid to Earth

It has been proposed that NASA go out, grab an asteroid, and bring the asteroid to Earth. It would be placed into high lunar orbit (not directly in Earth orbit).  Once there, astronauts can go out to visit it.

This would demonstrate key technologies like the solar electric propulsion and the ability to move asteroids, which could be important someday if we see the big one heading toward the Earth.  The relocated asteroid will become a destination for astronauts in the new Orion space capsule.  Such a trip will be a test of our ability to go farther than we ever have before without going all the way to Mars.  It would be much healthier than going all the way out to the asteroid in its original orbit around the sun, which would give the crew an unacceptably huge dose of cosmic radiation. (That’s a problem we still need to solve.)

The proposed mission will also give us the best opportunity EVER to study an asteroid, a fundamental building block of planets and an historical record of our solar system. So you can count on really awesome science coming from it!  And as if that weren’t enough, it will give us the opportunity to mine a real asteroid in weightlessness, demonstrating our ability to gather space resource that enable even more ambitious activities in space.

There are many, many kinds of rocks in space, so before we bring an asteroid to Earth we need to think which kind will accomplish all these purposes.  The next few posts will cover some important asteroid characteristics to consider.

An Asteroid’s Size

Size matters when considering how to bring an asteroid to Earth

One of the most important features is the asteroid’s size.  It would be absolutely fantastic if we could bring back a huge asteroid, a dwarf planet like Ceres, one that has enough gravity for Bruce Willis and a team of oil drillers to drive around on their asteroid buggy shooting its Gatling gun.  But that would require too huge a spacecraft to haul back to the Earth, too much fuel, and too much money.  Furthermore, it would be a bit dangerous.  What happens if we make a mistake while hauling it back and accidentally hit the Earth instead?  Larger than 25 to 30 meters, a portion of the asteroid could survive entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and hit the surface.  Pow!  That could be really bad.  But smaller than 10 meters an errant asteroid will completely burn up, causing nothing more than a brilliant display of light and color in the sky.  We are considering an asteroid in the range of 7 – 10 meters in diameter if we can find a good one.  That’s plenty small enough for safety.

By the way, if we bring back a rock smaller than 1 meter, then technically it’s not an asteroid; it’s a meteoroid.  Visiting such a rock would not fulfill the President’s direction to visit an asteroid.  We have to draw the lines somewhere.  Before 2010, a space rock had to be bigger than 10 meters to be considered an asteroid.  After a bunch of really big space rocks smaller than 10 meters were discovered, scientists decided they should be called asteroids, so the limit was moved down to 1 meter to be more inclusive.  This was four years after Pluto had been kicked out from being a planet, so maybe they were feeling guilty and tried to make up for it.  Anyhow, a 7 meter space rock now counts as an asteroid, and it’s small enough to bring to Earth economically so astronauts can visit it without exposure to too much cosmic radiation.

Some chondritic asteroids are believed to have as much as 20% water by weight.

One last consideration about the size:  can we get enough resources from a 7 meter asteroid to really do anything with it?  Well, some asteroids are as much as 22% water by mass (in the form of hydrated minerals).  That means a 7 meter asteroid could yield up to 83 metric tons of water!  That’s enough propellant to send a Human-class, 52 ton spacecraft from low Earth orbit to Mars (Δv=4.3 km/s).  To launch that much propellant from Earth up to low Earth orbit would cost more than a third of a billion dollars on the least expensive launcher available today!  That’s not enough savings to recoup the development cost of the asteroid retrieval mission, but it’s a good start toward setting up an in-space capability that can pay back a million-fold or even a billion-fold in the longer run.  And that doesn’t account for the value of the other materials in the asteroid, such as metals for 3D printing of spaceships.  So I’d say a 7 meter asteroid is big enough for a first mission!  It gives us a great opportunity to develop and test some very important technologies.

Next topic:  what type of trajectory the asteroid should be on when we go out to get it?

Author information

Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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At the most recent count, I found eight companies with a focus on space mining. They are at various stages:  seeking capital, developing technologies, and planning missions.  These companies have similar visions for the long-term:  robust human civilization in space.  To do this, they plan to initiate an industry that utilizes the resources of space.  That’s the key, because launching out of a planet’s gravity field is expensive and dangerous.  If we ever want civilization beyond the Earth, we need to avoid launching everything from Earth.

RASSOR, a NASA robot designed to mine space, working in very low gravity environments

To accomplish their goal, these companies that plan to mine space will need some profit in the near term:  to support their families and to raise capital toward the big vision.  They have different strategies to do this.  Four of them plan to mine the Moon, and four plan to mine asteroids.  At least three have discussed mining metals like platinum to sell down here on the Earth.  Others have discussed mining water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen, and selling it to other space-faring entities as rocket propellant so they can boost satellites into higher orbits or send humans on missions to Mars, for example. Both of these mining products, metal and water, can be obtained by mining the Moon or by mining an asteroid.

A NASA concept to mine space: a method to pull asteroids back to Earth by tether.

Already some of the companies have discussed plans to manufacture things in space like communication satellites that are bigger and have greater capacity than anything we could fit onto a rocket launched from Earth.  The metals and other materials they mine in space would therefore not be sold on Earth. In this Information Age, beaming the data alone is a very lucrative business.  And some have discussed plans to build giant solar power plants that will beam energy to Earth.  These general strategies were discussed in an earlier post, “How Do You Make Money in Space?”

So here is a summary of the companies I found that plan to mine space.  The nearer-term strategies listed here are according to on-line resources.  I am sure they all plan to do more than this, and I will update the table as I find out more.  My hope is that by providing this brief overview the world will see that this is an active and growing sector because bright minds are realizing the time is now to mine space.

To this list we could add SpaceX, because they plan to have Mars colonies, which implies they will need to obtain resources on Mars.  Also, there are many companies that plan to directly support these space mining companies with other in-space services.  I love the vision of all these companies!

(Please note:  these posts are completely my own private musings and do not represent the views of any organization, including my employer.)

Author information

Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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The Near Term

Everywhere I go, I ask my colleagues this question:  “How can you make money in space?”  The answers I have collected over the years can be placed (for the most part) into the following categories.

1.  Space Tourism. This involves flying to the ISS, taking trips around the Moon, or taking suborbital flights to see the Earth from the blackness of space while experiencing zero gravity. It might include hotels on the Moon or casinos in Earth orbit. You make money in space tourism by selling people an experience, which might change their lives.  What other ways can you offer tourism experiences in space?

2. Space Novelties.  This involves selling anything related to space, not for its inherent value, but simply for the novelty that it is somehow connected to space.  For example, you might bring back lunar rocks and sell them as paperweights.  (If you sell them to scientists, then it’s not a mere novelty.)  You might also sell the service of spreading people’s ashes on the Moon.  Can you think of space novelties that have significant commercial potential?

3.  Supporting science and exploration.  This is one of the main ways the “New Space” companies hope to make money in the near term.  The classical way to support science and exploration is to get a big government contract to build spaceships that the government designs, owns, and operates, or to provide services to the government for launching or operating those government spacecraft.  The New Space companies operate under a more entrepreneurial model:  the company puts up its own capital, makes its own decisions, takes its own risks, and makes its own money by offering support for science and exploration customers in space.  Those customers may be government agencies like NASA, but they could also be private individuals who want to fund their own missions in space.  This method of making money might involve providing rocket propellants needed by a Mars-bound spaceship, allowing it to fuel up in Earth orbit rather than launching with all its own fuel from Earth.  That would be a huge cost-saver for Mars exploration.  Those propellants might be made by a commercial company that mines the water ice on the Moon or from a nearby asteroid then electrolyzes it to produce  hydrogen and oxygen, which are excellent rocket propellants.  A company might also manufacture and sell spare parts or even entire spacecraft that they made in space, Other companies are getting ready to provide the transportation services in space:  to Earth orbit, to the surface of the Moon, and even to Mars.  Do you have any other ideas for companies supporting science and exploration in space?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.  I’m still collecting ideas for this list.

4.  Planetary Protection.  A space company might also make money selling services to the United Nations or to some other consortium of governments to protect planet Earth from dangerous Earth-crossing asteroids. It could provide services like mapping the asteroids, tracking and predicting their trajectories, and pushing them out of the way.  In the long run, perhaps these companies will completely clear all dangerous asteroids out of the neighborhood of Earth, using them up in construction projects or putting them into long-term, safe parking orbits.  Don’t underestimate what fantastical things a self-supporting robotic industry in space can do.  If we follow the logical path, soon the entire Oort cloud could be brought under the control of our planetary protection system.  This kind of business would be funded ultimately by taxpayers through their governments rather than by individual commercial customers, so in that respect it shares some commonality with government-funded science and exploration (in item 3).  However, planetary protection may motivate a unique element of taxpayer support, additional to all the support for item 3.  This should become true as the taxpayers grow in their feeling that the risks are real — the risk of an entire city being destroyed, or of all major lifeforms on Earth being extincted.  Continuing good science education will eventually make the people feel how real this is.  It is true that the risk is low over periods of time as short as, say, 100 years, but how low does the risk need to be to make such a tragic possibility morally acceptable, when we held it in our hands to virtually eliminate it forever?

5.  Returning Material Goods to Earth.  Maybe a profit can be made by mining metals or other resources and bringing them back to Earth’s markets for sale.  Some people I know believe the conditions are right to make this profitable today.  They argue that highly valuable platinum can be found near lunar impact craters, and since the pounding of micrometeorites over billions of years has already crushed the ore into a granular material the mining processes will actually be much simpler than on Earth.  Others argue that platinum along with other metals will be hugely profitable from asteroids, because their concentration in asteroids is many orders of magnitude higher than in the best ore bodies on Earth.  Still others argue that lunar Helium-3 can be sold profitably on Earth, because Helium-3 is needed for many different purposes on Earth and it is a non-renewable resource that is nearly depleted.  My opinion on this?  I am hopeful.  I believe with the advance of robotic technologies it is foolish to think that anything uneconomic today will remain uneconomic more than a few more decades.  Whoever isn’t getting into the business today will be getting into the business too late.  Also, in addition to raw space resources, maybe finished goods can be manufactured in space for sale on Earth, relying on the special environment of space to do things that can’t be done more economically on Earth.  For example, maybe you need zero gravity to make something in space, or maybe you just need the vast real estate of the Moon for some activity that is not permitted on Earth.  I have heard many suggestions but so far no definite plans that fall into this latter category. Any other ideas?

6. Beaming Energy to Earth.  Maybe instead of bringing material goods back from space, we can bring back immaterial energy.  Space beamed power has been controversial.  It is the idea of collecting solar power from somewhere in space — perhaps by satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, or perhaps by solar cells made out of regolith on the surface of the Moon — and then beaming the power down to the surface of the Earth via microwaves or lasers.  Some, like me, believe it will be possible to make money this way in the not-too-distant future.  Others believe it is a crazy idea and is so far from being profitable that only a fool would ruin his reputation even talking about it.  They point out that solar cells in the deserts of Earth are five orders of magnitude cheaper than solar cells launched into space.  How can you possibly make up for five orders of magnitude in the cost?  However, that argument entirely misses the point of space beamed power.  The real cost of solar power is not in generating it, but in storing it so that you have power at night.  Storing solar power is orders of magnitude more costly than generating it.  As a result, solar power generated in the deserts of Earth is uneconomic as a baseload capacity power source.  We use it only for topping off the peak demand during the daytime. Well, if we wanted to invest in dual power generation systems, we could have enough solar cells for all our baseload power in the daytime and then we could use the parallel system for power generation using entirely fossil fuels at night.  That would avoid the need for storage and would reduce fossil fuel usage by a little more than half.  Why don’t we do that today?  Because of the high cost of building and maintaining two completely parallel power generation systems.  And even if we did it, we would still be using fossil fuels at night, so it won’t get us completely off fossil fuels.  There are only two alternatives.  One is to store the solar energy for use at night, which is expensive.  The other is to put the solar energy collectors in space outside of Earth’s shadow so that you never have to store it and yet it is still available 24/7.  If we reduce the launch cost enough, then maybe it will become economic as baseload power.  I have heard two proposals that can in principle do this successfully.  One is a unique way of launching very affordably:  using a large in-space laser to beam energy at rockets that use uncombusted, pure hydrogen as the propellant for the best possible launch performance.  The other proposal is to make the power satellites in space, using materials that were mined in space and thus avoiding the launch costs entirely.  More work is needed, but I believe that when we have sufficient industrial capability in space, this will eventually become a money-maker.  The question is how soon it will become profitable?  Will it contribute to the startup of space industry, or will it be feasible only after the industry is already fully started?

7.  Beaming Data to Earth.  Like item 6, this one involves bringing an immaterial product down to Earth, and that makes the downward transportation very affordable.  To beam data, like energy, you just need an antenna instead of a spaceship. But what kind of data can we sell by beaming it down to Earth?  Well, navigation data for one.  There is a big market for GPS services.  And for another, we can beam down the data that was beamed up from the Earth — I mean, we can offer data relay services:  communication satellites.  There is much more that we can do with communication satellites than we are doing today.  For example, here are two proposals to put bigger and cheaper communication satellites into orbit.  The first proposal is to have an orbiting refueling depot and a set of space tugs.  These tugs fuel up using propellants mined in space and then take the satellites from low earth orbit to geostationary orbit higher up.  A recent study by the 2012 International Space University showed that for most rocket launchers this will provide about a 40% reduction in launch cost.  The second proposal is to simply make the communication satellites in space, just like making the beamed power satellites in space.  Then you eliminate the launch costs entirely, and (more importantly) enables you to put much larger communication systems into space than will fit on a rocket, and that opens up brilliant possibilities.  Beaming data is a huge growth area because the Information Revolution is still in full swing with no signs of abatement. Every year, more and larger communication satellites are demanded and launched into space.  Parts of the globe are still under-served in cell phone and internet service.  Point-to-point and secure communications are in increasing demand.  Soon we will all have the internet with high definition streaming video in our wrist watches and maybe (for some of us?) directly in our brains.  In my opinion, the manufacture and support of communication systems is one of the most lucrative opportunities for commercial space companies throughout the next century and beyond.

The Longer Term

The above list is things that companies might start doing to make money even before there is any other infrastructure or industry in space.  Those are startup activities.  But once those activities are established, they will create opportunities for even more ambitious projects in space.  One idea is to build colonies for people on Mars, and to sell or rent membership in those colonies.  The miracle of human industry is that we can turn a profit even when there are no resources at all, simply by applying our own ingenuity and effort.  So if there are enough humans on Mars, then resources or not, it will eventually be profitable, and with those profits the colony can buy from Earth anything it cannot yet make.  One thing that a Mars colony could sell profitably would be intellectual property:  inventions, technology, art, music, literature, and so on.  Again, it only takes antennas to ship those things back to Earth.  Robert Zubrin has pointed out that colonies have historically attracted inventive, entrepreneurial people, so Mars colonies may be expected to rival the most creative places on Earth.  Consider Silicon Valley in California:  all the people living there do not survive on resources grown and mined in the local area.  Their biggest industry is exporting intellectual capital. That allows them to buy everything they need.

Other wild ideas I have heard promoted for the longer term include:  extreme sports in the exotic environments in space; nursing homes in low gravity where people will have more freedom to move; and gigantic and dangerous research projects that are just too risky to perform on Earth.  What ideas do you have?

Extreme sports stadium on the Moon. Artwork by Pat Rawlings courtesy of NASA.

The Very Long Term

Eventually, there is no reason why all of the solar system should be less profitable for industry than the Earth is.  The solar system has literally billions of times more of every element and billions of times more energy than we have on Earth.  There is vastly more real estate.  There are unique environments to do things impossible on Earth.  With robotics we are no longer limited to operating in the environment of Earth.  Robotics can lead the way and set up cities and transportation systems for humans to operate everywhere in the solar system from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. This would be a Kardashev Type 2 civilization.

Shortcutting the Process

My colleagues and I recently wrote a paper about getting to the very long-term in a very short while.  The paper is called, “Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of the Space Industry and Solar System Civilization.”  It was published in the ASCE’s Journal of Aerospace Engineering in January of 2013.  I will discuss this paper in more detail in future blog posts.  For now I will just mention that, with only a little government funding, we can make a gigantic space industry self-supporting in as short as 20 to 40 years. If we do that, then every activity we do in space will be economic and produce almost unbelievable benefits to humanity.

Summary

I think the prospects for space industry are extremely bright.  Commercial companies are already lining up to establish businesses in various market niches:  mining asteroids, mining the Moon, providing launch services from Earth, providing transportation to the Moon, manufacturing in space, providing tourism opportunities, etc.  The governments of the world have a fantastic opportunity to leverage this commercial investment, both enhancing their own activities in space and making the commercial companies successful.  And with just a modest investment, we can directly startup a self-sufficient industry in space.

So is space industry for real?  It sure is.

Author information

Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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Water Wars

If the Earth were an apple, you could dip the apple into a bucket of water, pull it out, and the sheen of water on its surface would correctly represent the amount of ocean water on the Earth. It’s hardly anything at all!  There are other places in our solar system that have millions of times, even hundreds of millions of times more water than planet Earth. It just happens that the Earth has its very small amount water in liquid form. whereas most other bodies in our solar system have their vast amounts of water completely frozen. It’s that fact that makes Earth so special for life.

This reminds me of the movie Battle: Los Angeles.  Trying to explain why the space aliens are fighting to exterminate us, a planetary scientist says that Earth has something the aliens want, something they can’t get anywhere else in our solar system:  water in liquid form.  Apparently the aliens can build fleets of starships, fly armies through interstellar space, and fight wars of global extermination, but they can’t melt a comet!  The truth is, for a technological civilization, Earth is not a good place for resources.  For creatures that are technologically ahead of us by just a little bit, the best place would be the asteroid belt!  If slightly more advanced aliens ever do invade our solar system and domineer the resources of our asteroid belt, it would possibly doom us to never traveling to another star.  We need the asteroid belt.  Space resources are critical to our future.

By Alvim Corrêa, 1906 illustration for War of the Words.

And so this is why we are at such a special time in human history.  We are living in the brief moment of time when humans pass from planetary poverty into full ownership of an amazingly rich solar system, moving our civilization to the next higher level.  If we act on this moment, then the billion-fold leap in our economic ability will be revolutionary.

A Grossly Incomplete History of Time

Here’s the background story to help us understand our pivotal role.  Knowing this, you will begin to see the kind of strategy we need to bring this revolution about.  I will leave out many cool details to keep this extremely short.

1. The sun began burning and giving off light into the cloud of molecules and dust that surrounded it.
2. The sunlight blew the lighter molecules like water far, far away into the darkness.
3. Heavier elements like iron and silica remained closer to the sun and clumped into more dust, asteroids, dwarf planets, and planets.  These became Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and all the rest of the asteroids.  The bodies closest to the sun (like Earth) were originally bone-dry because the water was all blown away during their formation.
   

   Image credit: NASA

4. Far enough away from the sun there is a “Frost Line,”  beyond which the lighter elements and molecules like hydrogen and water can clump together to form more planets and Moons.  Those became the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all their icy moons, and the dwarf planets and other icy bodies far beyond Neptune.
5. When the rocky bodies (like Earth) accumulated enough material, they got hot and melted.  The molten metals then mostly sank to the core of those bodies because molten metal is heavier than the molten rock.  The molten rock floated to the top and hardened into a crust.  This process is called differentiation.  Metals therefore became inaccessible at the surface of planets like Earth because it was all deep down in the core.  Bad news for future technological civilizations that will need metals.
6. Apparently there were at least two planets (or “proto-planets”) between the distances of Mars and Jupiter that were big enough to undergo differentiation and that later collided, breaking apart into small chunks. These are now some of the asteroids of the main belt.  The material from the cores of those two proto-planets are now M-Class asteroids, composed of pure metal.  The chunks from the crusts of those proto-planets are a type of S-Class asteroid, composed of stony material.  These planetary fragments never re-clumped into a single planet because the gravitational effects of the nearest and biggest planet, Jupiter, kept them stirred up.  Thus, the metal of an entire planetary core is still exposed and broken into bite-size chunks in the asteroid belt.  Excellent news for a future technological civilization.

   Video showing discovery of asteroids from 1980 through 2012, which indicates the quantity of asteroids both in the main belt and near Earth. Some estimates say we have found only 1% of the asteroids, so far.

7. Because the asteroid belt is so close to the frost line, the bodies in that region were able to harbor and shelter some of the water from being blown all the way out past the frost line.  We now know that many asteroids in the furthest part of the main belt are extremely rich in ice.  Ceres, the dwarf planet, is believed to have a million times as much water as Earth.  Even more excellent new for technological civilizations, since metals and ices are co-located.
8. The icy bodies that formed beyond Neptune (like Pluto) are so far out that they don’t collide very often.  Thus Pluto and the three other known dwarf planets in that region, plus the countless other smaller bodies, failed to clump together into a proper planet.  (Sorry, Pluto fans.)  However, the material did collide often enough to flatten out into a doughnut shape aligned with the plane of the solar system.  This doughnut-shaped cloud of icy bodies is the Kuiper Belt.
9. Even further out, the material was spread so far apart and so thinly that it collided almost never at all.  It did clump into icy bodies, but the swarm of these bodies never flattened into the plane of the solar system.  It remains as a spherical cloud of icy bodies surrounding our entire solar system.  This is the Oort Cloud.
   

   Credit: NASA

10. All these solar system bodies tug and pull on each other, as do passing stars from beyond the solar system, and these disturbances occasionally send a small fraction of the bodies flying from the main asteroid belt or from the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud into the inner solar system.  Some are rocky or metallic.  Some are icy.  The icy bodies from the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are called comets when they fly into the inner solar system.
11. These icy bodies, both comets and icy asteroids, brought water back into the bone-dry inner solar system as they crashed onto the planets and Moon that had formed there.  This water was now able to persist in liquid form on the Earth and (for a while) Mars, because their gravity and warmth kept the sun from blowing it away again.  On Mercury and the Moon the crashing ice formed temporary atmospheres of water vapor that the sun began quickly blowing away again, but a portion of these atmospheres re-froze into the permanently shadowed, cryogenically cold craters near their poles.  Mars’ water eventually froze up, too, when its atmosphere became too thin to keep the surface warm.  (Venus has too thick an atmosphere and so is too hot for water in any form.)  So the Earth has long-term liquid water.  Mercury, the Moon and Mars have solid ice:  small amounts relative to the outer solar system, but strategically importance because of their locations near Earth.
12. 

    The Murnpeowie Meteorite, an iron meteorite weighing over 1 tonne. Photo credit: James St. John

    The M-Class asteroids that crashed onto the planets of the inner solar system deposited some metal back into those crusts.  Other metal was brought up by mantle convection from the core and plate tectonics through the crust, for planets like Earth that have those processes.  Good news for the beginnings of technological civilization.  Enough metal to get us off this rock and out to the asteroid belt.

Zoned for Commercial Use

This history explains the zones of resources we have in the solar system:

1. Solar energy is from the center of the solar system.
2. Silicate materials are mainly in the rocky planets.
3. Metals are mainly in the asteroid belt.
4. Hydrogen and Helium are mostly in the gas giant planets.
5. Ices are mostly in the outer solar system:  moons of gas giants and objects beyond Neptune.  This ice includes water, carbon compounds like methane and carbon dioxide, and nitrogen compounds like ammonia.
6. Smaller quantities of resources can be found in special reservoirs:

• Ice at the poles of the Moon and Mercury and beneath the surface of Mars.
• Ice and metals in wayward asteroids, and ice in wayward comets.  This includes Near Earth Asteroids passing very close to Earth.
• Metals as isolated ore bodies on Earth and probably other rocky planets and moons.
• Liquid water and the organic materials formed by life and accumulated on planet Earth.

Source: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/index.cfm

Strategy to Grow Human Civilization

Knowing this pattern, we can devise strategies to really make use of our entire solar system and take human civilization to the next higher level.  We need to start with the resources that are easiest to reach, first.  We started on the Earth, and our civilization grew so large that it is starting to feel the squeeze of this planet’s limitations.  Other life on this Earth still needs these resources, so let’s not be greedy for just this one planet.  The next most accessible resources beyond the Earth include those of the Moon and the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs).  Those resources are limited reservoirs, too, being in the dry inner solar system, but fortunately they are large enough to get a healthy, robotic space industry started.  Then the industry can set up a transportation network to begin utilizing the asteroid belt, and eventually the outer solar system so that we can access the billion-fold greater resources of of this, our amazingly wealthy home.

So here is a simple, top-level strategy:

1. Develop our capabilities using the resources of Earth (Kardashev Type 1 civilization)
2. Use the resources of the Moon and NEAs to establish industry in space in a convenient, nearby location while it still relies on some parts and materials transported from Earth
3. After achieving full self-sufficiency in space, leave the very limited resources of the innermost solar system and move industry to the Asteroid Belt so it can vastly increase in scale (moving toward Kardashev Type 2 civilization)
4. When able, expand the transportation network to include the outer solar system and thus vastly increase the scale of industry again.
5. Colonizing the Milky Way will now be easy. (Begin moving toward Kardashev Type 3 civilization.)

This is heady stuff, so I am anxious to return to the original topic:  how we can all personally, individually take part in the exploration and colonization of space!  But there is one more topic I need to discuss first.  How realistic is it for us to access the wealth of solar system resources within this generation?  That’s what really motivates me to help everybody get involved, and that’s the topic for the next post.

Please let me know your thoughts about this!  There is a lot of room for disagreement, and I would love to hear other views.

Author information

Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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