From Goldman:
Space mining could be more realistic than perceived. Water and platinum group metals that are abundant on asteroids are highly disruptive from a technological and economic standpoint. Water is easily converted into rocket fuel, and can even be used unaltered as a propellant. Ultimately being able to stockpile the fuel in LEO would be a game changer for how we access space. And platinum is platinum. According to a 2012 Reuters interview with Planetary Resources, a single asteroid the size of a football field could contain $25bn- $50bn worth of platinum.
Water
The Space Shuttle’s fuel supply was essentially water with its atoms rearranged. And space is full of it. Deep Space Industries has even developed a thruster that simply heats water into steam as a propellant, making it safe to fly as a secondary payload when other propellants cannot. According to Planetary Resources, it takes 54 liters of water (fuel) to lift one kg to LEO. Lifting that same kg to GEO requires just 4 liters, but each of those requires 54, compounding the size of rocket required. This means that an orbiting ‘gas station,’ using water from asteroids, could radically change the way we interact with space and cut launch costs significantly.
Metals
Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum, with a single 500-meter-wide asteroid containing nearly 175X the global output, according to MIT’s Mission 2016. Furthermore, the less valuable metals from asteroids can be ground into a powder and used in a 3-D printer. Asteroid mining could very quickly supply an emerging on-orbit manufacturing economy with nearly all the raw materials needed.
Capex
While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn. We expect that systems could be built for less than that given trends in the cost of manufacturing spacecraft and improvements in technology. Given the capex of mining operations on Earth, we think that financing a space mission is not outside the realm of possibility.
Regulations
The exploration and extraction of resources from celestial bodies – like minerals found on the Moon – are generally regulated by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which limits claims on celestial bodies but allows for resource extraction. In the US, former President Obama signed Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which opened the door for US companies to explore, extract, and recover space resources.
Good luck with it.
