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Stuart Nathan
Features editor
Asteroid mining: disaster movie, or the shape of things to come?
The extraordinary announcement yesterday of the formation of Planetary Resources, the billionaire-backed venture which aims to mine valuable minerals from asteroids, triggered an attack of deja-vu. It reminded me of my reaction when I first heard about the plans for Virgin Galactic’s maiden flight.
In an early publicity coup for the space tourism venture, Virgin announced that the passengers for the first flight SpaceShipTwo would include Richard Branson and his parents, plus Victoria Principal and Stephen Hawking. Hang on, I thought. The maverick and possibly hubristic tycoon owner of the ship, so confident that he’s brought vulnerable members of his own family along? The glamorous (but slightly B-list) actress, her glory days in the past? The wheelchair-bound genius scientist? This isn’t a news story, I thought. It’s the plot of a 70s disaster movie.
Then I felt slightly guilty about that, and tried to stop thinking it.
But my efforts were unsuccessful, because Planetary Resources — whose backers include Google CEO Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt; Peter Diamandis, who created the X-Prize Foundation; real estate magnate Ross Perot Jr (the son of the former US presidential candidate) and, almost inevitably, film director and undersea adventurer James Cameron — sounds like it was ripped straight from a science fiction movie. They’re planning on going into space? And strip-mining asteroids of precious metals like gold and platinum? And bringing it back to Earth? What could possibly go wrong?
Twitter, always a good place to go for amusing sarcasm, didn’t disappoint. ‘Oh, great,’ one commenter said, ‘now rich people are going to own space as well.’ Others asked whether these celebrity moneybags might like to solve world hunger before they started in on the asteroid belt.
Several pointed out that they couldn’t have found a more sinister-sounding name if they’d tried. To paraphrase a line from one of Cameron’s own films, you could easily imagine a dubious company representative telling the hero of our putative movie that ‘I’m from Planetary Resources, but don’t let that fool you; I’m actually an OK guy,’ before some sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
And that’s before you start thinking about the business plan — gold and platinum cost currently cost just over £1000 per ounce, and an upcoming mission to return two ounces of material from an asteroid for scientific study is costed at about £600,000. How can costings like that possibly turn a profit?
But when you look at Planetary Resources’ plans, cracks start to appear in the cynicism. For a start, the people in charge know what they’re doing. The president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources is Chris Lewicki, who was flight director for NASA’s Mars Spirit and Opportunity rover missions and mission manager for the Phoenix lander’s surface activities.
Moreover, the strategy is broken down into logical stages. The first is to launch small telescopes into orbit to survey near-Earth asteroids for useful substances, with volatiles like water, oxygen and nitrogen top of the list. The first of these is already under construction, and they can be launched on current rockets, piggy-backing with satellite launches; moreover, they can be spun around and leased out for Earth observation.
The second stage is to send out probes to tap these resources and place them into in-space supply depots. The thinking is that these substances are vital for deep-space missions but difficult to launch into space, especially water, which is heavy and incompressible. Future missions would need them, as propellants and to sustain crews, so collecting them and storing them in space, perhaps sending them out to a point where the mission could collect them, is a logical idea.
The third stage is the one which actually involves mining an asteroid, and there are several long-term visions for how this might be accomplished. With the experience of the previous two stages, you can imagine how costs could be driven down; but whether the economics stack up still seems far-fetched.
Is this another example of rich men’s hobbies getting out of hand? We’ve already commented on the example of James Cameron’s trip down to the Mariana Trench, along with Richard Branson’s upcoming attempt at the same feat (what is it with these two?) — in an upcoming issue, you’ll be able to read an interview with the designer of Branson’s submarine. Should we have to rely on the super-rich to have the vision and develop the technology to achieve these feats?
Perhaps not, but history is littered with examples of how what could be described as rich men’s hobbies blossoming into real science and engineering that affects everyone’s lives. Two of the most obvious are astronomy — originally the preserve of nobles and time-rich clergymen — and flight, whose early days as ballooning and the swashbuckling beginnings of powered aviation were solely the preserve of what must have seemed like rich idiots.
Page, Schmidt, Perot, Diamandis, Cameron et al are swimming in cash and if this is how they want to spend it, that’s their business. Of course, you could argue that they ought to be spending it on something else. You can definitely argue that they should pick a better name for their venture. But there’s no way that a government agency could possibly commit to such an ambitious venture, especially in the middle of a seemingly endless recession. And, as we’ve said numerous times, projects such as this grab the attention, bring glamour to engineering, excite future engineers, and make people think about and debate humanity’s aspirations and capabilities — and all of those are good things.
At the very least, it might stop James Cameron making another film. He hasn’t made a decent one since Aliens.
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Readers' comments (28)
Andrew Mooney | 28 Apr 2012 10:37 pm
I am surprised to discover that the editor of this column thinks that Aliens is a good film but nothing James Cameron has done since is any good.
"Aliens" is actually just "Avatar" with creatures that don't look or behave nicely. Otherwise, the two films are virtually identical. There are Marines, a mining company, corporate interests....and the local wildlife.
His best film is actually "Terminator 2" because it is quite subversive. It illustrates how scruffy the morality of many engineers actually gets once they get working upon a project. They no longer care about whether what they are doing is morally correct or not.
Miles Dyson has a flash house, a well paid job and has clearly not thought through any of the consequences of rushing to sell the Skynet chip to the military and removing humans from nuclear defence. He's like a lot of engineers in that he is so engrossed in the details of an interesting problem that he does not realise what the consequences of solving it might be.
"Avatar" is actually quite subversive as well. It suggests that if you place a group of humans in a place where no-one else will see them, they will act like savages if the local wildlife has something that they want.
He is therefore quite an interesting choice to have on an asteroid mining project, as at least he knows about the consequences of acting in an immoral fashion. This is contrasted with Google's upper management, who have "Don't Be Evil" as their corporate motto, and yet want to spy upon everything that you do online....And don't see anything wrong with it.
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Editor's comments | 28 Apr 2012 10:37 pm
Point of order: there's nothing local about the wildlife in Aliens. They are, as Ripley clearly states to the board of enquiry, not indigenous to planet LV-426.
Anonymous | 30 Apr 2012 2:12 pm
It makes a change for technology to be driven not by warefare and politics but through adventure. Like the good ole days of NASA (well sort of). I wish these gents well, we need these people with the vision and means to move us onwards.
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dave reynolds | 1 May 2012 2:32 pm
joking about films apart I think the idea is great as far as it will drum up new enthusiasm, potential employment and is a massive scope for finding out more about our less local surroundings. Thinking a bit more down to earth, (which the 'rich' probably arent) is it really a viable and worthwhile effort in this current stage of our technological evolution? How much does it cost to send a rocket into space? How much resource/ money/ manpower? And they want to send a whole mining community/communities? Heavy machinery etc etc etc. Space flight isnt cheap and the technology to make it so isnt here yet, so i suggest we should spend the money on trying to solve earth's energy worries so we have chance to evolve as an engineering community for long enough to make space dreams more plausible. But then its not our money.
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Peter Dickinson | 2 May 2012 12:56 pm
Avatar is a decent movie. Obvious plot, but well acted, lovely to look at and definitely worth watching.
Oddly enough it's all about an unscrupulous corporation strip mining another world. Reality emulating fiction?
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Ben Jensen | 2 May 2012 1:00 pm
A good place to start would be the orbiting scrap heap of space debris found above our planet. Plenty of very valuable pure metals and alloys up there, and a lot easier to 'mine' than asteroids.
Material mass is still difficult to cope with in space, so we need a step change in rocket motor efficiency for this to have a chance of working commercially. Also, figuring out how to slow down and de-orbit tonnage weights of ore in a controlled way is going to be real fun...
Great concept and good luck to the team at Planetary Resources (‘Dead Space’ never popped into my mind once ;>))!
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John Moran | 2 May 2012 8:50 pm
At last, someone is getting serious about exploring space instead of wasting the last 30 years since we left the moon.
OK, so it's a few rich kids doing it - so what? At least they are prepared to do it, unlike the mangy politicians who just want to feather their own beds and leave us all the crumbs from their tables.
I say good on them - just do it faster so I can see it happen in my lifetime or, better still, so out there with them - what an experience ...
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Anonymous | 3 May 2012 1:34 pm
Mr Mooney,
I do not think Mr Dyson was thinking of an AI controlled nuclear arsenal without human control when he designed the chip (neural net processor). As he said to his wife... "Imagine a jet airliner with a pilot that never gets tired, never makes mistakes ....does not turn up to work with a hangover;.....here is the pilot" -- pointing to the chip); his mission was to develop something that benefits mankind. Indeed, when he finally learns of the eventual fate of humanity he expresses shock and surprise (his project, like so many other big tech/engineering projects was later 'militarised' by the government). Much the same thing happened in the film 'Contact' ..a major scientific discovery is made ...then in wades the military .. who clearly have other plans from those who made the discovery, but alas Mr S.R. Haddon, an engineer (played by john hurt) actually sees more noble and just reasons to use the discovery and he helps the heroine (jodie foster).
Sorry for going off into 'cinema land' ... but sometimes films such as terminator and the like do show that sometimes, as well intentioned as our work may be; there are others who may seek to use it for more sinister ends or to gain power over others.
Please feel free to comment on my thoughts.
Regards,
An Engineer.
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John | 4 May 2012 3:18 pm
Ahh remember the days of the asteroid game on Atari and Pac Man, it all comes to pass!!
Really though great stuff, let's have something to aspire to, there isn't a lot of joy around at the moment is there? Who knows what may come of it after all!
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