Earth for mining or – for those with particularly large concentrations of water – to create the ‘gas stations’ for a burgeoning industry looking ever farther outwards.
The Scramble for Space
A 2012 Caltech study concluded it could cost as little as \$2.6 billion to move an asteroid into near Earth orbit for easier mining. That was confirmed in a 2017 report by Goldman Sachs which stated, ‘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’. While \$2 billion might sound like a lot, it is comparable to the sunk cost for a new rare earth mine, which MIT presently puts at around \$1 billion. All of which means that once the full architecture is in place for asteroid mining, perhaps as soon as 2030, the marginal cost of each new mine will fall for every asteroid that is exploited. This will create a feedback loop of ever-improving infrastructure and rising incentives to extract minerals beyond our home planet.
That isn’t to say asteroid mining doesn’t have significant challenges to overcome before becoming a viable industry. Robots with the requisite levels of sensory-motor coordination are likely decades away although, as already highlighted in Chapter Four, that is more a question of when rather than if. Of greater concern is that the precise composition of asteroids, beyond predictive models based on broad categories, remains unknown. What if a company chose an asteroid only to find, upon arrival, that it holds far less water and platinum than expected? Between that and the immense costs required, specifically in robotics, it is dificult to see how nimble actors like DSI and Planetary Resources will fare when the likes of
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