A Quixotic Quest to Mine Asteroids – Wall Street Journal

A new company backed by two Google Inc. billionaires, film director James Cameron and other space exploration proponents is aiming high in the hunt for natural resources—with mining asteroids the possible target.

The venture, called Planetary Resources Inc., revealed little in a press release this week except to say that it would “overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.” The company is formally unveiling its plans at an event Tuesday in Seattle.

Getty Images Peter Diamandis, a proponent of non-governmental space flight, is behind Planetary Resources.

While the announcement may cause some people to snicker at what could be a page out of a sci-fi novel or a Hollywood movie scene, Planetary Resources is making its debut just as scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other groups are embracing the notion of mining “near-Earth asteroids” and providing blueprints for how such a feat would be accomplished.

The possibility of extracting raw materials such as iron and nickel from asteroids has been discussed for decades, but the cost, scientific expertise and technical prowess of fulfilling such as feat have remained an obstacle. NASA experts have projected it could cost tens of billions of dollars and take well over a decade to land astronauts on an asteroid.

Tuesday’s event is being hosted by Peter H. Diamandis and Eric Anderson, known for their efforts to develop commercial space exploration, and two former NASA officials.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Scientists from NASA and elsewhere recently studied the feasibility of capturing an asteroid and bringing it back near Earth. Some findings:

An unmanned craft could launch on an Atlas V rocket Solar-powered craft could capture a 500-ton asteroid A potential flight would take six to 10 years in total. Estimated cost: $2.6 billion

Source: Keck Institute for Space Studies

Mr. Diamandis, a driving force behind the Ansari X-Prize competition to spur non-governmental space flight, has long discussed his goal to become an asteroid miner. He contends that such work by space pioneers would lead to a “land rush” by companies to develop lower-cost technology to travel to and extract resources from asteroids.

“I believe that opening up the resources of space for the benefit of humanity is critical,” Mr. Diamandis said in an interview with Forbes magazine earlier this year about plans to launch an asteroid mining company.

People listed by Planetary Resources as members of its “investor and advisor group” include Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, and Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman; Mr. Cameron, whose film “Avatar” depicted a corporate venture to extract natural resources from another planet; former Microsoft Corp. executive Charles Simonyi, who has made two trips to space and funded other related activity; Ram Shriram, a Google director and venture capitalist; and Ross Perot Jr., son of the Texas technology entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Ross Perot.

Former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki is listed in the press release as president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources, with Messrs. Diamandis and Anderson as co-chairmen.

None of the men could be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for Planetary Resources, which discloses few details on its website, declined to comment.

National Geographic/European Pressphoto Agency Space mining has captivated Hollywood. Director James Cameron is a backer of the new venture.

The news conference announcing the launch of the company is scheduled to be held at the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Tuesday.

Asteroid mining could take several forms, including sending humans in a spacecraft to an asteroid so they could explore and mine it. In another scenario, robotic spacecraft could be launched either to mine an asteroid directly or transport it closer to Earth so that humans could more easily reach it.

Such mining could yield a large amount of water, oxygen and metals to help further space exploration by allowing humans to fuel spacecraft, build space stations and other constructs. The resources could potentially be brought back to Earth as well.

Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.

Walt Disney/Everett Collection Bruce Willis in ‘Armageddon.’ His character was tasked with drilling into an asteroid to break it apart before it collides with Earth.

The estimated cost doesn’t include the billions of dollars that it might take to extract minerals.

“[W]ith the right ground-based observation campaign approximately five attractive [asteroids] per year could be discovered,” said the NASA study, published by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. It also said that by exploring asteroids people may be able to gain information or find raw materials that would allow humans to travel far beyond the moon.

Mr. Lewicki and Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut who is an advisor to Planetary Resources, were involved in the study, though it’s unclear if that means the company will adopt the same strategy for extracting material from asteroids.

Louis Friedman, a former NASA aerospace engineer who also was involved in the study, said he supports this strategy but noted that it would take “hundreds of millions of dollars” to get started and that Planetary Resources would “need to find a lower-cost way to access space” in order to succeed.

Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Sean Connery in 1981’s ‘Outland,’ a British thriller that takes place at a mining colony on a Jupiter moon.

He is also skeptical the company could find ways to transfer raw materials extracted from asteroids back to Earth, given the cost of going in and out of earth’s gravity well. Thus, he said, the materials could only be useful in space.

President Obama in 2010 set a goal to send a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025, but the details remain fuzzy and the effort hasn’t generated much public excitement or political traction. However, NASA is working on an unmanned mission called OSIRIS-Rex that would launch in 2016 and land on an asteroid, study it, and bring a tiny amount of it back to earth by 2023. NASA also is calling on amateur astronomers to help the agency find “near-earth” asteroids that could be explored in the future.

In recent years, as NASA has pulled back on space exploration, wealthy entrepreneurs such as Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla Motors Inc. creator Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen have tried to fill the void with their personal money. Mr. Musk has pursued commercial rockets and spacecraft to transport cargo and astronauts into orbit, while Messrs. Allen and Bezos have looked to launch tourists to the edge of space and possibly beyond.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 21, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Quixotic Quest To Mine Asteroids.

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Young Asteroids Got Smacked Around Just As Earth Did

Shortly after Earth and Mars were born, they found themselves in a lengthy bout of cosmic bumper cars with comets and space rocks. A new study now suggests the asteroids of the inner solar system were also subjected to such impacts.

An international team of astronomers analyzed the chemical compositions of Vesta and several other asteroids and found “highly siderophile elements” – chemicals that bind tightly to iron – not only in the cores of the space rocks but in their mantles.

The presence of the iron-loving elements outside the core suggests they were deposited there by impacts with other bodies after the asteroids had formed, but still early in the history of the solar system, said study lead author Christopher Dale, a postdoctoral researcher at England’s Durham University.

“This process of late accretion is recognized and well-accepted for Earth, the moon and Mars, but it wasn’t clear if it was a process that was widespread,” Dale told SPACE.com. [Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets]

The detailed results of the study are published in the April 6 issue of the journal Science.

Building blocks of a planet

Scientists think planets are formed by a process known as core accretion. As giant disks of gas and dust are swirling around nascent stars, the grains of dust bond together to form objects called planetesimals that collide and stick together to make even larger clumps of material. Once these emerging bodies accumulate enough mass, their gravity begins to suck in gas and they eventually become planets.

Since siderophile elements bind tightly to iron, any that were present in the early stages of a planet’s formation would have been pulled into the body’s iron core. So the presence of these iron-loving elements in the mantles of Earth, the moon and Mars must have been delivered later, after the process of core formation ceased.

The asteroids in the inner solar system – including Vesta, which is large enough that many researchers call it a protoplanet – were done forming in less time than the planets, with their cores accreting at lower pressures and temperatures.

“Within the first few million years, but certainly 10 million years after the start of the solar system, these bodies had accreted and formed their cores,” Dale said. For “a planetesimal like Vesta, during core formation at lower pressure and temperature, we’d expect almost all of the highly siderophile elements in the core. But that’s not what we find.”

Instead the researchers also found highly siderophile elements in the mantles, indicating that space rock impacts were not unique to larger planets and moons. The findings also suggest this process lasted longer than thought.

“It tells us that the process of accretion was certainly not a finite event; it continued for many millions of years,” Dale said. “There also must have been lots of small or medium-size bodies present in the solar system for these collisions to have occurred over a range of time scales.”

Shaking up the solar system

Astronomers think that about 600 million years after the solar system was formed (or about 4 billion years ago), a vast expanse of space beyond the orbit of Neptune, called the Kuiper Belt, was shaken up by the migration of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

This gravitational disruption scattered comets and other icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, flinging many into interstellar space but also throwing some onto orbital paths that wreaked havoc on the inner planets of the solar system.

This period, called the Late Heavy Bombardment, lasted until 3.8 billion years ago, during which time comets pummeled the side of the moon that faces Earth and created the contrasting light and dark patches on the lunar surface that are seen today.

Comets that hit Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment were thought to have deposited water and carbon on the planet, astronomers have said.

But the results of the new study suggest that a lengthy round of impacts preceded the Late Heavy Bombardment. This would account for the highly siderophile elements seen on Earth, the moon, Mars and early asteroids.

“We’re not relating the Late Heavy Bombardment to the increase in these highly siderophile elements,” Dale said. “What this study shows is that the vast increase was probably prior to the Late Heavy Bombardment. I’m not sure that the amount of material in the Late Heavy Bombardment is great enough to explain highly siderophile elements on Earth, so much of the material was probably derived from fairly large impacts early on in its history.”

The researchers plan to continue studying other bodies in the solar system to build upon these findings.

“We’re certainly interested in looking at other bodies to see what they tell us about these early processes,” Dale said.

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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