After we recently talked about the project of the company Planetary Resources, which intends to do some space mining after building its Arkyd 100 spacecraft, Mining Examiner found a related statement from Declan Vogt about the possibility of mining asteroids.
“The supply and demand of iron-ore and precious metals is globally well balanced; therefore, the mining of these metals in space for use on Earth is not viable“, said the strategic research manager of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Centre for Mining Innovation.
According to Vogt, space mining will not be the golden chimera everyone is thinking about. Mining outside the Earth will not result in a more affordable mining rate than the current one. “Placing hundreds of tons of precious metals on Earth would crash market prices and render valuable minerals worthless”, the expert says. In the researcher’s opinion, there are enough minerals on Earth that can be mined at a more affordable cost.
The mining engineer Michael Neale agrees concurs with Vogt. The expert notes that selling space resources on Earth’s metal markets won’t be viable, especially in the next years. This is his opinion:
The intent of initial space mining should be to support space development, as the value return for Earth will start as novelties, such as meteorites and moon dust, which already sell at a high price. Processing ore into metals is not easy and is even less so in space.
We need a much bigger presence in space before this will become a reality. We need to earn our place in space by mining the simpler elements to sustain ourselves and then, when we have mastered infrastructure, energy and simple mining, we escalate to metals. Although there are unlimited deposits of iron-ore and an abundance of most resources available — to mind-boggling degrees — in space, they are extremely inconvenient to mine.
Declan Vogt highlights that the real value of space mining is in its potential of providing resources for space exploration like metals and fuels. “Space vehicles and technologies for space exploration require large amounts of iron, which is the most commonly used metal for steel and vehicle manufacturing. Therefore, mining metals in space will be more viable and cost effective for space exploration”, he adds.
Inspired by a quote from Carl Sagan – “All civilisations become either space faring or extinct, and space faring requires space mining” -, Michael Neale adds that space mining is not the ultimate goal, but it might be an essential step to spread the human presence in space in a sustainable way.
According to the mining engineer, “space mining is currently a very big pill to swallow and understandably so. To make it a reality, we need to break its development down into small pieces and make sure every piece is worth the investment”.
Besides, we need laws that can regulate this new field, among so many other things. Like Neale says, “there are only treaties to guide what will happen, but no laws. My understanding is that the first come, first serve rule will apply. Eventually, laws to govern the mining of space resources will be required, but establishing international legislation is a slow process and for something that is yet to happen, it will take even longer”.