If you happened to be in
the Seattle Museum of Flight last Tuesday, Apr. 24, you might have been able to
squeeze into a news conference called by an outfit terming itself Planetary
Resources, Inc. Planetary
Resources’ main distinction so far is that it has a lot of resources of the
monetary kind. Backers reportedly
include Google CEO Larry Page, who is in possession of some $16 billion
personally. What Planetary
Resources’s co-founder Peter Diamandis wants to do is to mine asteroids within
a decade, that is, by 2022 or so.
Already they are planning to launch small orbital telescopes, modern
versions of the old mining engineer’s surveying transits, that they will use to
search for likely prospects for a visit.
But as in earth-bound mining, you are never completely sure what you
have got until you go there and start digging.
The idea of mining
extraterrestrial objects is not new.
One writer at www.livescience.com
traced the idea back to an 1898 short story endorsed by none other than Thomas
Edison, whose single most costly failed project involved a Canadian iron-mine
venture in 1902. In 1944, Isaac
Asimov used an asteroid mine of the future as a setting for one of his
speculative pieces about whether robots could become sophisticated enough to
foment rebellion. But Diamandis
and company are not fiction: they have
serious money and serious plans, and while I’m sure science fiction enthusiasms
are in their backgrounds, their main motivation is to make more of what they
have a lot of already, namely, money.
But they want to make it in a cool way.
There are actually two aspects to their plans. One is to use
asteroids as a resource for the thing that currently makes space flight so
expensive in the first place, namely, the fuel. When you have to pack everything you need on a trip and
can’t count on finding any gas stations, it severely limits your options as to
what else you can take along. But
several researchers have shown that if it was possible to establish fueling
stations in space, it would make the logistics and economics of space travel
much friendlier than they are now.
So once you’re in space, never mind gold or platinum or anything like that: fuel is the most precious
resource. And the idea of erecting
a solar-powered hydrogen plant on an asteroid and making hydrogen from water
(ideally) or rocks (in a pinch) would satisfy that need. From a technical engineering
standpoint, this aspect of the Planetary Resources plans makes a lot of sense.
What about the rest of it, namely, mining asteroids for
profit by extracting rare materials such as platinum and so on? I would urge Diamandis, Page and
company to do a little reading in the history of 16th-century Spain. It was Spain more than any other
country which did on a small scale what Planetary Resources is trying to do on
a large scale: namely, exploited
newly discovered mineral wealth on a near-monopoly basis for quite a while,
from 1492 right up to the 1800s.
The worst aspect of Spanish colonization of the Americas was their
barbarous treatment of the native Americans, who were forced into slavery and
furnished most of the labor involved in operating the gold mines that gave rise
to the wealth that produced Spain’s Golden Age of culture. Fortunately, no asteroid appears to
have even non-sentient life on it, so that particular problem will not arise.
Of course, if you import too much of a given scarce
resource, its price can fall to the point where it’s not worth fooling with anymore. But I am sure that the Planetary
Resources people will look to the example of the DeBeers diamond monopoly as to
how to control their prospective monopoly to extract the most value from
it. They are too smart to let
greed get the best of them and flood the platinum market with tons of the stuff
all at once. But smart people have
been outsmarted by markets before.
All the same, even if the technical hurdles are overcome, I
anticipate that some legal and governmental issues may arise. Somebody, somewhere, is going to want
to tax all of this new economic activity.
Unless the U. S. manages to impose jurisdiction on an asteroid, there
will be no way that the U. S. government can claim that the operation is
domestic and subject to corporate tax.
This may be another attraction for the company: asteroid mining is the ultimate
offshore site. Nobody has given a
lot of thought to how all this will be dealt with from a legal and governmental
angle. And the current tight
coupling between corporations and the U. S. government probably ensures that
whatever regulations are imposed will generally be favorable to the
corporations.
There are huge risks involved in this enterprise, even
though the entire operation is supposed to use non-manned flight only. If anybody can afford it, though, it is
the backers of Planetary Resources, who together have multiple billions of
dollars to spend. And it may take
every cent before they even get back a few grams of valuable stuff. Mining has always been a business for
gamblers, and space mining is no exception. At the worst, even if it fails, it will furnish a lot of
employment for heretofore unemployed aerospace engineers who can get to work on
something that might actually make money.
And if it all works out, it could be the first step in the
transformation of space travel from an exotic, rare, super-costly thing engaged
in only by governments to something closer to what international flying is like
today: still sophisticated and
relatively costly, but open to anyone with the money to pay for it. And as I say about so many things I
consider in this blog, time will tell.
Sources: The Apr. 24 news conference was covered
by many media outlets. I referred
to an article in USA Today at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-04-24/mining-asteroids/54507782/1. A good overview of space mining in
science fiction appeared at http://www.livescience.com/19862-asteroid-mining-fiction-present.html. My attempts to access the Planetary
Resources Inc. website at www.planetaryresources.com
were unsuccessful. I hope their
rockets work better than their website.
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