Chris Lewicki, president and CEO of a U.S. asteroid mining company called Planetary Resources, has declared that space is the "next resource frontier" for humanity. No longer something out of a science fiction novel, asteroid mining could provide humans with valuable raw materials to use on Earth, and beyond that, it could ensure that future deep space missions - including space colonization - are sustainable.
Lewicki, who previously worked on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander, claims that with asteroid mining humans will also have access to elements such as hydrogen and oxygen for fuel in missions to other planets.
Speaking most recently about his company's goals at the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto on March 7, Lewicki explained that, after all, when humans venture out to colonize other plants and beyond, we will need resources to construct and maintain our settlements.
Transporting raw materials from Earth into space would be an almost insurmountably expensive project, he noted, estimating that just the cost of sending water into orbit would be around $10 million per ton.
"In order for [humans] to do that sustainably, and to do that indefinitely, they're going to need to use resources they can find nearby," Lewicki outlined. "This is something that is going from theoretical to practical," he said. "The next resource frontier is outer space."
Lewicki's company is already experimenting with technologies that could be used in the extraction of metals such as iron, nickel, and cobalt from asteroids close to Earth. They launched their first spacecraft in July 2015, with plans for another one to be deployed this year.
Called the A6, the operation will be able to measure temperature differences among the various space objects and substances that it encounters. It will also gather information the presence of water, which is not only vital for human life but also can be refined down to its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen - for rocket fuel. Lewicki predicts that his company will begin extracting water from asteroids in the early 2020s.
Asteroid mining is so innovative that there are few protocols in place to determine who has the right to harvest the resources. The U.S. recently passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, legalizing commercial asteroid mining and limits governmental regulations until September 2023 and proclaiming that any substance mined from a space rock is the property of whoever extracted it.
Lewicki said that more rules will be necessary as the space mining industry takes off, however. "We often talk about the challenge of regulations," he noted. "But regulations create an important framework."
"The only thing that is new about the industry of asteroid mining is it doesn't happen within what we are familiar with as the national territory of any country," Lewicki said. He offered some ideas toward establishing asteroid jurisdiction: for example, countries could make territorial claims to specific asteroids and other celestial objects, lease the "territory," or request the right to mine for resources.
With the new policy in the U.S., Lewicki said that "maybe we'll see the beginning of the national federation of planets start out of this."
