The Gold Rush Among the Stars: Trillionaires and Asteroid-Mining

California, 1851: clipper ships rush to the shore, carrying hordes of budding prospectors. Dirt-encrusted hands reach for the riverbed soil and nervously shake sieves, hoping to find an answer to their prayers - a nugget of gold. 

Among these prospectors, many continued to live in squalor, while others became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. A fair outcome? Perhaps not, but there is no such thing as fairness in a lawless free-for-all.

At this point you’re probably wondering whether you can make like a prospector, and get rich by turning over a rock. The short answer is, “No.” The long answer is, “No, at least not on the Earth.” If you turn your gaze from the soil beneath you and look to the vast skies above you, the riches you seek are hidden in plain sight - a mere rocket launch away. 

NASA defines asteroids (minor planets) as “rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.” Accounting for over 1.1 million of the celestial bodies within our solar system, these space rocks can be filled to the brim with deposits of gold, platinum, diamonds, rocket fuel, and other precious economic cornerstones, such as silicon. Currently, estimates place the combined value of our solar system's asteroid resources at over $60 quintillion USD. Take for instance, 16 Psyche, an extremely rare M-type asteroid whose nickel and iron deposits are estimated to be worth a total of $10 quadrillion USD. If an entity was actually able to get a hold of this Massachusetts-sized metallic boulder, it’s estimated that the quantity of resources would be vast enough to flood global markets and collapse the world’s economy. 

Does the promise of imperial splendour and unclaimed troves of treasures tantalize you? Then grab your pickaxes and spacesuit, and get on the next charter cruise to the Kuiper belt...  in a few decades. The private space sector is in its infancy, and the closest one can get to space as a private citizen is by purchasing a $250,000 ticket from Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, then biding their time on the company’s celebrity-gilded 600-person waitlist. 

Aside from the lack of affordable avenues to space, the actual process of mining in the cosmos is quite costly. In an environment where objects are in constant motion, where radiation bombards everything it can touch, and where you’re surrounded by a deadly vacuum, the rules for mining must change. Rather than a simple pickaxe-and-shovel mining operation, the entire process will have to be largely automated. For instance, there may be fleets of automated ships, with each ship carrying out a specialized role such as moving the asteroid to a more suitable location, carrying out the actual mining, or transporting the mined goods back to Earth and elsewhere. As such, unlike the gold rushes of the 19th century, the race to stake a claim to the riches of our solar system won’t be a competition between individual prospectors, but corporations instead.

Surprisingly, the company at the forefront of the space-mining revolution is not SpaceX, Blue Origin, nor Virgin Galactic, but a soon-to-be titan, known as TransAstra. Headed by people such as Dr. Stanley G. Love (a NASA Astronaut with 25 years of experience), the company describes its mission as, “Dedicated to building the ‘transcontinental railroad of space’,” and desires to be a global leader in technologies to “find, prospect, harvest, and use space resources.” 

The company’s work includes the creation of asteroid survey and detection telescopes/satellites, a lunar-based solar power generator and probes for lunar water extraction (rocket fuel), and much more. However, their most exciting project is known as the “Mini Bee.” The goal of this project is to use a “ride-share” rocket launch to send their Mini Bee satellite, along with a synthetic asteroid, to Low Earth Orbit. There, the team will use the satellite’s inbuilt technology such as a capture chamber, and solar laser to enclose the synthetic asteroid, evaporate water and other important materials out of the asteroid, sift through and separate the materials, and finally release the unused remnants. This proof-of-concept mission is set to take place in the forthcoming years, and if it's successful it will be a cornerstone to the future asteroid-mining industry. Once the costly proof-of-principle is done, fleets of imitation satellites can be created with some investment, and the markets will take it from there. 

So mining among the stars is only a matter of time, right? Not exactly. The biggest hurdle to staking a claim to these riches is not a technological innovation, but a civil innovation. Currently the most important legal document regarding the idea of property rights and an adjudication system for extraterrestrial resources is “The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space.” With the treaty’s core principles being the closest thing we have to a global accord on “space laws”, no corporation or government can try to claim an extraterrestrial resource and use it for profit. To that extent, it is better to reach a global agreement on a set of internationally-enforceable legal codes, prior to setting up any type of space-based mining operation. When unimaginably large resource troves, such as that of 16 Psyche are at stake, it is obvious that in the presence of outdated treaties and vague notions of ownership in space, any nation with enough wealth and aerospace capability will try to claim or colonize whatever they can. As such, well-defined and verifiable property rights are essential for creating a truly robust space economy, and for assuring that the new space-age is peaceful. However, this does have significant implications, such as the relinquishment of significant powers to international courts and other multinational bodies, in an era where nationalist sentiment is on the rise. 

Perhaps the 21st century prospector will have to drop the sieves and pickaxes, and be more innovative. They’ll need to possess technological prowess, an excellent legal team, a lot of money, and a time machine to fast-forward a decade. A seemingly impossible dream, but one that if successful, will usher in a new era of unimaginable wealth, and provide the answer to the single most important question in economics: “How do you fulfill unlimited wants with limited resources?” 

The answer is quite simple: you merely strap yourself into a rocket, and head to the stars.