Last week, a space probe successfully lifted off from Florida aboard the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launcher. Their destination: Psyche, an asteroid 200 kilometers in diameter that NASA intends to explore. It could be the core of an ancient celestial body, whose surface was torn off by asteroid impacts. But this mission will also be an opportunity to observe precious metals such as gold, platinum and silver, of which the asteroid appears to be almost half composed. This is what it would give you, according to the estimates of Forbes, an astronomical value estimated at 10,000 billion dollars. It is enough to see in this exploration mission an “extra operation” of prospecting.
And although it will be necessary to wait until 2029 for the probe to reach the celestial body, this mission already raises the question of the exploitation of asteroids and their minerals. Is it a fantasy of a few business leaders or the next disruptive innovation that will revolutionize the space industry and provide Earthlings with the resources they lack? With the appearance of New Space, a handful of entrepreneurs and investors, convinced of its future, have decided to bet on this new activity for about ten years.
“A response to the scarcity of land resources”
“Despite the obvious difficulties related to the distances to be traveled, the technologies to be mastered and the uncertainty of knowledge, asteroid mining has long been considered a possible answer to the scarcity of terrestrial resources, if not like the future of the Earth itself. the conquest of space,” estimate the senators of the foresight delegation in a report released by Franceinfo and published last June.
The first startup to enter this niche is Planetary Resources. Founded in 2012, this American pioneer has managed to attract big names among its investors such as Larry Page, founder of Google, and Eric Schmidt, then executive director of its board of directors. This project, initially called Arkyd, had been struggling to develop since 2009. It then managed to obtain funding, three years later, thanks to this new name and this reboot with great fanfare among space industry players and the press.
The idea of the three founders is to exploit the thousands of asteroids near the Earth to extract metals and thus produce everyday consumer goods such as televisions, computers and defibrillators, the newspaper recalled. The echoes in 2019. The founders of Planetary Resources even have ambitions to extract water in space to bring it back to Earth.
The following year, a newcomer, still American, called Deep Space Industries, positioned itself in this same decidedly promising niche.
And these actors were encouraged by the removal of potential legal obstacles to space extraction. In November 2015, the passage of the Space Launch Competitiveness Act by the United States Congress effectively gave companies full rights to all the materials they extract from space rocks.
A financial obstacle
However, ten years later, neither of these two startups is on track, anywhere near or far, from realizing their asteroid mining project. After attracting numerous investors, Planetary Resources finally closed in 2020.
“Planetary Resources, in many ways, failed because we couldn’t raise the amount of money necessary to take the next step,” Greg Lewicki, one of the co-founders of the company Planetary Resources, told the Daily Beast.
According to him, one of the biggest obstacles facing space mining is less technological or scientific than financial.
While Deep Space Industries, for its part, has not officially disappeared, its ambitions have been considerably reduced, following its acquisition by Bradford Space in 2019.
Lower launch costs
But things have evolved a bit in recent years, perhaps changing the cards slightly on the question of the viability of these space drilling missions.
“Other technologies have improved and it’s a little easier to get capital for these types of companies.”
$13 million for Astroforge
An observation shared a priori by Astroforge, who decided to embark on the adventure despite the failures of his predecessors. In 2022, the young company secured $13 million in seed funding, suggesting renewed investor confidence. It remains to be seen whether this renewed confidence is justified by promising technological advances in this field or whether it is simply the repetition of a speculative bubble of the same type as that of the 2010s.
Unlike the companies that preceded it in this niche, Astroforge has chosen to quickly jump into the depths of space and already has two first missions on the agenda in 2023.
The first, scheduled for April, will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and test metal refining technology in zero gravity. The second, which should begin in October, aims to observe a distant asteroid, the Daily Beast reports. Its founder has set an ambitious goal: to bring its first refined load of platinum back to Earth by the end of this decade.
Source: BFM TV
