Open yourself to mania and you can almost feel it, the distant hum of 10 million sci-fi super-geeks quivering in sweaty anticipation: space mining — or, more accurately, ‘off-Earth’ mining — is a thing.

I’ll consider your mind blown. Sure, it’s an abstraction so loose in origin, so wild in vision, and so totally unhinged in the meaning it gives to ‘feasible’ or even ‘possible’ it borders on satire. But it is indeed a thing.

‘Thing’ is used here in lieu of a general consensus. In its literal sense, off-Earth mining refers to the exploration for, and exploitation of, minerals and resources on objects beyond Earth but within the solar system, including asteroids, comets, moons and planetary bodies, like Mars. 

But to take that as univocal would be to forget this space mining business is a research project in primis. In spite of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s somewhat heady assertion that the world’s debut trillionaire will be the person who first mines an asteroid, actual income from off-Earth exploitation remains a flight of fancy. More than that, it’s a research project with knowledge gaps that paint a profile akin to Swiss cheese. But those gaps — according to Professor Serkan Saydam, a mining and off-Earth engineering researcher at the University of New South Wales — are distinctly more informational than technical.

“Whatever we’re doing right now, it’s going to be for scientific purposes, right? Not for commercial purposes yet,” Professor Saydam says.

“So we’ll land on the Moon, for example, we’ll go and pick up materials and analyse them, and then based on that information we’ll develop a new system. I think we’ve got the technology ready, we just don’t have the information. Once we have the information, it will be extremely quick to develop a mining system.”

“Once we have the information, it will be extremely quick to develop a mining system”

It would also be to forget that outside the laboratory, in the dizzying circles of scientific discourse, conversations about space mining are a comprehensive shitfight. Beyond the generally accepted notion that off-Earth mining is some kind of inevitability, our extraterrestrial eggheads seem to agree on little else.

By way of example, take government institutions like NASA, JAXA, and the European and Luxembourg space agencies, which seem bent largely on establishing a presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for a lunar economy, and ultimately sending humans to Mars.

“A lot of focus is on the 2025 Moon landing of NASA, putting the first woman and person of colour on the Moon,” Saydam explains.

“Then the aim is to establish a colony on the Moon, and then go to Mars. This is the agency’s view, right? But if the private sector does differently, we’ll see what happens. SpaceX, especially, is very aggressive about going to Mars first, rather than going to the Moon.”

But Matt Gialich, co-founder of asteroid mining start-up AstroForge, has other ideas. Based in California, AstroForge is fixed on a mission to make space resources available on Earth — a task Gialich says is “a pretty simple idea for a company, and pretty fucking hard to execute on.”

“I’m not interested in bringing resources to Mars or to the Moon or to low Earth orbit to be sold. Those all might be viable markets in the future. The reality right now is, they’re not,” Gialich says. 

“There isn’t an in-space economy, there isn’t this trading that happens”

“There isn’t an in-space economy, there isn’t this trading that happens. We simply bring them back to Earth to be sold on the normal spot markets. We’re not trying to do anything special here. We’ll go through a standard refining process, a final refining, we’ll stamp our metal, and we’ll sell it on a trade. That’s all we’re doing. And to be clear, that’s the platinum group metals, those are the resources we’re focused on.”

These are likely to be brief, two-year round trips during which asteroids are mined and processed on-site, since they are themselves simply “too much mass to bring back”. Rather, the platinum group elements would be shipped home using “a standard kind of deep space return trajectory” that relies on the Earth’s atmospheric density to slow the capsule down.

Incidentally, this might be the point where Joel Sercel, founder and CEO of TransAstra, also based in California, would disagree.

“We’re very practical business people, scientists and engineers,” he says.

“And we realise that, given the technology and systems of five years ago, it’s absolutely laughable to consider building a business to mine asteroids, because it’s too expensive to operate in space, and for a few other reasons.”

Indeed, Sercel has defined “four fundamental breakthroughs” he says need to be met if asteroid mining is to be practical.

“One, you need to be able to prospect them, you have to find the asteroids. Two, you need better ways to get around in space, better propulsion. Three, unlike in science fiction movies, you can’t land and walk around on an asteroid, and you can’t have robots landing and walking around on asteroids. They don’t have gravity to speak of, so you have to capture asteroids in enclosures. And four, you need ways of processing materials that you find and capture in space.”

A research project in primis. Because whatever our feelings about Elon Musk, we should allow ourselves to be impressed with the development model SpaceX has built. Many of what were once the company’s core research projects have grown into revenue-generating business segments — Starlink, Starship, its military-focused Starshield — which provide income supplementary to lucrative government launch contracts.

“There are very important businesses that can be built today — better telescopes for monitoring traffic in space, better propulsion systems for deploying constellations of satellites, capture bags for cleaning up orbital debris,” Sercel says. 

“Each of these technologies has very real revenue potential here and now, today. TransAstra is a seed-stage company, we only make millions of dollars a year in revenue, and we only have about 20 employees. But we intend to scale the company around these near-term businesses. And as the company becomes big and robust the way SpaceX is, we’ll have all the pieces in place to do asteroid mining. That’s the business plan.”

For these and other good reasons, it’s important to acknowledge the theoretical diversity driving all this. Almost everyone currently active in the industry holds a proprietary understanding of how it will one day work. That’s not to say — particularly given the conceptual nature of it all — that some are more or less right or wrong than others, only that fiercely competitive and meaningful work among objectively clever and innovative people is a good thing. It’s the ‘how’ behind SpaceX’s welcome slashing of space travel costs, as well as NASA’s recent OSIRIS-REx soil sampling mission to the asteroid Bennu. It’s why Sercel was able to build his game-changing Omnivore solar thermal rocket, and why AstroForge has an actual refinery floating in low Earth orbit right now.

Indeed, these ultra-brainiacs have stormed every problem from every angle. They’ve run every simulation, autopsied every conceivable outcome — hundreds of times over — in a way that sometimes seems diagnosably obsessive. They’ve ticked every box, even squared every root for good measure … except one.

Tom Wolfe’s 2009 essay for The New York Times, One Giant Leap to Nowhere, is host to a number of memorable lines, like this one: “The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add ‘godlike’? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.”

It was indeed one small step for Neil, one giant leap for mankind, and “a real knee in the groin for NASA.”

The problem, in Wolfe’s estimation, was that the space race of the 1960s lacked any purpose beyond domestic morale and foreign image — “Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy?” NASA had strapped a man to a rocket and lit the fuse, and even brought him home safely. So what? It had failed to lay down the ideological imperative.

Its sole “philosopher” was Wernher von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre and chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that sent the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. But the PR goons at NASA were a savage and influential bunch, and perhaps disinclined to let a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht speak for the world’s most advanced space program. His speech at a dinner one night in San Francisco about building a bridge to the stars to save ourselves was, for good or bad, not widely marketed.

Now, if you’ll let me pose for a big-headed moment as The Ghost of Tom Wolfe, I’ll suggest to you that in the bubbling vat of 21st Century hubris, we have — yet again — failed to lay down the ideological imperative.

It’s true that TransAstra’s Sercel and AstroForge’s Gialich baulked in equal measure when the topic of ‘benefit sharing’ — the idea that off-Earth mining should enrich and advantage mankind equally — macheted its way into the conversation. Asked what such a thing means to them, their companies, and the whole space endeavour generally, their responses ranged from “Do you really want to talk politics?” to “Frankly, it’s not very interesting to me.” 

If such answers seem a little cold, trust that there is in fact some logic to it — and also that it might even make a tremendously great deal of sense.

“What interests me is, can we go and mine an asteroid? Can we be the world’s first commercial deep space company? Can we fucking do it?” Gialich says.

Well … of course benefit sharing has taken a back seat, along with everything else that isn’t a purely technical conundrum, including sleep, personal time, and sanity. Even if socially progressive babble like benefit sharing didn’t tremble with communist undertones, to tackle it now would be a half-brained misappropriation of engineering talent. These are the young boys and girls who looked up at the stars one night and never really came back down, and who for massively dominant portions of their lives have been dedicated — in the highest sense — to making possible that which currently isn’t. On all fronts, the ‘extra-terrestrial challenge’ is the name of the game.

But then again, a judicious reappraisal of that stance might not go amiss. 

Ask why anyone would be bothered to venture into space, and the reply is usually something to do with humanity’s next evolutionary step.

“Even if you were to continue to harvest resources from the Earth, if humanity continues to exponentiate, the whole planet will eventually become a city,” Sercel says. 

“We don’t want that. Earth is a beautiful planet. Let’s keep it beautiful. So let’s move into the cosmos and figure out who and what we are as a species. That’s the vision.”

“Earth is a beautiful planet. Let’s keep it beautiful. So let’s move into the cosmos and figure out who and what we are as a species. That’s the vision.”

But, as Saydam pointed out: is it the next evolutionary step for humanity, or for the US or China or Russia? Or is it — God forbid — the next step for an individual person? An even richer, even louder Musk-type figure?

Because with space mining comes a whole new game in terms of scale. The iron content of the asteroid 16 Psyche, for example — which sits in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and is the primary target of NASA’s Psyche mission set to launch in October — is estimated by planetary scientist and mission leader Lindy Elkins-Tanton to be worth around $10 quintillion. That’s $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 — the iron content of a comparatively modest 220km-wide space rock.

Multiply all the gold ever produced by a factor of 772,190 and you’d be starting to get the idea. Or perhaps not … These are figures we’ve rarely had to reckon with and which we’re poorly equipped to comprehend. It might therefore be reasonable to suggest the qualities we designate as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about Earth-bound mining will be vastly more profound once we reach the cosmos. 

Few are better qualified to weigh in than Ben McKeown. A career mining executive who still acts as Chair of Tinka Resources (TSXV:TK), he’s made the shift to the academic side as an off-Earth mining PhD candidate at the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research.

“I’ve sat on many boards. I’ve chaired a number of companies. I currently chair a company in Peru. So I’ve kind of come into this looking at how we can actually make off-Earth mining work from a commercial perspective,” McKeown says.

“And that includes benefit sharing, it includes the legal regime, it includes the whole kind of social licence to operate. It includes all those non-technical areas which actually — when you’re trying to develop a mining project just about anywhere — are the most important issues.”

Part of the problem is that benefit sharing is viewed almost exclusively as a monetary concern; a submission to outstretched and undeserving hands. The truth — and the issue at heart — is that it lacks any real meaning at all, and might even be better if it didn’t come in cash. The rest of the issue presents as a blanket failure to see what benefit sharing really, truly is: perhaps the most significant barrier to the success of off-Earth mining. Period.

“Ultimately, financing is actually the prism you’ve got to look at this through,” McKeown explains.

“Can you get it financed? What is it going to take to get it financed? There are speculative venture capital and seed funds that are putting money — what I consider small amounts — into off-Earth space companies at the moment. But we’re talking tens of millions of dollars, we’re not talking billions of dollars. And any one of these projects is going to take billions of dollars to develop. I mean, this is not going to be a cheap undertaking at all.”

“Ultimately, financing is actually the prism you’ve got to look at this through”

When it comes to seed financing, Sercel is your guy. No one in the world has won more NASA Innovative Advanced Concept grants — a whopping seven in total. But despite that success, the monetary value of those grants reaches a little over $4 million.

“NIAC will fund you if you have a few things going for you,” Sercel says.

“Number one, you have an idea that will change everything. The more powerful the idea, the more likely they’ll be to fund you. Number two, it has to be so crazy that no one else will fund it. Number three, it has to be good with the laws of engineering and science and economics. Number four, you have to have a plan that can get through peer review. It’s really hard to get through all those gates. But for that reason, NIAC is probably the most competitive program in NASA to get funding from.”

Props to NASA for the cojones. After all, TransAstra’s auxiliary businesses could ultimately make the difference. But if off-Earth mining is going to take off at scale, you need some serious capital. That capital will only come from big banks and financial institutions. And for those big banks and financial institutions to get on board, they need the capacity for due diligence. For that to occur, a clear and logical legal framework needs to be established, which — you guessed it — can’t be done until we give some kind of meaning to benefit sharing.

“Financing is really bloody difficult to secure for the majority of mining companies outside of lithium at this point. And I don’t think we’re going to see any significant financing outside of the specie, venture capital sort of stuff until we get a legal framework in place,” McKeown says.

“And part of that legal framework is going to be the whole fiscal regime, which is about the benefit for mankind. Is there going to be monetary benefit sharing or is it going to be non-monetary benefit sharing? Whatever it is, it’s going to need to be clear so the big financiers, the big commercial finance banks and the rest, will be able to do their due diligence.

“Even if costs come down, this is going to be a billion-dollar game”

“Even if costs come down, this is going to be a billion-dollar game. I chair a zinc project in Peru, which is a pretty standard mid-tier, mid-size project, and that’s going to cost us hundreds of millions. You can’t say stuff off-Earth is going to be cheaper than that. That’s just a ridiculous perspective to take. For me, financing is almost like that gatekeeping function. How are you going to get this financed? The legal side is a very key part of that. And part of the legal side is the benefit sharing. It’s not to say it won’t be sorted out, but it’s not sorted out at the moment.”

And so we come pretty much full circle. Benefit sharing, like off-Earth mining, is a research project in primis. A grossly under-resourced, slowly decaying, busted-up wretch of a thing, kept somehow alive by the saintly efforts of a rare and disparate few. No one party to fault, of course; merely the broad stroke of casual apathy. 

Of course, this is but a tiny reflection on a topic the complexity of which continues to stun everyone involved. And it will surely be the case that when we’re finding answers, we’re finding new questions, too. How are we to distribute and regulate ownership of off-Earth territories and resources? What will happen to global commodity markets? The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, NASA’s Artemis Accords, and the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space only go so far. And what are we to make of the Moon’s prevailing role as a lunar deity? Would mining or even colonising it spark the first cosmic holy war? 

Add them to the list, but for now let’s stick with what we do know: first, space mining — off-Earth mining, asteroid mining, in-situ resource utilisation — will happen in some form at some point. The previously discussed thing. Buckle up. Second, benefit sharing deserves a great deal more attention — from everyone. It’s not enough to leave it to the Sercels and the Gialichs, or the Saydams and the McKeowns, or the lawmakers and economists and policy freaks. The wild success of space mining’s technical side can only be attributed to the weight and diversity of its support. For the commercial and funding side to do the same, well …

Because here’s the thing no one saw coming: ‘benefit sharing’ might have been the most self-serving, egotistical component of the whole off-Earth game from the very start. Who could have possibly guessed that charity — of all things — would be the key to the success of space mining? The irony is almost unbearable …

Write to Oliver Gray at Mining.com.au