“MAGNIFICENT desolation.” Buzz Aldrin’s first impressions of the moon, uttered as he stepped delicately on to the lunar dust in 1969, bring to mind a landscape of pristine emptiness. Apart from the odd footprint and the remnants of a few probes, the moon has been practically untouched for 4 billion years. It is a celestial wilderness, but maybe not for much longer. If would-be space miners get their way, future lunar visitors could see a very different kind of desolation: deep scars, autonomous diggers and great piles of ore.
It is a dystopian vision, but not an inconceivable one. China is weighing up the business case for mining the moon, while the US firm Moon Express is already developing technology to do it. Then there are the companies planning to mine asteroids. Such ventures received a shot in the arm last November when President Obama signed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, aka the Space Act, which grants US citizens and companies ownership of anything they can extract from celestial bodies. It fired the starting pistol for a dash to carve up the riches buried in space.
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The risks and potential rewards are astronomical, and the whole enterprise is blasting off into a legal void. That could spell trouble on a cosmic scale. “We need rules, preferably at international level,” says , assistant professor at the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But what should those rules be?
The US is home to most wannabe space miners. Planetary Resources, a firm in Redmond, Washington, and Deep Space Industries and Moon Express, both based in Mountain View, California, all have audacious plans to harvest the vast mineral wealth of the solar system, starting with the moon and low-hanging space fruit – small asteroids that pass close to home. These bodies are thought to be rich in resources that are increasingly hard to find on Earth: platinum, for instance, and rare-earth elements such as yttrium and lanthanum.
Given that we don’t know much about the precise composition of most asteroids, we have to rely on estimates of their monetary value. , owned by Planetary Resources since 2013, collates data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Harvard’s Minor Planet Center. By its reckoning, the five most easily reached asteroids are worth between $8 billion and $95 billion.
Water is high on the space shopping list too. Astronauts need it for drinking and growing food, and it can also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel. “Mining the precious materials is not economically viable unless you can work out how to use water as fuel,” says Bob Richards, CEO of Moon Express. Then there is helium-3, a light isotope that could be a critical feedstock for any future nuclear fusion reactors. One estimate has it that the moon of the stuff, blasted into its surface by the solar wind.
Finders keepers?
The grand vision is the creation of an entire off-world economy. Not only will we haul back mineral resources for use on Earth, we will also move destructive industries away from our planet by building self-sufficient factories in space. For its advocates, space mining is a route to untold riches and the first leg on the path to colonising other planets.
“If a firm started mining the moon tomorrow, it would not be breaking any laws“
Whether the economic case stacks up remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the technology is improving rapidly, with new prospecting satellites and autonomous mining robots being put through their paces (see “Can you dig it?“). The biggest hurdle, say industry insiders, has been the absence of a legal framework for exploiting space commercially. “Investors didn’t want to commit if there might be a legal problem later,” says . Metzger co-founded NASA’s Swamp Works lab at the Kennedy Space Center, a testing ground for mining technology that would supply water and building materials to planetary settlements.
Two international treaties cover space mining, albeit patchily. The UN during the cold war with a view to preventing nuclear missile batteries being stationed in orbit, not for an era of private space flight and autonomous prospecting. It holds that outer space is “the province of all mankind”, but also insists that “the moon and other celestial bodies shall be free for exploration and use”. Would-be asteroid miners take that word “use” as a green light to exploit space rocks for profit, and certainly the treaty does not explicitly forbid it. “The capitalist view of the treaty is that it is finders keepers,” says Richards.
Then there is the UN Moon Agreement of 1979. It declares that lunar resources are the “common heritage of mankind” and calls for “equitable sharing” of the returns from any exploitation of them. But not a single spacefaring nation has signed it.
If the Chinese government dug up a few hundred tonnes of lunar lanthanum tomorrow, they would not be breaking international law. Ditto if any of the US space-mining outfits suddenly announced it had been extracting platinum from asteroids, and they will be emboldened by last year’s Space Act. The product of what Richards describes as “hand-to-hand combat with lawmakers over every line”, the act allows companies to “possess, own, transport, use, and sell” whatever they can pull out of objects in space, as long as it was obtained in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty.
Chris Lewicki, president of Planetary Resources, has compared the legislation with the Homestead Act of 1862. That opened up the American West by distributing land to anyone who could make a living from it. Similarly, for its supporters, the Space Act clears the way to begin the vital work of establishing an off-world economy.
Legal frontiers
It’s not just the US that is positioning itself to take advantage. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a tax haven barely larger than some asteroids, announced in February that its has secured funding and R&D deals to give both Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources a research and manufacturing presence inside its borders. It is also attempting to draw up a national legal framework for such activities. The idea, says government spokesman Paul Zenners, is to catapult Luxembourg into the major league of space-mining nations before the competition really gets started.
Not everyone is thrilled at the prospect. in Canterbury, UK, is one of several space law experts who argues that the Space Act violates the original intent of the Outer Space Treaty and the moribund Moon Agreement: to prevent the unilateral commercial exploitation of space resources. “The principle that cuts across all the existing multilateral space treaties is one that precludes national appropriation of outer space by use or by any other means whatsoever,” he says.
Whatever your take on the Space Act, it has brought into focus the need for global agreement. Already a new international think tank called the Working Group, based at Leiden University, has started to thrash out a legal framework for space mining. It hopes to make recommendations to the UN (COPUOS) by the end of 2017.
One of the most obvious issues is the potential for conflict. If more than one company claims the right to mine an asteroid and establish industries around it, we can expect conflicts involving the nations in which those companies are registered. “This is going to become a geopolitical issue,” says Metzger. “No nation will want any other nation to be the only one to have that capability.”
Cosmic cartels could also be a problem: the high costs of entry to the business plus a lack of regulation could create monopolies on an unprecedented scale. “If you could put a factory in space and have it print copies of itself, output could grow exponentially until you have an industry millions of times bigger than any industry on Earth,” says Metzger. So space enterprise could vastly enrich a few at the expense of the rest, fuelling inequality.
“Could space mining firms sabotage the quest to find life in the solar system?“
Even more emotive is the spectre of environmental damage. Asteroids are not in short supply. The moon, on the other hand, might deserve special treatment. “We just won’t feel as strongly about strip-mining a passing asteroid as we will about the moon,” says , a space lawyer at Sunderland Law School in the UK.
Some safeguards are already in place, on paper at least. The Space Act stipulates that the Outer Space Treaty should be honoured. “This means that the US is obliged to authorise and supervise its national activities in outer space and ensure that such activities comply with the Outer Space Treaty,” says Joanne Wheeler, a lawyer with London firm Bird & Bird and an adviser to the UK Space Agency.
Article Nine of this treaty requires that nations not cause “harmful contamination” of celestial bodies. Although that wouldn’t protect the moon from strip-mining, it should go some way to preventing the astrobiologist’s worst nightmare: careless mining firms transferring extremophile microbes from Earth, sabotaging the quest to discover evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system.
How might we do better? The Outer Space Treaty was based on the UN Convention on the High Seas, meaning that like international waters on Earth, outer space is neutral territory. For that reason, Meagan Crawford of Deep Space Industries argues that the international agreement for deep seabed mining should be emulated in space. The seabed agreement allows its oversight body to issue responsible deep-ocean miners with exclusive licences to operate in a given area. “We’re looking for something very similar in space that gives us a right to operate without interference,” says Crawford.
But Jill Stuart, a space law expert at the London School of Economics, says that a such a legal regime is not an inevitable consequence of developing the technology that makes space mining possible. If we’re casting around for legal templates, she points out, Antarctica offers a different perspective: commercial mining is outlawed there by the Antarctic Treaty System. “The high seas and Antarctica have solid legal regimes behind them, but that doesn’t mean space will automatically follow suit,” says Stuart. “Space is different, physically and existentially, so we need to confront head-on the unique challenges raised by the prospect of space mining.”
Even if there is international agreement on new regulations drawn up by COPUOS, the UN will have a tough job enforcing them. What’s more, with just a year’s notice any state could theoretically pull out of the Outer Space Treaty and any space-mining conventions applying alongside it. Indeed, Newman suspects that any regulations dreamed up in advance may not cut the mustard once robots start scooping riches from near-Earth orbit.
“The only real way we can establish the legal framework is by seeing what happens and what gets tested in court,” he says. The trouble is, by that point our local space environment may no longer be a pristine wilderness.
Can you dig it?
Anyone planning to mine metals in space faces some hefty engineering challenges. First they must find accessible deposits of coveted minerals, then land equipment on the resource-rich bodies and dig in low or zero gravity. How will they do it?
Moon Express, based in Mountain View, California, recently applied to the US Federal Aviation Authority for permission to launch a lunar lander containing a clutch of surface sampling tools and a diminutive rover. If it gets the nod, the mission will blast off next year. “We’ll be landing softly and then scratching the surface of the moon to validate the presence of precious deposits and water,” says CEO Bob Richards. In doing so, the firm hopes to scoop the $30-million Google Lunar X Prize.
Asteroid mining ventures are also developing new technology. Planetary Resources of Redmond, Washington, will begin by stationing its in near-Earth orbit and training their multispectral imagers on candidate asteroids. The firm wants to assess albedo – a measure of how much light a surface reflects – as an indicator of the resources space rocks may contain. Spacecraft can then be sent out for a closer look. Planetary Resources’ next test craft, Arkyd 6, launches this summer.
Deep Space Industries, also in Mountain View, plans to get up close and personal too. Water-rich asteroids are very low in albedo because the water will be under the surface. “They are darker than coal and even in the infrared they are hard to get images of against the black of space,” says Meagan Crawford, one of the firm’s vice presidents. With that in mind, it plans to send sampling spacecraft to asteroids and analyse them in situ – not only for resources but also for “diggability”, meaning how easy it would be to land there and dig. As the European Space Agency’s Philae lander demonstrated when it bounced off comet 67P, gaining purchase can be a problem on bodies with little or no gravitational pull.
Third-party manufacturers are also tooling up. New York City-based Honeybee Robotics helped build NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and has now designed an drills that attach firmly even when the surface is as hard as concrete.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Swamp Works test lab in Florida is developing tricked-out bulldozers and diggers for strip-mining the moon. One digger, called at each end, working simultaneously to provide sufficient force for digging in low gravity.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Space raiders”
Article amended on 15 July 2016
Tanja Masson-Zwaan’s affiliation has been corrected
