The Asteroid Boom

NOTE FOR 2019 READERS: This is the seventh in a series of digital time capsules for the next century(opens in a new tab). The series marks a little-known chronological milestone. According to UN data(opens in a new tab), life expectancy at birth in 27 countries now exceeds 81 years — which means babies born in 2019 are more likely than not to be alive in 2100.

What will life be like at the other end of these kids' lives? The latest science, science fiction, and Silicon Valley all offer glimpses. But ultimately, it is our present-day hopes and fears that shape what the future will become. 

Dear 22nd Century,

All of a sudden, out of the dreams of geeks and the potential of technology, an entire new economy explodes into being.

There are new networks full of new kinds of behavior to be cultivated or exploited. The rising tide of money lifts many startups upwards; some sink. The world is awash in a sense of abundance and fear — this could save us, this could destroy us. Some argue this new economy is saving the planet from the carbon economy. And at the apex of the revolution, a small number of foresighted people with famous names acquire wealth greater and faster than any tycoon in human history.

This is the story of the internet economy in the early 21st century. (Arguably, it’s the story of every great market leap since the railroads). It is also, I confidently predict, the story of the space resources economy in the early 22nd.

The main difference is this: Internet pioneers become billionaires; many, many asteroid mining pioneers will become trillionaires. The early 21st century thinks it’s seen a wealth gap; it ain’t seen nothing yet.

At the words “asteroid mining,” a contemporary reader would likely roll their eyes. We are still decades away from the orbital future where a vast semi-automated operation harvests the bottomless wealth of our solar system — the platinum, the gold, the diamonds, the rare earth metals that lay under layers of dust, there for the taking in ridiculous quantities.

How much, exactly? We’re only just beginning to guess. Asterank(opens in a new tab), a service that keeps track of some 6,000 asteroids in NASA’s database, prices out the estimated mineral content in each one in the current world market. More than 500 are listed as “>$100 trillion.” The estimated profit on just the top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion.

Is it ours for the taking? Well, here’s the thing — we’re taking it already, and have been doing so since we started mining metals thousands of years ago. Asteroid strikes are the only reason rare metals exist in the Earth’s crust; the native ones were all sucked into our planet’s merciless iron core millions of years ago. Why not go to the source?

As a side project, space mining can grab water from the rocks and comets — water which, with a little processing makes rocket fuel. Which in turn makes even more currently unimaginable space operations possible, including ones that could give the planet all the energy it needs to avert climate catastrophe. Cislunar space — the bit around us and the moon, the local neighborhood, basically — is about to get very interesting.

It’s hard, even for the most asteroid-minded visionaries, to truly believe the full scope of this future space economy right now. Just as hard as it would have been in 1945, when an engineer named Vannevar Bush first proposed a vast library of shared knowledge that people the world over would access via personal computers(opens in a new tab), to see that mushroom into a global network of streaming movies and grandmas posting photos and trolls and spies who move the needle on presidential elections. 

No technology’s pioneer can predict its second-order effects.

The space vision thing is particularly difficult in 2019. Not only do we have plenty of urgent problems with democracy and justice to keep us occupied, but the only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans, startups that seemed to be going strong and had launched satellites already, were just bought by larger companies that are, shall we say, less comfortable executing on long-term visions.

Planetary Resources was founded in 2012 in a blaze of publicity. Its funding came from, among others, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, and the country of Luxembourg. It had inked an orbital launch deal with Virgin Galactic. And it was sold last October to a blockchain software company. (To 21st century readers, this paragraph would look like I’m playing tech world mad libs.)

In January, the other company, Deep Space Industries, also partly funded by Luxembourg (way to get in the space race, Luxembourg!), was sold to Bradford Space, owned by a U.S. investment group called the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation. Maybe these new overlords plan on continuing their acquisitions' asteroid mining endeavors rather than stripping the companies for parts. Both companies have been notably silent on the subject.

“The asteroid mining bubble has burst,” declared The Space Review(opens in a new tab), one of the few online publications to even pay attention.

That’s also to be expected. After all, anyone trying to build Google in 1945 would go bankrupt. Just as the internet needed a half-dozen major leaps forward in computing before it could even exist, space industry needs its launch infrastructure.

Currently, the world’s richest person and its most well-known entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, respectively, are working on the relatively cheap reusable rockets asteroid pioneers will need. (As I was writing this, Bezos announced in an email blast that one of his New Shepherd rockets had flown to space and back five times like it was nothing, delivering 38 payloads for various customers while remaining entirely intact.) 

Meanwhile, quietly, Earth’s scientists are laying the groundwork of research the space economy needs. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has been in orbit around asteroid Ryugu for the last year and a half, learning everything it can. (Ryugu, worth $30 billion according to Asterank, is the website's #1 most cost-effective target.) The craft dropped tiny hopping robot rovers(opens in a new tab) and a small bomb(opens in a new tab) on its target; pictures of the small crater that resulted were released afterwards.

Officially, the mission is to help us figure out how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand whether all those useful metals clump together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors. If not, we can still get at the metals with other techniques, such as optical mining (which basically involves sticking an asteroid in a bag and drilling with sunlight; sounds nuts to us, but NASA has proved it in the lab(opens in a new tab)). It’ll just take more time.

Effectively, we’ve just made our first mark at the base of the first space mineshaft. And there’s more to come in 2020 when Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth bearing samples. If its buckets of sand contain a modicum of gold dust, tiny chunks of platinum or pebbles of compressed carbon — aka diamonds — then the Duchy of Luxembourg won’t be the only deep-pocketed investor to sit up and take notice.

The possibility of private missions to asteroids, with or without a human crew, is almost here. The next step in the process that takes us from here to where you are? Tell us an inspiring story about it, one that makes people believe, and start to imagine themselves mining in space. How would you explain the world-changing nature of the internet to 1945? How would you persuade them that there was gold to be mined in Vannevar Bush’s idea? You’d let the new economy and its benefits play out in the form of a novel.

As Hayabusa dropped a bomb on Ryugu, Daniel Suarez was making the exact same asteroid the target of his fiction. Suarez is a tech consultant and developer turned New York Times bestselling author. His novels thus far have been techno-thrillers: his debut, Daemon(opens in a new tab), a novel of Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare, AI run rampant, made more than a million dollars.

So it was a telling shift in cultural mood that Suarez’s latest thriller is also a very in-depth description of — and thinly-disguised advocacy for — asteroid mining. In Delta-v(opens in a new tab), published in April, a billionaire in the 2030s named Nathan Joyce recruits a team of adventurers who know nothing about space — a world-renowned cave-diver, a world-renowned mountaineer — for the first crewed asteroid mission.

Elon Musk fans might expect this to be Joyce’s tale, but he soon fades into the background. The asteroid-nauts are the true heroes of Delta-v. Not only are they offered a massive payday — $6 million each for four years’ work — they also have agency in key decisions in the distant enterprise. Suarez deliberately based them on present-day heroes. 

The mission is essential, Joyce declares, to save Earth from its major problems. First of all, the fictional billionaire wheels in a fictional Nobel economist to demonstrate the actual truth that the entire global economy is sitting on a mountain of debt(opens in a new tab). It has to keep growing or it will implode, so we might as well take the majority of the industrial growth off-world where it can’t do any more harm to the biosphere.

Secondly, there’s the climate change fix. Suarez sees asteroid mining as the only way we’re going to build solar power satellites(opens in a new tab). Which, as you probably know, is a form of uninterrupted solar power collection that is theoretically more effective, inch for inch, than any solar panels on Earth at high noon, but operating 24/7. (In space, basically, it’s always double high noon). 

The power collected is beamed back to large receptors on Earth with large, low-power microwaves, which researchers think will be harmless enough to let humans and animals pass through the beam. A space solar power array like the one China is said to be working on(opens in a new tab) could reliably supply 2,000 gigawatts — or over 1,000 times more power than the largest solar farm currently in existence.   

“We're looking at a 20-year window to completely replace human civilization's power infrastructure,” Suarez told me, citing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the coming catastrophe. Solar satellite technology “has existed since the 1970s. What we were missing is millions of tons of construction materials in orbit. Asteroid mining can place it there.”

The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. 

Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world(opens in a new tab). The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.

The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.

“Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”

Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders(opens in a new tab) since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. 

But the trillionaires clearly will.

In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. 

For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon(opens in a new tab) — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal(opens in a new tab) to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin(opens in a new tab)), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. 

For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond(opens in a new tab); there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. 

We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.

For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul(opens in a new tab); Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) 

For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.

For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.

“After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.”

All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.

Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. 

(Space junk(opens in a new tab) is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)

And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.

It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes would probably kill you.)

Interstellar colonization, as we’ve already noted, is out. Cislunar space and near-Earth asteroids are where it’s at. And it’s almost certainly where you’re at.

Hope you’re having a blast up there, and that you’re inspired to come up with new geek dreams that we, down in the gravity well of the past, cannot even begin to imagine.

Yours in diamond-encrusted hope,

2019