First Developer President Is Interested In Lunar Mining
Trump’s Transition Team Asked NASA About Surveying the Moon for Valuable Resources, Motherboard
“In the 100-plus pages of documents that Motherboard obtained–including emails, briefings, directories and budget spreadsheets–Trump’s agency review team, or ART, asks only a handful of questions of NASA. One of them deals with the technology NASA develops, and whether anyone can profit from it. “The ART has requested the following information,” one briefing paper states. “Provide data and examples of how NASA does technology development (perhaps even in the form of products) when working with industry–for example, types of contracts/partnerships and IP [intellectual property] arrangements.”
FOIA Document response
These “new” plans for the moon remind me what Spudis and Wingo been writing for years. However it doesn’t look great when this post is followed by “NASA Will Soon Enter Workforce Shrink Mode.” I guess all this will be handed over to private companies (but most likely driven with money from the government).
which may not be a bad thing… if contracts aren’t a cost plus contract. should get more bang for buck
I don’t see NASA being downsized despite all the hand waving.
Those efforts are aimed government agencies burdening the economy with excessive rules, regulations and micromanagement. NASA, by contrast to those other agencies, contributes to America’s greatness in the eyes of the world. That is why it’s budgets haven’t been cut like the other parts of government.
Yes, they will need to submit a plan as a government agency, but don’t expect it to be as drastic as at others, especially IF NASA is willing to focus more resources on the economic and industrial development of space.
I enjoyed the Motherboard article a great deal; very interesting insights into the discussions between the transition team and NASA… (Wish I had all of the raw materials referred to!)
Also, I like very much the cropped image that you (Keith) used in illustrating the article. It depicts a concept I invented back in the late 1990s — around the time I was Chief Technologist for the Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS) at NASA Hq. It shows the modular and mobile “Habot” (Habitat Robot) approach for lunar (and Mars) exploration. There was a related 20 page IAF paper describing a 2-decade plan for a “mobile lunar village” that could evolve and explore the Moon from pole to pole, with periodic landings and new systems being added. (Lots of articles on the idea; see this link for a good image of the entire concept: https://www.researchgate.ne…
Amazingly nearly 120 years ago H.G. Wells described something similar to the Habot, the Martian tripods that terrorized England in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.
Subconciously, I’m sure I was inspired by Wells (when I was 12)…! However, six legs are much better than three — especially if British cannon are firing on your mobile habitat…!
“However, any plans to extract valuable resources from the Moon
for commercial purposes would seem to at least bump up against the 1967 Outer Space Treaty
signed by the United States, Russia (then USSR), and 90 other
countries, which states: “The exploration and use of outer space,
including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for
the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their
degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province
of all mankind.” “
The OST is a commie treaty that needs to be modified/cancelled/violated to increase interest in outer space. Reservations and countries that do not allow private land ownership never progress at all. If private land ownership is not allowed why the deuce would anyone in the private sector invest in space? The US has a long history of violating treaties (with Indian tribes) in the interest of profit and development. OST is next on the list.
There is no violation of the OST, as both the U.S. Space Resources Act and the similar law passed by Luxembourg last year show. What nonsense.
Are you saying OST and/or the US Space Resources Act allow for private land ownership on the moon or asteroids? Mere ownership of extracted minerals is not equivalent to owning the asteroid. If we cannot own the asteroid then there is no use prospecting for it as we will be only helping claim jumpers.
Except an asteroid in reality is just a pile of minerals, often not even that big of one. Does it become something you can own the moment you add a thruster pack? Do you have to put it in an enclosed cargo hold? Grind it down to less than some threshold particle size?
The distinction is an artifact of law which is out of touch with reality.
The legal literature at the time (1960’s) defined a Celestial Body as any object in its natural place. So by that reasoning if you move an asteroid in a new orbit it ceases to be a Celestial Body and becomes subject to appropriation.
There was, in fact, a lawsuit filed against NASA by a Russian astrologer. She claimed that the Deep Impact mission, by crashing a projectile onto an asteroid, has slightly altered its orbit. Since n-body orbits are a chaotic system, the result was a slight, but unpredictable change to the orbits of everything in the solar system. Therefore, she had to redo all her previous astrological calculations, and was due compensation. I never heard how that came out (I suspect it would be thrown out based on a lack of standing.)
It really must ruin her day whenever a meteoroid impacts the Earth 🙂
BTW, was the change in orbit actually measured by NASA? Or was it within observational error?
I’ve previously mentioned the non-interference clause. For a few million, I know people who would provide a very sensitive scientific instrument. Sensitive enough to guarantee and claim jumper landing on the same (small) asteroid would interfere with it.
In any case, have you considered the details an asteroid mining operation? For example, what would make one asteroid better than another? The only near-term market I’ve heard of is getting water to geostationary orbit. For that, most C-class asteroids are probably equally “`ore” rich. The main issue would be ease of getting there and returning.
Good launch windows to a given Near Earth Asteroid don’t repeat very often. For example, it’s 6, 3 and 4.33 years, for 101955 Bennu, 25143 Itokawa, and 162173 Ryugu, respectively. I picked those because they are the targets of past or current sample return missions. Ryugu is probably more like 13 years, since there’s a large window-to-window variability due to its eccentricity. Only every third window would be very good.
I don’t think you’d need a very large asteroid, even as big as the three I mentioned (250 to 1000 m radius.) I suspect picking one asteroid and sticking with it wouldn’t be viable. Instead of waiting through those multi-year dead times between launch windows, it would probably be better to do one-off extractions from whatever 100-meter sized rock happened to be in a favorable position at the time. Prospecting would be done by Earth-based astronomy (orbital determination, size, rotation rate and spectral classification.)
Also remember space will not be like the Old West where anyone with a horse, gun and attitude could terrorize settlers and miners. The barrier to entry will be high, even with firms like Blue Origin and SpaceX lowering the cost of access.
Unlike the Old West, in space the mining will be done by corporations in the $100 million plus capitalization range. They won’t risk their capital and equipment starting a fight with another firm. This also limits the number of players, which further reduces the risk of conflict over mining.
The only danger from “claim jumping” will be from the Moon Treaty nations who think signing an agreement among themselves gives them resource ownership rights to the Moon, Celestial Bodies and stars in the Galaxy. But they are unlikely to invest in the technology needed to actually do anything about space resource development other then claim the profits for themselves in the name of “humanity”. The space miners and space faring nations will of course ignore these claims to wealth they didn’t earn.
Now that I think of it, those long delays between launch windows might make piracy more of a problem than claim jumping. You might see half a decade of mine production delivered over a few month period, then nothing for another half decade. I don’t mean the sort of piracy Edward Teach was known for, but the white-color variety. Quite a bit of money would be involved in commodities and futures markets, and it’s not unknown for people to make money manipulating those sorts of markets.
Piracy is legally and traditionally the hijacking of cargo and passengers outside of national territories.
Unfortunately the software and entertainment industry got the term associated in the popular mind with copyright infringement, but that is not in keeping with the legal history of the term although it makes for good press.
What you are discussing may be insider trading, depending on if the knowledge is public or not which is also not piracy.
Which is why both Planetary Resources and DSI are building telescopes to search from Earth orbit.
It is also why I favor lunar mining, because it is always three days away and close enough for telebotic prospecting, mining, processing and shipping.
No, and there is no need for land ownership on Celestial Bodies, nor the legal baggage it brings with it.
On Earth land, because of the presence of soil, is part of the biosphere and capable of sustainability producing wealth indefinitely (forestry, grazing, farming, etc.). Who has the right to this wealth today and in the future is an important economic question and that is why Real Property Laws (land ownership) emerged with the agricultural revolution. Destroying this prospect of future wealth from land is the basis of most environmental laws on mining.
By contrast, on these barren Celestial Bodies, land becomes basically worthless once the mineral resources are extracted. There is no prospect for it creating future wealth except perhaps as shielding. So who owns it is not important. Who does own the wealth extracted from it and from structures built on it is, but both are adequately covered by the existing OST. All the Space Resource Act did was clarify and codify it.
Also, as pointed out below, Article 9 of the OST prohibits interference with existing activities on Celestial Bodies, which eliminates the claim jumper fear you have. Other firms will need to stay their distance from your mining activities.
Couldn’t you imagine a future in which some permanent base of operations is developed? One “settled”, more or less, one on which smelting and fabrication could take place?
This would not only give value to the location of a particular asteroid, it would also provide a sensible market for resources other than water.
There is some far future, one could imagine, much like the current series running on television, where Ceres is well-settled. In fact a permanent settlement of some sort is about the only thing that adds value to the resources offered in the belt. Earth as a market for asteroid riches, certain limited exceptions aside, isn’t very strong.
In that future current notions about Celestial Bodies will be insufficient to contend with reality.
I expect that would take a long time, and the short-term prospects have to be viable. The water-to-GEO idea could probably be done robotically. If it pans out, someone would be willing to invest in infrastructure to make it more profitable. That could lead to human staff (or, at first, periodic visits for maintenance and repairs.) That could lead to more people around to cater to the engineers and technicians (which is what boom towns in the American west were all about.)
But I think that’s far enough off that it’s hard to predict the legal implications. Would the Outer Space Treaty’s non-interference clause imply a requirement for a warrant to search someone’s apartment on Ceres? Legal precedents have been based on stranger logic. For now, what matters is the current legal framework and its affects on the near-term developments. I don’t see a problem there.
No, OST focus is only on relationships between nations.
A warrant to search someone’s apartment on Ceres would be governed by the laws of the nation that the structure containing the apartment is governed by. If its a corporation in the U.S., it would be U.S. law. If Russian, Russian law.
Yes, the real value of space mining will be to support space based manufacturing. In fact I am working on a paper on that topic for ASCE Earth/Space 2018.
But the OST already recognizes the ownership of structures as being essentially spacecraft. So any such facilities would be owned and governed by the laws of the nation(s) they are registered in as is the ISS under Article VI of the OST. The Article IX provision prohibiting interference would provide the buffer zone, again as in the case of ISS which has a buffer zone about its orbit. So the legal framework for such settlements is basically in place now.
It seems NASA as a R&D agency thinks more of
science research that industrial development, which is why Mars, Europa,
and other places get focus because as if there is not much science left
to do on the Moon (actually there is). A compelling argument to not carry ***all*** fuel from the earth surface. For starters make fuel on the Moon (LCROSS showed there’s lots of hydrogen and oxygen, just need to split it) and lunar gravity well not so deep.
I wonder if Moon has renewed interest because with a new President and now can talk about the Moon. Trump has done development work (hope it doesn’t turn out like many of Trump’s developments where other people lost money and end results have a lot to be desired), but then with Trump there is a lot of political division and baggage with no compromise in sight.
Then what methods (SLS, FH, BO) can scale up to industrial size and routine operations? Of course this is what everyone is arguing about now.