Why Hasn’t Someone Mined this $10,000 Quadrillion Asteroid Yet? | Unveiled

Why Hasn’t Someone Mined this $10,000 Quadrillion Asteroid?

Many millions of miles from Earth, between Mars and Jupiter, our solar system has a vast asteroid belt filled with millions of astronomical objects. Though much of the belt is empty space, what’s there is hugely valuable. It’s even home to one of the solar system’s biggest dwarf planets, Ceres. But what’s the most lucrative object of all, and how can we get our hands on it?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; why hasn’t someone mined this $10,000 quadrillion asteroid?

16 Psyche is a metallic, or “M-type” asteroid believed to be the remnant of a planetary core, specifically the core of a proto-planet that never became an actual planet because it was subjected to numerous collisions. Now it orbits the sun around three times further away than Earth does. It’s called “16 Psyche” because it was the sixteenth minor planet found in the solar system (with the first being the dwarf planet Ceres).

Scientists believe that Psyche is made primarily out of iron and nickel, both elements we already have on Earth, but present in unimaginable abundance inside Psyche. In fact, the asteroid’s estimated worth is a staggering $10,000 quadrillion. That’s 75,000 times more than Earth’s global GDP, which is between $80 and $90 trillion a year on average. It’s astonishing that just one asteroid, only 120 miles across, can be so valuable. And while it is the biggest M-type asteroid in the solar system that we know about, it’s far from the only one. Other M-type asteroids, like 22 Kalliope, might be made primarily of silicates. Considering that silicon is a major component in semiconductors, and that the production of semiconductors is one of the world’s most lucrative industries, 22 Kalliope could also be worth a fortune. It’s no wonder then that space agencies and entrepreneurs alike have been giving the asteroid belt a lot of attention.

In the last decade, a lot of this attention has been directed as 16 Psyche. In 2017, a bid to launch a mission to investigate it was finally approved by NASA. The mission will send out a spacecraft also named Psyche to orbit the asteroid. Using a wide array of instruments, including a multispectral imager and a magnetometer, the craft will carefully study its composition. Set to launch in August 2022, it will use a gravity assist from Mars to reach the asteroid by January 2026 and will orbit Psyche for just shy of two years.

But as for actually mining Psyche, or any other asteroid, we’ll still have to wait a while.

Currently, there are actually private companies created with asteroid mining in mind. Founded in 2009, Planetary Resources has the stated goal of "[expanding] Earth's natural resource base”. It’s successfully launched two satellites so far. One of its plans is to construct a fuel depot in space, where rocket fuel is produced from the resources extracted from asteroids.

Another ambitious asteroid mining startup, Deep Space Industries, was founded in 2013, but acquired in 2019 by Bradford Space. This shifted the company’s goals, although pursuing asteroid mining in the future hasn’t been ruled out. A third company, Kepler Energy and Space Engineering, hopes to dig into the regolith on small asteroids, which in theory will be easier to mine.

The reason these companies haven’t actually started mining asteroids, and that the industry isn’t booming, is simply because our technology isn’t there yet. For Psyche in particular, we’re yet to even thoroughly investigate it, let alone start building complex mining rigs. The furthest humans have gone from Earth is to the moon, which is 239,000 miles away on average; the asteroid belt, on the other hand, is 3 AU away at certain points – that’s 279 million miles, over a thousand times further. So, by going to the asteroid belt for a manned mining operation, we’d be going farther from home than we’ve ever gone before and for years on end. Flying all the way out there would take a lot of time and fuel, making it incredibly expensive – perhaps too expensive to be realistic, even with the vast return investment Psyche promises.

Of course, we don’t necessarily have to send humans to Psyche at all. Over the last decades, the mining industry – like many others – has become increasingly automated. That’s the reason that, despite job losses throughout the fossil fuel industry, the production of certain fossil fuels, like natural gas, is actually increasing. Automation on Earth is part of a drive for more efficiency and higher profit margins, but automation in space is a different story; it would still be more efficient and profitable, but also removes the enormous risk to human life that traveling to an asteroid almost 300 million miles away would pose.

Fully automated asteroid mining would be a risk-free endeavor, at least as far as human lives are concerned. However, it is likely that some people would need to travel there to oversee the machines and repair faults - just nowhere near as many as you’d need to conduct a normal mining operation. Machines also don’t need food, water, air, breaks, or comfort.

Another benefit to mining an asteroid, as opposed to mining on Earth, is that we wouldn’t risk polluting our own planet. Currently, mining can cause a lot of pollution and ecological destruction. A prime example is the nickel mining town Norilsk, which is incredibly toxic and dangerous and has been named the most polluted city in Russia, producing tons of sulfur dioxide each year. Psyche contains nickel, which would mean there would be less pollution on Earth from the nickel industry if we could have our needs met by nickel deposits in space.

Plus, the abundance of iron in Psyche and other asteroids could cause a construction boom, with a glut of cheap iron available. This could help to not only build on Earth but to construct human habitats on other planets. After all, the asteroid belt is firmly between the outer and inner solar system, a perfect go-between for not only Earth but future human colonies on Mars, Titan, and Europa.

It’s not all positives, however. 16 Psyche certainly wouldn’t remove our current reliance on fossil fuels and other important minerals. Even if we do shift away from fossil fuels eventually, that would take more and more batteries to store the electricity generated by renewable sources, which means elements like coltan, cobalt, and lithium. The extraction of all these minerals currently causes tremendous environmental and social damage, with coltan contributing to violent conflicts and cobalt involving the use of child labor. So asteroid mining is not a catch-all solution for the many problems facing Earth in the near future.

There’s also the issue that even though 16 Psyche contains so much iron, it’s still a finite resource; we’ll eventually run out of iron again. After resource extraction has done so much damage to Earth, it’s not hard to see why people could be opposed to industries that exploit other celestial bodies for our own ends, even if they aren’t home to other life forms.

And should any company be able to mine an asteroid for profit? At $10,000 quadrillion, the company able to mine Psyche would become the richest company in the world by an impossibly huge margin. There are already space treaties that try to prohibit private interests in space. But they haven’t been ratified by the countries with the best space capabilities, however, such as the United States. In fact, the US has made its own law asserting that any US citizen “shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law” .

For all the criticisms around asteroid mining though, it is no doubt an inevitable part of our future. One day, mankind’s resource consumption will far exceed what Earth can provide, if that hasn’t happened already. Acquiring resources without putting people in harm’s way or further polluting the planet is a great solution to this problem, and asteroids can provide what we need. Eventually, our technology will reach a point where asteroid mining is not only possible, but sensible and essential - as well as being a vital step in humanity’s journey to becoming an interplanetary civilization. Though there are dangers ahead when it comes to potential corporate monopolies over asteroid mining, asteroids like 16 Psyche also represent new possibilities and solutions to far-reaching problems.

We haven’t sent a crewed mission to another celestial body since 1972, but with space exploration coming back to the foreground of Earth’s culture, it’s only a matter of time until the technology to make asteroid mining real is available. And that’s why nobody has mined this $10,000 quadrillion asteroid, yet.