Resources on Earth are becoming less and less, so the idea of extracting minerals from asteroids looks more and more attractive. Space startup AstroForge plans to test this possibility and has planned two missions for 2023: the first will test the company’s own mining technology, and the second will explore an asteroid located in deep space.
The first mission will take place already in April – a 6U CubeSat loaded with a test sample of material will deliver a SpaceX Transporter-7 rocket into orbit. The team plans to show investors how their recycling technology will work in zero gravity. AstroForge has previously shown her work in a vacuum.
The space startup is being consulted by experts from the Institute of Planetary Sciences and NASA, who will help identify the appropriate species. The team recently published research from the Colorado School of Mines that looked at the metal content of asteroids and how they can be mined and sold on Earth or used in space.
AstroForge’s second mission will approach the chosen asteroid and study its surface using high-resolution images. The company did not disclose the asteroid’s location, AstroForge CEO Matt Hialich said only that “it’s closer to us than, say, a rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.”
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“The asteroid belts are far away and would take us 14 years to travel there and back. Our facility is much better suited for research and exploration…” – said Hialich.
The journey to the asteroid chosen by the AstroForge team will take 11 months. The second mission will fly into lunar orbit with a space startup called Intuitive Machines, and from there continue on its way independently. The third mission involves the landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid, and the fourth – the extraction and transportation of minerals to Earth.
The startup AstroForge appeared in the space industry a few years after the collapse of the asteroid mining plans of two large companies – Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. Both never made it to the asteroids and ran into financial problems.
The company will have to work hard to make its business profitable. The largest amount of material ever retrieved from an asteroid at one time was 250 grams, delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.
AstroForge plans to mostly outsource the infrastructure related to its tasks. For example, a separate company OrbAstro will build a spacecraft, and SpaceX will be entrusted with launches. According to Dzalich, the startup itself is primarily focused on the development of technology for the extraction and processing of minerals in space, as well as determining the trajectories of missions.
Hialich says he eventually hopes to bring the cost of platinum metals down to $50 an ounce from about $975 an ounce:
“It’s not because we have some fabulous mining technology or anything. This is because we are heading to a place where the concentration of platinum metals is much higher than any deposits we have left on Earth. And this is what really makes our project economically viable.”
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Source: Bloomberg, Techspot
