Cheat Sheet. The other space race that’s going on

For what, selling real estate? Honeymoon trips? No, prospecting for fortunes, especially in the form of nickel, iron, gold, titanium, palladium, platinum and, maybe, even water.

Someone’s found a gold mine in outer space? Not yet, but they’re hoping to do so pretty soon. Hence, the race.

Where would they find these mines? Clearly, not the same way we once found them on Earth. The popular hunch is that asteroids may be hiding a wealth of resources that we can one day dig up and ship back to Earth.

Aren’t asteroids those weirdly shaped chunks of rock too small to be planets? They can be chunks of metals or ice too. Asteroids, and other celestial objects classified as minor planets, are by-products dating back to the Solar System’s creation. There are millions of asteroids, with the vast majority of them in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. There are also near-Earth asteroids, which pass close to our planet and are, on occasion, dangerous to life down here. Ask any dinosaur.

And why do people believe these can be mined? Well, when scientists examined meteorites and random space rocks that fell to Earth, they found metals like platinum and palladium in them, both of which are much in demand by the automobile and electronics industries. Besides, sending objects to a near-Earth asteroid can be a lot cheaper than sending objects to Mars, which seems to be the fashionable thing to do these days.

Who’s in this race? Japan has an asteroid initiative that is poised for launch. JAXA, the country’s space agency, says it will be ready in December to send off the probe Hayabusa 2 on its roughly-four-year-long journey to 1999JU3, a near-Earth asteroid. The probe will return to Earth with samples of asteroid material, some of which will be blasted from within the asteroid. These will be studied for insights into the origins of the universe, but the more pressing discoveries will have to do with whether firing a huge bullet into an asteroid will turn up metals of some kind.

Who else? A few private companies, backed by billionaire investors, are quite keen. One of these is Planetary Resources, founded by Greek-American entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. About mining asteroids, the company’s website says: “Unlike Earth, where heavier metals are close to the core, metals in asteroids are distributed throughout their body, making them easier to extract. (They are often) in significantly higher concentration than found in mines on Earth.” Then there is Deep Space Industries, which plans to launch a fleet of tiny low-cost spacecraft (a 25-kg creation called Firefly) to reconnoitre asteroids most suited to mining.

What’s stopping the rush of prospectors from heading into space? It may be that the promise of infinite resources could be vastly exaggerated. In January, Martin Elvis, an astrophysicist from Harvard, said that commercial mining may be possible, if at all, only on about 10 near-Earth asteroids.

And the other problem?

The question of who owns resources mined in space. The Outer Space Treaty, which the UN has forged among 102 countries, says no country can own an astronomical body. But it’s silent on whether private entrepreneurs can do so. And in the absence of clear laws, no one wants to go to the trouble of finding gold in space only to have to share it back on Earth.

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