Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Courtesy NASA

Five thousand satellites pass over your head every day. Only about two thousand are working. The rest are “junk” … inoperative … kaput. They represent approximately $20 billion worth of material floating around in space. The average weight of the currently active 2,064 satellites is 3,212 pounds. If defunct satellites follow that average it means there is 9,936,000 pounds of inoperable satellite in orbit worth $2,075 per pound. Since getting something into orbit costs about $10,000 per pound  the actual value of that unused material in space is worth 120 billion dollars. That is more than is expected to be made from mining many asteroids. This is material that it is known exactly what it is, where it is, it’s already manufactured into useful components specifically for use in space, and it's already in space. Plus, it is much more accessible than even the closest near Earth asteroid. One of the asteroids we have actually been to is Ryugu. It’s estimated mineral value is just 83 billion dollars, and that is before costs to extract it are factored in.

The satellite situation has not gone unnoticed by some. Tom Markusic, founder of Firefly Space Systems, wants to tow these objects to an orbit around Mars where the salvaged components can help out with missions to Mars and the outer planets. Keith Volkert, CEO of Satellite Consulting, Inc., wants to use space tugs to tow these objects to an orbit around the Moon where they can be salvaged at leisure from a small space station orbiting there. The parts would then be catalogued and warehoused for future projects on the Moon or heading outward to Mars or beyond. NASA’s proposed Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway might fill the bill for this purpose, providing an attachment for a combination disassembly dock, warehouse, and habitat. 

Besides making money, the removal of dead satellites from Earth orbit is a very good thing. There are too many of them, and the problem is getting worse. See this great time lapse video to see how big the problem is and how fast it is getting worse. There is the very real possibility of the Kessler Syndrome occurring. A cinematic portrayal of this event was well done in the movie Gravity. This is where a collision between objects in Earth orbit creates more objects in a cascading effect that eventually ruins the possibility of getting anything into orbit without being struck. Mankind could be stuck on Earth for a while. 

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New technology in thrusters may enable these salvage plans to take shape. Accion Systems has developed an ion thruster on a chip. It does away with a lot of complicated plumbing, bringing the concept down to a chip that accelerates ions and a reservoir of fluid for ion creation. The thruster chip is called TILE — Tiled Ionic Liquid Electrospray. The size of a deck of cards, a TILE has been operated continuously for 42 days straight. The goal is 417 days. That is a lot of time thrusting and one of the things making this technology so promising. 

As far as satellite removal goes, think of a selfie stick with some TILEs and electronics on one end and an attachment mechanism on the other. A swivel to allow directional changes gives us the first space tug chugging its way to the Moon and back, gradually whittling away at all those space debris objects representing orbital Armageddon. 

Phase Four is another company making tiny, efficient thrusters applicable for this situation. Large, high voltage electronics typically produce and accelerate ions in Hall thrusters to move things around in space. Phase Four has reduced these components down to a size you might expect in a cellphone. These components generate radio waves accelerating plasma produced from xenon gas. These efficient little engines could be used to nudge old satellites outward to the Moon, maybe Mars. 

Going beyond the simple salvage, many of these satellites have simply run out of fuel. If they were to be refueled, they would be perfectly good satellites again. A salvage operation could also become a service operation, boosting the value of this material many times over its salvage value. But there is a legal hurdle that must be jumped before salvaging or servicing occurs. By Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty countries are recognized to have jurisdiction and control over their space objects. Can this be valid after the origin country deliberately abandons the satellite in space? It can’t be a forever situation. 

Once some company goes after an abandoned satellite and the country of origin protests, the U.N. must decide how to handle it. The U.N. should tell that nation that if they still want responsibility for their satellite, they will have to pay for it to stay in orbit. A yearly orbital fee based on the weight of the satellite should be levied by the U.N. on the country in question. I believe a nascent satellite salvage company should press the issue to get things done. The world’s governments and the U.N. are unlikely to spontaneously get around to solving this problem. 

I think we will be hearing more about companies with schemes to remove dead satellites and simultaneously mine them for their valuable components. It is certainly a better plan than destroying  these valuable objects and may even eclipse news and plans for asteroid mining for the near future. 

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ESO/M. Kornmesser on flicker

The early explorers set out on the high seas in wooden boats with cloth sails. They were brave people facing difficult conditions. The next century will see a similar wave of brave people willing to face difficulties to go see in space what no other human has seen or experienced. With proper planning, adequate funding, and modern technology, however, the conditions may not be all that difficult. In fact, they would definitely be considered luxurious by the crews of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. And it all has to do with an industry that doesn’t even exist yet—asteroid mining. 

Near Earth objects or NEOs are usually asteroids, sometimes comets, that come close to Earth at some point in their orbits around the Sun. These are some of the most likely candidates for extraterrestrial mining. There is no gravity penalty with asteroids like there is for Mars and the Moon so design, equipment, and fuel costs are much lower. Although the technology is almost up for it, there are a couple of things to be resolved before mining the asteroids becomes a real thing. 

A power source is required that won’t fizzle out towards the asteroid’s farthest point from Earth, which may be even further out than the asteroid belt. NASA could have a solution with technology called KRUSTY (Kilopower Reactor Using Sterling Technology) that puts out between 1 and 10 Kilowatts. I doubt that NASA is tired of the Simpsons jokes yet, so keep 'em coming. While most of the power needs of mining drones would be satisfied by a field of solar panels installed on the surface of the asteroid or hanging in orbit, it would not hurt to have a back-up generator should something go wrong. The drones will be powered by large lithium ion batteries like those in a Tesla and automatically seek a recharge near depletion like a Roomba. 

KRUSTY nuclear power plant - courtesy NASA

Also, someone needs to come up with an AI capable of running a space mission on its own. Once that's done and likely asteroid choices vetted, it won’t be long before AI driven, solar powered mining drones with a nuclear backup touch down on an asteroid as it makes a flyby of Earth and start mining it for water, metals, silicon, or whatever substance of value that can be hauled back to Earth orbit on the next closest pass. 

If the drones are careful about how they excavate this chunk of space rock, the owners will not only be making money from the mine, but by renting out a perfectly safe and comfortable Solar System shuttle as well. It will serve as a scientific expedition base as easily as a planetary system cruise ship or some combo thereof. 

What makes this craft so safe and comfortable? Besides the normal stuff like food, water, and air, there are two big current problems for human habitation of space—radiation and the lack of gravity. Radiation is a big bugaboo. Cosmic radiation can throw an iron nuclei at you that packs the power of a baseball thrown at 40 mph. Concentrating that much power in such a small area causes physical damage and ionizing radiation with mutagenic effects on human tissue. It could damage your eyesight and your genes. Also, we are not sure why, the lack of gravity in space is not that great for humans. It makes bones porous and muscles weak. It can also affect vision and balance. An asteroid-based shuttle does away with both of these problems. Here is how it will be done.

We will use asteroid 1996 FG3 as an example for this thought exercise. Asteroid 1996 FG3 has a diameter of 1.7 kilometers or 5,600 feet. It is a chondrite asteroid and rotates once every 3.6 hours and weighs more than a trillion pounds. It crosses Earth's orbit reaching just inside the orbit of Venus on its trip toward the Sun. Outward bound, it comes close to the orbit of Mars without crossing before heading back in. It takes 395 days to complete its journey so your trip will normally take at least a year. 

The mining robots will form a cylindrical shape from the interior of the asteroid as they remove material to be processed. The axis of this cylinder will coincide with the rotational axis of the asteroid. But there is a problem. Even if the internal cavity is quite large, say 3,400 feet in diameter, standing on the inside of that big cylindrical cavity the artificial gravity would be a paltry .002 standard Earth gravity at its current rate of rotation. However much it would help your dunk shot, it would not work to keep you healthy. 

If artificial gravity were to be created for cavities inside, the asteroid would have to be spun up to about 1.25 rpm or 20 times faster than what it is now. Even using the mass driver propulsion system I’ve proposed in A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic, Asteroid Propulsion System producing 155,000 pounds of thrust, it would take a hundred years to get the asteroid up to speed. How can this be solved? 

We build a cylinder inside this cavity that is much lighter. With a cylinder spinning inside the asteroid, the gravity can be controlled by the speed of rotation. Assuming the dimensions already given, a cylinder 3,400 feet in diameter spinning at 1.25 rpm would provide .91 normal gravity. A 200 pound person would weigh 182 pounds if that person was standing on the outside wall of that cylinder. 

Such a large cylinder may have many levels from the center to the outer wall. If each level was a hundred feet from floor to ceiling, there would still be 17 levels. Gravity at the innermost level (100 feet from the center) would be .05 Earth normal while level 10 (1,000 feet from the center) would be .53 or half Earth normal. 

To save time and resources, the cylinder will be made a lot smaller and the rotation sped up to compensate. For instance, a 2,000 foot diameter cylinder spun at 1.65 rpm to provides .93 Earth gravity at the outermost level. But we’re not talking about enough room for a space colony … yet. We are only planning for a few dozen people. Plus, if the cylinder is over 100 feet long, serious structural issues begin to pop up at the outer level, the same ones that bedevil an engineer on Earth trying to span a 100 feet with proper safety margins. The above design can be pared down to its simplest configuration—a glorified centrifuge. 

This centrifuge would consist of two arms of equal length attached to a central hub. The arms would serve as the vertical access tube to the different elevations and as the main structural support countering centrifugal forces. 

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

This first illustration shows a minimalist layout for the habitat inside the asteroid. The hub of the habitat contains electromagnetic bearings that provide frictionless rotation of the habitat. The illustration shows six levels but that could vary. Whatever the final configuration, the arms have to be identical and the internal loading must be monitored by AI to prevent unbalanced loads. 

The long, curved outer tubes on the arms will be considered the “basements” as they are the farthest thing “down” and they have the highest gravity at .93 g, a little less than Earth normal. The next level “up” would be .79 g and the next, .65 g. The short tubes closest to the center will be the “attics”. They only have an artificial gravity of .23 g, less than 1/4 of Earth’s gravity. The basement and the next level up will be the primary levels for residence since this will convey the greatest protection against the deleterious effects of low gravity. The rest will serve as labs, storage, and special applications. 

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

1996 FG3 is a chondrite asteroid made up of anhydrous silicates, hydrated clays, organic polymers, magnetites, sulfides, and maybe some nucleic and amino acids. The Murchison meteorite proved the extent of organic materials in space when 70 different amino acids  were found using high resolution spectroscopic tools. There is the possibility of millions of unique organic compounds in that same meteorite. It is possible these will also show up in asteroids like 1996 FG2. 

The asteroid has water, which is important. Water will be extracted during the mining process and stored as ice.  This water will power the rotation of this habitable centrifuge. Rocket motors burning hydrogen and oxygen will bring the habitat up to speed with occasional boosts to keep it there. The hydrogen and oxygen come from water mined from the asteroid. This will be the only instance where rocket exhaust in space can be reclaimed and reused. The rocket exhaust will turn to water which will turn to ice which will accumulate in the inner cavity housing the habitat. Special drones will vacuum the ice crystals up periodically for recycling.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

Once the habitat is up to speed, it’s time for the voyagers to move in. A deep space tug has brought them from Earth’s orbit to 1996 FG3 as it makes one of its passes near to Earth. The tug parks in a bay excavated for it by the mining drones. This gives it protection from radiation coming from most directions. The illustration labeled “Detail 3” shows the tug in its protective bay. The space-suited future inhabitants go from the tug to the access tunnel dug into the rock of the asteroid. This leads to the airlock for the habitat. Through this they gain entry to pressurized living space and transition from 3.6 rotations per hour of the asteroid to the 1.65 rotations per minute of the habitat. They shed their suits, and climb “down” one arm or the other to different levels. 

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

As illustrated, this habitat has about 320,000 square feet of habitable space. That does not include areas for storage or utilities. If just half is used for 600 to 1200 square feet apartments, a hundred to two hundred people could have their own digs aboard this asteroid shuttle. 

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge. 

This design easily lends itself to expansion. From the minimal wedges of the original layout, it goes full circular. Also, the mining drones have excavated four more cavities for additional rotating habitats and added another access tunnel with docking bay at the other end of the asteroid. This space would allow about 26,000 people to inhabit the shuttle. 

By this time, and we may be talking about a couple of centuries in the future, there is a mature economic system in space. There will still be a few tourists, but much of the habitat will be devoted to labs and manufacturing facilities making products in low gravity or vacuum that can't be made on Earth. There will be labs studying new organic compounds discovered on asteroids and comets. It could include a new repository of seeds that will replace the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. It will be safer from cosmic radiation and/or conflict and climate change on Earth. Likewise, a repository of the world's animals as embryos will come about and be stored on such an asteroid. 

On its approach to Mars, it will become commonplace for one of the deep space tugs to rendezvous with the uppermost station of the Mars Space Elevator, allowing people to go to the surface of Mars to conduct business or science or just sightsee. Likewise, the approach to Venus allows travelers to make a connection with the orbital labs around Venus working to terraform the planet. 

Other asteroids will be converted in a similar matter. Some will have orbits taking travelers to the outer edges of the asteroid belt, almost to Jupiter. These shuttles will be excellent for launching expeditions to the outer planets and their moons, the Kuiper Belt, and even the Oort Cloud. Outposts with fuel and supplies for these ventures can be more easily stocked with such a conveyance. 

The human race is at this fantastical pivot point in history. At the same instant in time, historically speaking, we are poised to begin an expansion into space and to witness our planet ravaged by unforeseen (or ignored) circumstances involving the very industrial/technology base that allows us to venture into the great unknown. I sincerely hope we are up to the precarious balancing act from here forward that will allow us to keep our home planet livable while exploring others. 


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The Technology of Fresh Food In Outer Space

Crops inside a Mars Lunar Greenhouse unit.

 Courtesy Dave Mosher/Business Insider

I've talked to you about picking the right asteroid, how to securely land on it, the equipment you'll need to mine it, how to give it a propulsion system that could last for centuries, and recycling the mined out asteroid into a Solar System traversing space yacht. 

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What I haven’t talked about is when you and your friends are sitting in the lounge of that space yacht halfway to Ceres, laughing at old Lost in Space episodes, and you get the munchies, and you want something fresh; not frozen, dried, jerked, or canned. This is not a mundane or unreasonable request. The human palate sometimes demands fresh fruits or vegetables to be satisfied, and it may be some time before a true replicator comes along that can actually build something organic, molecule by molecule, and get it right. 

Mars colony with modules. Courtesy NASA

Man cannot live on Tang and freeze-dried ice cream alone, so being able to grow food will be a necessary thing for staying on Mars or the Moon for any length of time. While the ability to grow fresh produce is a great asset for cruising to the asteroid belt on your space yacht, for long term residents of Mars it is essential. It will serve as a buffer for the cataclysmic accidents we are already familiar with in space travel. It’s a dangerous business. A lost supply ship could mean starvation to the Mars crew unless they are at least semi self sufficient.

What are the current options? Near the top of the list would be the Mars-Lunar Greenhouse. It is a bioregenerative system, meaning it's self-sustaining for the plants, animals, and microorganisms living in it. After an administration change, NASA’s study of bioregenerative life support systems took a big hit in funding. It shut down the project in 2003 but managed to funnel some grant money to the University of Arizona to study the feasibility of a greenhouse that would produce food, oxygen, and process grey water - all helpful things in space. 

A prototype of the Mars Lunar Greenhouse, a bioregenerative life support system funded in part by NASA. Courtesy University of Arizona.

They came up with a collapsible aluminum and plastic tube 7 feet in diameter and 18 feet long that telescopes down to 4 feet for shipping. Plastic tubes supply water to plant roots. Light comes from an LED system or is piped in from the outside. There is an external composter that digests human and plant waste with microbes and filters water. One of these units, under optimal operating conditions, can provide 50% of food, 100% of air, and 100% of clean water that one astronaut needs on Mars or the Moon. 

It is not perfected, and the money for the project ran out in 2017. The Chinese have a similar project under way. It is much further along. Eight Chinese student volunteers spent a year in China's "Lunar Palace 1", the longest stay in a self-contained facility. Their stay ended in May of 2018. The Chinese are planning to go back to the Moon as well If they can get their fusion technology perfected, the helium-3 on the Moon could be a game changer for energy domination.

Although the Mars Lunar Greenhouse is a wonderful thing, it seems a similar setup could be made using an aeroponic system. SpaceX has not said anything about developing a bioregenerative unit for its planned Mars mission. Thawed bologna sandwiches without lettuce and tomatoes for that crew so far. It seems the opportunities in this field for companies to develop support technology are many and varied. It’s need is a given for space, but there may be applications on Earth. Some people may feel their survival bunkers just aren’t complete without a self-contained bioregenerative greenhouse. 

The fresh greens and fruit aren’t quite ready for prime time but what about meat? I just can’t picture giant links of sausage hanging/floating from the instrument packages on the Big Falcon Rocket Spaceship like a science fiction-tweaked scene from Das Boot. Probably there will be a tabletop version of the machinery used by Impossible Foods to make their hamburgers from yeast. Their tech is to get yeast to produce the iron-infused chemical heme that gives meat its distinctive flavor.  

Also, real meat can be grown from muscle tissue stem cells, forming something that looks and tastes like meat. Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University gave a demonstrative proof-of-concept to "cultured" meat in 2013, but no attempts have been made to scale it up commercially. There are misgivings about public acceptance. This is a very promising technology for adaptation to space travel and long-term stays on Mars and the Moon. The commercial aspects for Earth-bound populations should also be re-visited in light of the increasing certainty of an agriculture/climate relationship.

At the rate technology is moving now, there is a good chance efficient greenhouses and miniature meat labs will provide fresh food to those venturing beyond the Earth's gravity well by the time we get ready to send them. So don't turn down that astronaut gig because of preconceptions about a boring diet in space. Chasing your shrimp salad down in zero g, on the other hand, is a totally different matter for consideration. 

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