To Mine Asteroids, Look to the Moon

2024-09-28

The year is 2024. By now, according to the science fiction many of us grew up with, humanity has definitively conquered the Solar System. We have permanent stations and even colonies on the Moon and Mars. We routinely harvest the natural resources of our celestial neighbours. Space travel is as unremarkable as air travel. In reality, though, these ambitious visions have remained unfulfilled dreams. The reason for the failure of man’s heavenly aspirations comes down to one earthly constraint: money.

For space colonisation to become a reality, space needs to pay for itself. The proof of this theory is found in space itself, in near-Earth orbits (low-Earth, medium-Earth, high-Earth, and geosynchronous orbits), where the commercial utility of satellites for communication, navigation, remote sensing, and other terrestrial applications have driven down the cost of access and infrastructure development. Deep space — the Moon, the asteroids, and beyond — is still out of reach for capitalism. Deep space needs a killer app.

That killer app is space mining. On the lunar regolith and in the numerous near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), there exist resources of such prodigious worth that they dwarf the terrestrial economy. Metallic asteroids, for example, contain the precious platinum group metals (PGMs), which are crucial for pollution control and clean energy here on Earth. Extracting them is risky, but the reward is a future that exceeds the expectations of even the most optimistic science fiction enthusiast.

The road to space resources is littered with the remains of past explorers. A new crop of companies has emerged recently, but all of them have one thing in common with those that failed in the 2010s: they are aiming to mine NEAs.

At Exterra, we think differently, perhaps because we are the only space resource company founded by astrophysicists. Detecting and characterising tiny, tumbling NEAs is expensive and time-consuming. Developing mining techniques for near-zero gravity, and waiting months for spacecraft to reach and return from these asteroids compounds the challenge. Exterra takes a faster, less risky approach with bigger rewards: mining asteroids that have crashed on the Moon over the past 4.5 billion years.

All the PGMs that we have ever mined on Earth were brought here by asteroids. The Earth’s geological processes, however, have erased the records of these impacts, thereby making them hard to find. The Moon, on the other hand, has no significant geological activity, and has retained the history of asteroidal impacts, as anyone can plainly see on the pockmarked face of our satellite. Our recent research has shown that there are more than 6000 craters on the Moon that contain PGM-ore-bearing asteroid remnants. Getting to them, extracting them, processing them, and returning the refined product is far easier than chasing NEAs that zoom around the Sun.

The table below shows a comparison between the Moon and NEAs as it pertains to resources in general, and PGM mining in particular.

As can be seen, the Moon is unambiguously a better target for PGM mining than NEAs, and yet, Exterra is the only company exploiting this opportunity.

In the coming years, Exterra will locate PGMs on the lunar surface, extract them, and bring them to our customers on Earth with positive unit economics.

Join our journey as we colonise the Solar System.

Ex terra, ad luna.