The cost of sending resources into space can be a make or break factor for missions. As human beings explore the Universe they are also exploring ways to generate the materials and resources that are needed once they arrive in space, rather than firing them up on rockets.

A great example of this happened for the first time in April 2021 when the Perseverance Rover made history by generating oxygen on another planet for the first time. It was the fifth rover sent to explore the Red Planet but this one had a different mission to its predecessors. Buried inside its body was a golden box about the size of a toaster, which when activated began to heat up. As it approached its working temperature of 800 degrees Celsius, the care of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory paid off. A thin layer of gold protected the rover, while 3D-printed nickel alloys heated and cooled the atmospheric gases flowing through the device.

Mars’s atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide. As the electrolysis process began, Perseverance vented a waste product, Carbon Monoxide meaning that it had achieved its objective. Human ingenuity enabled Perseverance to generate oxygen on another world for the first time.

Escaping gravity

The majority of the effort to get supplies into space is wrapped up in escaping Earth’s powerful gravity. Getting 1kg of mass just to Low Earth Orbit varies enormously from rocket to rocket, but the cheapest prices available are of the order of a thousand dollars. Blasting four astronauts off the Martian surface to return home would require around 32 tonnes of fuel and oxygen alone, according to the Jet Propulsion Lab.

This is one of the reasons that missions cost billions of dollars and it is also why that little device on Perseverance is such a critical moment in the history of space exploration. Called MOXIE, which stands for the ‘Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment’, it is the first step towards generating some of the resources needed to traverse the solar system away from Earth’s restrictive gravity. Moxie only produced enough Oxygen for a human to breathe for 15 minutes but it was the start of something much further reaching.

Angel Abbud-Madrid, Director of the Centre for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. He leads a research program on the human and robotic exploration of space and the utilisation of its resources. He is clear that the value is in generating resources needed for space, in space and not for bringing them back to Earth. “There’s no way to compare the cost to go to space, to obtain a metal and bring them to earth. What he was clear all along, and by the community as a whole is that resources in space are good to be used in space, on this concept of living off the land, if you got to travel to a place don’t carry it with you. It is extremely energy intensive, is extremely expensive to do that.”

Collaboration for exploration

A major development in space resources began in 1999 when interested industries formed the Space Resources Roundtable was founded, and it sits at the Colorado School of Mines. “The intention was to have a forum in which not just space professionals but members of the extractive industries, but also financial analysts and policy analysts and economists could discuss about the field of space resources,” he says. “Because, as they say, our cities on earth resources involve all of this aspects. They require the science engineering, but also the companies that are going to get involved and business cases and plans.”

It started small, 20 to 25 people attended and most of them members from NASA and some academics that were interested in the field. But it started growing over time, as the interests (mainly of NASA) began to change. “People got interested because all of a sudden there were opportunities to do research on how to excavate and drill and extract resources for those types of missions.”

Angel says that the techniques used will depend on the resources targeted. “The moment one starts talking about space resources, people gravitate to space mining. But it’s interesting that there are resources that cannot be mined, that are intangible.”

Such as solar energy, which is practically limitless, and in the future is one of the few things that can be brought to Earth. “Because you can collect it with solar panels and solar collectors that can transform that energy into microwaves and can be beamed down to pay to certain points on Earth,” says Angel.

Solar panels in space do not need to worry about cloud cover, and there is a near-limitless volume of space to occupy with panels, meaning there is no worry about covering the entire countryside with solar farms. Then there are the properties of space itself, which have niche and extremely delicate manufacturing applications such as ultra high vaccums and low gravity. These could be used to create products with better qualities. “More and more we’re finding that might as well start from technologies that can be used in that environment in low gravity, extreme temperatures, vacuums, radiation, all sorts of different environment, than that one finds on Earth. It will depend on the resource that you’re going after,” says Angel.

Resilient design

Designing equipment that can survive and operate efficiently in these hostile environments is critical. Testing such equipment requires the recreation of these conditions on Earth and this is what Angel and his colleagues try and do at the Colorado School of Mines. “So think about one destination the moon, you’re going to have to do your experiments on their vacuum, you’re going to have to subject your samples to extreme temperatures very cold, very hot, you are going to have to replicate if you’re dealing with a lunar dust. It’s called the regolith, this is electrostatically charged and so you have to replicate that.”

This involves vacuum chambers, lowering the temperature to minus 190 degrees Celsius, then to plus 120 degrees Celsius to simulate the day/night cycle on the moon. The team also replicate soil conditions and the characteristics of the dust. “The dust on the moon is extremely abrasive is has jagged edges, and is glassy has never seen any humidity so it’s highly reactive,” says Angel.  

When it comes to space resources even derelict satellites could provide useful materials. One of the major areas of study at the moment is identifying the location and viability of resources. Even the moon, which has a very similar material make-up to the Earth, is structured in a very different way thanks to the geological processes that created them.  The hypothesis is that the Moon was formed from the collision of a Mars-like planet with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, material from both the ancient Earth and from Theia was ejected and gradually coalesced, forming the moon hence the material similarity. But in the moon’s case it cooled very rapidly. “There was some volcanic activity that brought some of the material to the surface. But you don’t find the same type of concentrated mechanisms that you find on Earth,” says Angel.  “So yes, you may find iron, you may find titanium, or other ones, but they are found in in small amounts in different sections. So you have to understand the processes that gave rise to the moon, in order to see where the resources are, in what amount what concentration with what minerals, so that then you can adapt the extractive technology. So that’s a very important thing.”

Commercial potential

Ultimately, just three things are necessary to have a viable commercial operation that obtains resources. They first have to be found and then there has to be the technology to recover them. Finally there needs to be a customer with a use for them. For the longest time, the only potential customer was NASA. They had exploration objectives and were prepared to consider in-situ resource exploitation. But now we have entered the New Space era and several space agencies around the world are interested in space resources.

“Since the beginning of the space age, we have depended 100% from our Earth, to explore space, we have to carry everything with us every little bolt and nut and consumable and propellant and communication satellites, and metals and everything. And that’s going to limit what we can do in space,” says Angel.

Space agencies realise that, in order to expand their exploration goals, to have larger payloads to be able to stay on planetary bodies, they going to have to use space resources. But there are other customers too. “Starting in around 2016 or so, the first companies, the first clients of space resources started coming out. And these were private sector companies, these were rocket companies that were interested in on lowering the cost of transportation, which has impeded us from doing more in space,” says Angel. He says this is why so few countries have gone out into space and why less than 600 people have visited – because it is so expensive and so energy intensive.

This means that for the first time ever the language of space resources is firmly on the exploration plans of space agencies. In previous years the idea had been a ‘scenario of interest’ a curiosity, but now it is seen as a critical part of making exploration space sustainable. If this works then ultimately, resources in space could perform much the same role for the economy as they do on Earth.