The Wealth of Asteroids: Berfrois Interviews Martin Elvis
NEAR Shoemaker: Near-Earth Asteroid 433 Eros, 2000
by Russell Bennetts
Martin Elvis is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I spoke to him about his recent book, “Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed will determine our Future in Space”.
Berfrois
Who owns asteroids?
Martin Elvis
No one can own any celestial body, including asteroids, according to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. More precisely, Article II says they are “not subject to national appropriation”. For now, that is taken to mean that any person or company within a nation cannot own a natural space object. But several countries have laws saying that if you pick up a rock off a celestial body then it is your property, the way the Apollo moon rocks belong to the USA. If some asteroids turn out to really valuable, then I would expect some creative interpretations of Article II to emerge. Or some “extra-legal” activities will pop up, like space rustling and claim-jumping, even space piracy.
Berfrois
Plenty of career options there. Should I perhaps train to become an asteroid miner?
Elvis
Depends how old you are! For someone going to college now, or for a recent graduate, it’s not a completely crazy idea. There are certainly some start-ups popping up with new ideas on how to make a profit from mining asteroids. There are also a handful of reputable academic courses in space mining just beginning.
Berfrois
How do love, fear and greed influence our relationship with asteroids?
Elvis
Love of science and exploration has been our main driver so far, and it is speeding up as we realise the importance of the asteroids in answering some Big Questions, such as where the Earth’s oceans came from. But that exploration has uncovered the threat of large asteroids colliding with the Earth, instilling a healthy fear in us. As the t-shirt slogan says, “Asteroids are nature’s way of asking: How’s that space program coming along?” That fear is gradually gathering steam for programmes to find and deflect potential killer asteroids. However, while love and fear may open our eyes to the possibilities, they are both small scale compared to the Solar System. To get to scale, we need the natural growth that a functioning, commercial, space economy would bring. We need to harness the profit motive: greed.
Berfrois
Just how commercial will this opening of the space frontier be? Will our exploitation of asteroids be led by state entities or the private sector?
Elvis
In new risky areas it is often the state that does the preliminary work, bringing down the risk until commercial companies are be ready to jump in. Space resources, whether from the Moon or from asteroids, seems to be following this road. New US surveys for asteroids, the NEO Surveyor and the Rubin Observatory, are a case in point. After that threshold is crossed, the private sector is generally better at controlling costs. If they don’t, they will soon be out of business. States still need to be involved to settle disputes, set safety standards and the like. We don’t want private companies shaving safety margins when dealing with large masses heading towards our Earth, after all…
Berfrois
Do you think that asteroid mining will prove more profitable than planetary mining?
Elvis
Planets have the disadvantage of being at the bottom of a gravity well. And, as far as we know, they don’t have anything that the asteroids – which have negligible gravity – don’t give us. The penalty in rocket fuel for mining on Mars is pretty big. Asteroids are better. The Moon has half the gravity of Mars, so the fuel cost is lower. It is also always nearby which is good for communications and, if needed, rescue. So maybe the Moon will be mined first and the asteroids – with their far bigger resources – will follow.
NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft: Up and Down in Vesta’s Cratered Terrain, 2011
Berfrois
Is this all going to happen way in the future?
Elvis
Wealth from asteroid mining is at least a decade away, but maybe less than two. By 2030 we will have much better treasure maps of the asteroids to locate the minority that might be profitable. We will also have big new rockets by then that will let us take massive mining machines to them.
Berfrois
How developed is asteroid science today?
Elvis
My impression is that there’s a long way to go. The community of scientists working on asteroids, comets and meteorites combined is only about 500 strong. But there are two recent missions that returned samples of asteroids and several new missions in the works. They will be visiting types of celestial body that we’ve never been to before: a metallic asteroid and several “Trojans” that lead or trail Jupiter in its orbit. Trojans are thought to be stray members of the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune, that were then trapped by Jupiter’s gravity to lead or follow Jupiter in its orbit. Then there’s the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission that will soon launch on a path to its own destruction when it hits a small asteroid, one that is a moon to a larger asteroid, Didymos. The idea is to see how much that small moon changes its orbit. It’s an exercise in “planetary defense”. Can we deflect an asteroid that threatens to hit the Earth? DART will tell us.
Berfrois
How did you become so fascinated by asteroids?
Elvis
It’s a bit of a winding path. A decade ago, it became clear that cutting-edge space telescopes are now so expensive that NASA can no longer afford to launch more than one every 15 years or so. In any given decade, it’s as if we astronomers are looking at one colour instead of seeing in full colour. Imagine how wrong we could be if we only saw one shade of red. My own research into quasars relied on all of NASA’s Great Observatories. The answer is to get the cost down, but how? This was before SpaceX’s reusable rockets. My answer was to use capitalism as a tool to bring costs down. But where would we find an industry in space to profit from? The resources of space, which are mostly in the asteroids, seemed like the obvious choice. Studying asteroids uses the same astronomical tools that I’m familiar with, which was a plus.
Berfrois
Humanity remains wary of asteroids following the extinction of the dinosaurs. Are we right to be afraid?
Elvis
Yup. It has happened before and it could well happen again, unless we stop it. Extinction-level asteroids come by at long intervals, we’re talking millions of years. They don’t appear regularly. We are unlikely to get clobbered by one, but it could happen. City-killers come by far more often, once or maybe twice a century. The 2013 Chelyabinsk event was on that scale, but we were lucky that it skimmed the atmosphere instead of heading straight down.
Berfrois
How do you see the space economy looking in a few centuries from now?
Elvis
A growing space economy will find all the asteroids and will make it easy to deflect them, putting an end to our fear. Our love of knowledge will be requited too. We will be able to explore the Solar System, not at the rate of one or two missions per year, but at dozens per year – enough to explore all 200 or so worlds: planets, moons and asteroids made spherical by their gravity. It will let us explore the Universe on scales that are hard to imagine. A telescope at the Solar Gravitational Focus, ten times farther from the Sun than Pluto, could image the continents on another Earth-like planet, or the innermost regions around a giant black hole.
But while I invoke greed to get our capabilities in space up to match the scale of the Solar System, endless exponential growth is not supportable. I surprised myself by extrapolating the relentless doubling of our use of iron every 20 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution out into the future. Exponential growth like that has a tendency to hit us unawares. Population growth and climate change are two big examples. When I put the numbers in, I found that, at present growth rates, within 400 years we will have used up all the iron in the asteroids, a scale millions of times greater than we use today. Growth in resource use will have to stop; either then, crashing when we have no choice, or sooner, when we can control the process.
Berfrois
It’s movie night: Armageddon or Deep Impact?
Elvis
Deep Impact has a little more relation to what might happen. Gaming out scenarios at the Planetary Defense Conferences shows that there are lots of ways where stopping an impact could go wrong. Every time we do that we learn how to do it better. The comet in Deep Impact, for example, would come in way too fast for us to rendezvous with it, at least with today’s rockets.
For me, Armageddon is more fun because of Bruce Willis! Both movies try to blow up the threatening cosmic body with nukes and back then experts thought this was a terrible idea. Now it’s not so obvious. Newer calculations show that a nuke can deliver a much bigger punch to an asteroid to change its orbit to miss us. On the other hand, experiments firing super-fast bullets at meteorites show that they will instead burst into myriad fragments, just as both films wanted. Will any of those fragments be big enough to kill us off? “More study is needed”, as all research papers say.
About the Author
Dr. Martin Elvis is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and is an expert on the supermassive black holes we see as quasars. Concerned about the future of astronomy he has turned research on asteroid mining, covering both technical and legal/policy issues. Asteroid 9283 Martinelvis is named after him. He is the author of “Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed will determine our Future in Space” from Yale University Press.
Images
Both photographs are from NASA on The Commons and have no copyright restrictions.
