(Published in Deep SA, August 2012)
By Stef Terblanche
When
a Hollywood movie-maker, an internet whiz kid, some space and computer
scientists, a Texas billionaire, and a few other very wealthy people got
together in April and told the world they were preparing to go into space to
mine platinum on near-earth asteroids in quantities that would make South
Africa look silly, one expected the world to take note.
And
it did. Their announcement was carried in more than 2,000 news articles around
the world in the days that followed.
Only,
many of these took a tongue-in-cheek stance and seemed to dismiss them as a
bunch of publicity-seeking crazies.
Publicity
they may certainly have sought, but crazy they were not. In fact they –
collectively going under the banner of a company called Planetary Resources –
are dead serious in their quest to raise the necessary billions of dollars
needed, develop the appropriate technology, mine the asteroids for vast
quantities of platinum and create the world’s first trillionaires.
One
also expected South Africa and its circle of blue-chip platinum miners to
respond. After all, with them presiding over 75% of the world’s currently known
platinum group reserves, the announcement by Planetary Resources potentially
threatens this monopoly.
But
either they shared the notion that these were crazy people, or they were busy
with other far more depressing things, like simply trying to survive while
preparing interim results in a very negative market. Most likely the latter.
As
Northam Platinum spokesperson Memory Johnstone put it: “South African platinum
companies are not really looking into that (space mining) right now, they are
more concerned with just surviving at the moment. Platinum prices are down at
the moment, so concerning themselves with space exploration for platinum is not
really something they will consider right now.”
True,
South African platinum group metals (PGM) production is down 25%, much of it
due to labour unrest; the platinum price has fallen more than 16% over the past
year and continues to slide; costs continue going up; executives of these
mining companies have been facing something of a shakeup; and share prices have
plummeted.
So
when Planetary Resources made their announcement at the Museum of Flight in
Seattle, Washington, South Africa’s platinum bosses probably were far too busy
to be bothered.
Nonetheless,
the ambitious US-based start-up company has formidable backing, and is dead
serious. In fact, they have quietly been working at their plans for over two
years now. In their announcement in Seattle - aimed at attracting investors and
“the best brains” out there to participate in the venture - the group said that
there are 9,000 asteroids larger than 50 meters in diameter in orbit near the
earth. Some of them could "contain as much platinum as is mined in an
entire year on earth”, they claimed.
And
Planetary Resources is in a hurry to get to that vast orbiting treasure chest.
It has committed itself to having its first prospecting telescopes in space
within 24 months.
The players
Planetary
Resources boasts a formidable A-list team of founders and funders, among them –
• James Cameron, the Canadian film
director-producer and deep-sea explorer who made the box-office hit “Titanic”;
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire
computer scientists who founded Google;
• Eric Schmidt, an American businessman, software engineer and the current executive
chairman of Google;
• Peter Diamandis, the founder and chairman
of the X Prize Foundation who is widely held to be a key figure in the
development of the personal or private spaceflight industry and who has created
many space-related businesses and organisations;
• Eric Anderson, a leading space industry
entrepreneur who has led the development of commercial human spaceflight and
the space tourism industry, selling more than $250 million in spaceflights
including South African software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth’s space trip;
• Chris Lewicki, a former National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars mission manager;
• Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and
veteran NASA astronaut;
• Charles Simonyi, the chairman of
Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft's former chief software
architect;
• K. Ram Shriram, the founder of Sherpalo and
a founding director of Google; and
• Ross Perot Jnr, Texas billionaire and
chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group, whose father once ran for president.
One
could hardly ask for more “heavyweight” than that, which is why sane and influential
people everywhere should be taking serious note of their announcement.
In
an interview with Space.com, Anderson said, "We are going to the source.
...The platinum group metals are many orders of magnitude easier to access in
the high-concentration platinum asteroids than they are in the Earth's
Crust."
It
may be mere ironic coincidence, or a case of Hollywood-meets-reality, but it
was co-founder and funder Cameron who wrote and directed the 2009 hit movie
“Avatar” in which a fictitious precious metal called "unobtainium"
is mined on Pandora, a fictional, lush habitable
moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.
The technology
In
developing the required technology, the group certainly has the right
credentials with several of its members being aeronautical and computer
scientists and engineers. Some of them previously worked on space programmes of
NASA.
For
now Planetary Resources will be focusing on robotic space exploration and
getting exploration telescopes into place. In the course of the next two years
the group hopes to launch between two and five space-based Arkyd-101 Space
Telescopes that will be used for exploration to find the asteroids most
feasible for mining.
The
next phase – within five to seven years - would involve launching spacecraft with a more specific prospecting agenda
to map out an asteroid in detail and identifying potential, relevant geological
characteristics.
The
third phase, within five to ten years, would see the company going from
prospecting to actual extraction by the building small, relatively low-cost
space craft to carry robots to the asteroids. These will mine them and bring
back to earth the mined and refined platinum ore.
As
the asteroids are believed to contain substantial quantities of water, the
group intends using the water’s hydrogen and oxygen to create “fuel stations”
in space to refuel the space craft to be used in the venture. This could also
benefit NASA’s spacecraft involved in deep space exploration.
Planetary
Resource hopes to launch its first spacecraft within 24 months.
The
team says it will be making good use of technology already developed such as
that used to take Cameron to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to film the
sunken wreck of the Titanic, or the
robotic technology used by petroleum company Shell to access oil in some of the
deepest oceans.
Planetary
Resources believes its initial customers are likely to include private research
institutes and agencies like NASA.
The NASA fit
In
fact, Planetary Resources’ plans seem to fit quite well with NASA’s own future
plans. With NASA now retiring its space shuttle fleet and shifting its focus to
deep space exploration, it will increasingly rely on private companies to build
transport craft for cargo and crew and transport these to the orbiting
International Space Station.
General
Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, told me in an interview conducted with him
when he visited Cape Town late last year that “one of the important challenges
that NASA has from the National Space Act that established us in 1958 was to
promote commerce and industry”.
“We
just recently decided on a heavy-lift launch vehicle for example. We decided that
we are going to rely on industry itself to build and operate space aircraft
going into low orbit, taking both cargo and crew. That is a totally new
industry that will grow up, hopefully not just in the United States.”
“One
of the reasons why we think it is very important for us to now allow American
industry to take over owning and operating the vehicles that go into lower
earth orbit because we in America have been doing that now continuously for 30
years with a couple of interruptions when we lost Columbia and Challenger.”
“The
shuttle programme was an incredible thirty-year technological era that I don’t
think will be matched for quite some time but at the expense of not allowing us
to explore, to go beyond lower earth orbit. So President Obama decided that we
should follow along with the recommendations from previous administrations and
turn over access to lower earth orbit to the commercial enterprises, and let us
do the (deep space) exploration,” said Bolden.
Space prospecting
Exploration
and distance prospecting of this kind is not quite new. In fact already back in
2000, Brad Blair of the Colorado School of Mines’ produced a paper on
near-earth asteroids having a role to play in long-term platinum supply. He
followed this with a paper in 2002 entitled “Space Resource Economic Analysis
Toolkit: The Case for Commercial Lunar Ice Mining.”
Blair
is described by colleagues as “dedicated to opening the space frontier for
human settlement and commerce”, something he has been researching for over
twenty years. He is also a professional space consultant to NASA, Bechtel
Nevada, Raytheon and the Canadian Space Agency.
According
to Blair high-grade PGM concentrations have been identified in so-called LL
Chrondrite near-earth asteroids. He argues in his paper that space-based PGM
sources will become available commercially over the next few decades owing to the
technology growth that allows increased human activity in near-earth space.
He
further argues – in line with what Planetary Resources are saying – that PGM
deposits on asteroids will be sufficient to create its own viable economy.
Until now iron meteorite samples have yielded evidence of substantial platinum
deposits.
“Future
economic work should include econometric estimation of short- and long-term
demand elasticity for platinum, and extend the above analysis to the other
platinum-group metals offered by asteroids,” says Blair.
“The
breakthrough for space resources will come about when a sufficiently large market
is found that justifies mining from a lower cost mineral source located in
space. “The most commonly cited potential market is transportation fuels for
earth-orbiting vehicles.”
The market
Planetary
Resources does not shy away from the anticipated cost of the scheme which it
says will run into billions of dollars. But, it says, the return will be an
addition of “tens of billions of dollars to the US’ GDP annually." The
company nonetheless hopes to bring down substantially the hitherto cost of
visiting asteroids of between $1-billion and $2-billion.
The
question is whether the platinum market can afford near-space mining. At
present earth still has an abundance of platinum and PGMs certainly are not
part of the current resource pinch.
An
article in The Economist argued that “PGMs are expensive because they are rare.
Make them common, by digging them out of the heart of a shattered planet, and
they will become cheap.”
But
Planetary Resources PGMs are high-priced simply because they are being used to
narrowly. By expanding their application across more technology and industries
because of greater supplies being available, will keep prices at viable levels,
they argue.
And
that is also what both the government and leaders in the mining industry in South
Africa seem to think. In fact South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry
(DTI) is already thinking of creating a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) focused
solely on platinum development.
The
DTI’s director-general, Lionel October, has been quoted as saying that a DTI
team was already engaging with various people to establish whether a central
platinum hub with satellite zones would be economically viable.
PGMs
have many wonderful uses. Platinum is used as a catalyst in fuel cells, and development
of hydrogen fuel cells could open up a whole new world of clean energy, it is
thought.
Anglo
American CEO Cynthia Carroll also told the United Nations climate change
convention’s seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Durban last
December that by developing these fuel cells zero-emission electricity could be
produced creating many new jobs and opening up all sorts of other
opportunities.
Experts
say the fuel cell technology derived from platinum can be used for a range of
applications, from powering cell phones, to driving vehicles and even generating
power in isolated locations, meaning there might just be a market able to
absorb what Planetary Resources hopes to bring back to earth.
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