Inside the startup that wants to mine asteroids and transform space travel forever – Wired.co.uk

On May 25, 2008, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite transmitted a grainy image back to Earth. It showed two white dots - the Phoenix Mars lander and its parachute - descending against the backdrop of the planet's vast Heimdal impact crater. Chris Lewicki, the Phoenix mission's manager, hadn't seen the lander since its launch on August 3, 2007, on board the Delta II rocket that carried it into space. The Phoenix landed 20km from the huge crater, kick-starting its search for microbial-friendly habitats on Mars.

For Nasa, this was the beginning of another successful mission, but to Lewicki, things began to feel repetitive. He had first become obsessed with space at the age of 11, when he saw images of Nasa's Voyager mission, the space probe that captured images of the Solar System's outer planets. He studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of Arizona and, in 1999, joined Nasa, where he rose through the ranks. In 2003, at the age of 29, he oversaw the landing of the Spirit and the Opportunity Mars Rovers.

Those missions were the fulfilment of his childhood dream. Now, with the Phoenix - his third mission to Mars - he began to feel restless. "A lot of my friends were working on the next big robot project, Curiosity," he says. "But that felt like the easy thing to do." So he started casting around for a new job.

That's when he received a call from an old friend, Peter Diamandis, a man best known for creating the XPRIZE Foundation, a $10 million (7.7m) award for the development of the first reusable space rocket. Lewicki had met him at an international astronomy organisation called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, set up by Diamandis in 1980 to promote interest in space exploration. Lewicki had built its website, helped set up its offices and even written letters to Congress. "We'd been in and out of each other's spheres since then," he explains.

During that phone call, Diamandis told Lewicki about his new startup. It had an ambitious goal: to mine asteroids for their natural resources. Diamandis was looking for a CEO. Was he interested? "I just told him he was fucking crazy," says Lewicki.

In the days after that conversation, however, the more he thought about it, the less crazy Diamandis's project seemed to be.

John Keatley

For one, the concept of asteroid mining made sense - in theory. There are more than a million asteroids orbiting our Sun, ranging from a few centimetres to hundreds of kilometres in diameter. Most are lumps of inert rock and dirt. Some, however, are ancient proto-planetary cores stripped of their outer layers during the violent tumult of our Solar System's youth. These are made of pure metal, usually nickel, iron and platinum. "Having an abundant source of platinum group metals from space can transform the way our world works," Lewicki says. "Much as we transformed our relationship with metals when we figured out how to extract aluminium from the Earth's crust."

Furthermore, Lewicki had worked on Nasa's Near Shoemaker, the first space mission to touch down on an asteroid, the Eros, so he had first-hand knowledge of the procedure. "We've sent people and robots to the Moon so it's a place that we understand and feel close to," he says, "But there are also 15,000 near-Earth asteroids which have orbits that come close to us. In the past 20 years, we've found about 5,000 of those that, from an engineering standpoint, are easier to get to than landing on the Moon."

And, of course, Peter Diamandis's ideas had paid off before, as one of the pioneers behind such companies as Blue Origin, Scaled Composites and Elon Musk's SpaceX. "I had been at Nasa for ten years," Lewicki says, "and began to realise there was more I could do to move space exploration forward in the private sector."

So when Lewicki became CEO of Planetary Resources - the world's first asteroid-mining startup - in 2009, he was no longer of the opinion that this was a pipe dream. He was just surprised no one had thought about it before.

John Keatley

At 22:22.00 on October 28, 2014, Chris Lewicki stood in the observation bay at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, to watch the launch of the first test spacecraft built by Planetary Resources.

Weighing just 4kg, the Arkyd-3 only had prototype communications and control systems, but no sensors. It was but a tiny piece among a 2,300kg payload of supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) and would place Planetary Resources among that rarefied subset of startups that have actually sent a satellite into space.

At exactly 22:22.38, the gently billowing steam of condensing fuel surrounding the Antares 130 launch vehicle erupted in a burst of fierce yellow light and dark smoke. Half a second later the launch tower fell away and, perched atop a column of crackling white fire, the 300-tonne rocket rose up into the night.

Fifteen seconds after the launch and scarcely 60 metres above the Atlantic Ocean, however, the main engine exploded. As quickly as it rose, and with twice the pyrotechnics, the rocket plummeted to Earth, taking Planetary Resource's first satellite with it.

"As far as fireworks go it was beautiful," Lewicki recalls. "As far as getting a spacecraft into space, not that good." The loss of Arkyd-3, Lewicki claims, while disappointing, really wasn't that big of a setback. "Part of our philosophy is that the satellite should be somewhat disposable."

Within a few weeks after Arkyd-3's fiery demise, Planetary Resources were able to assemble its replacement and, a few months later, attach it to a follow-up ride to the space station.

John Keatley

This decision to favour multiple "good enough" systems over expensive ones is a result of Lewicki's frustrations at Nasa.

An attachment to already proven technology lead to the Phoenix lander launching with an obsolete 20 year-old computer chip.

"The standard practice has been that a spacecraft has one computer, which does everything, and if something goes wrong, you fall out of the sky," Lewicki says. "This breeds a philosophy that failure's not an option, so success gets really expensive and extremely time consuming."

Planetary Resources' next batch of satellites, the Arkyd-6, will distribute tasks among 17 smaller computers per satellite, so if one fails, it doesn't take the others down. This approach will also be applied to its first prospector spacecraft,the Arkyd-200, which it expects to launch in 2025. "We often over-predict what will happen in a year's time, but we almost always under-predict what will happen in ten years," he says.

The biggest challenge Planetary Resources faces to launch a space mining industry, Lewicki argues, is not technical, but political. In November 2015, the US Congress signed a raft of legislation called the Space Act that guarantees the property rights of private companies over the resources they mine in space. When the Space Act was passed, Lewicki was ecstatic.

Internationally, however, the reaction was much less positive. (The only exception was Luxembourg, which passed similar legislation last year). During the 55th session of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in April 2016, various member states voiced opposition to the US law.

"We're hardwired to think in terms of scarcity and competition," Lewicki says. "But in space these limits don't apply. Exploiting them gives us the opportunity to think about how much more there is to develop and share. There are resources there beyond our comprehension."

Lewicki feels that there's reason for optimism. This February, Etienne Schneider, the deputy prime minister of The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, announced plans to invest 171 million into space resource startups, 21 million of which went to Planetary Resources. This comes in addition to more than 18 million in publicly announced prior investments from, among others, Google founder Larry Page and chairman Eric Schmidt, alongside Virgin CEO and founder Richard Branson. "The change has been profound," he says. When we started, if you brought up asteroid mining, you'd get sniggers. But now people are beginning to realise that this is available in our lifetime."

John Keatley

The home of Planetary Resources is a nondescript building located in an industrial unit just outside Redmond, Washington State. One hundred metres away is the headquarters of Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Chris Lewicki wears his thick, brown hair swept to the side and has a quick, boyish smile. He's dressed in a blue-checked shirt and jeans and has a way of condensing highly technical topics into seemingly straightforward explanations that make you feel like maybe you too could understand rocket science.

As we sit in the company's boardroom, Chris Voorhees, Planetary Resources COO and a former Nasa graduate, enters the room, hefting a large laptop-sized chunk of shiny, jagged rock.

"This is around 90 per cent refinery-grade iron, mixed with cobalt and nickel," Voorhees says. "You melt it, and you get steel."

What he's holding is a meteorite, one of the tens of thousands of shattered asteroid fragments that come hurtling down to Earth, bringing clues about the riches beyond our atmosphere.

"There's more platinum in this meteorite, by percentage, than the most productive mines in the world," Voorhees continues. "Miners on Earth have to expend enormous energy and create huge amounts of waste to extract and refine this much metal. But this came from something several kilometres across and that was the same purity of metal all the way through."

Through observational data collected by Nasa and other space agencies, Planetary Resources has been building a shortlist of the asteroids that are large enough to explore, small enough to easily land on and take off from and near enough in orbit from Earth to allow for transit times of less than a year or two.

There is, however, only so much you can tell about an asteroid from so far away in Earth orbit. In 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's unmanned spacecraft, Hayabusa, returned a few milligrams of grains from the surface of the Itokawa asteroid. A follow-up mission is currently on route to the asteroid Ryugu, with arrival scheduled for July 2018.

Of most interest to Lewicki and Voorhees however, is OSIRIS-REx, a current Nasa mission, on target to meet Bennu, a 492-metre-diameter, near-Earth asteroid made of porous carbon, by 2018, and return with approximately 60g of sample material.

"All of our telescopic data currently indicates that Bennu is rich in carbon and water," explains the project's principal investigator, University of Arizona professor Dante Lauretta, who also sits on Planetary Resources' scientific advisory team. "OSIRIS-REx is a pathfinder for exploring asteroids."

To decide where to create the first space- resource extraction site, however, Planetary Resources will need to send its own spacecraft out into the Solar System for a closer look.

Visible through the window of the boardroom are two solar-panel-plated cereal-box-sized units sitting on a clean room table. These are the Arkyd-6 satellites, the company's first space prospectors that will be instrumented with a mid-wavelength infrared sensor, and placed into low-Earth orbit later this year on one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets.

In addition to infrared sensors, these miniature space telescopes will also carry hyper-spectral imaging sensors capable of analysing light from 40 points across the light spectrum. "By analysing the particular spectral fingerprint the reflected light that an object leaves on these two sensors, we can get a good idea of what it is made of," explains Lewicki.

Once they do know, Planetary Resources will then send small spacecrafts to inspect potential asteroid targets up close. A mock-up of one, the Arkyd-200, sits in the corner of the boardroom. It possesses a doughnut-shaped propellant tank no more than a metre wide. Small enough for several of the spacecrafts to hitch a ride into space orbit alongside a larger main payload, they are designed to move through low gravity under their own propulsion to reach the intended target asteroid.

John Keatley

In July 2015, around 90 million tonnes of solid platinum hurtled within 2.4 million kilometres of Earth - a distance 30 times closer than Venus. That 452 metre-long asteroid UW-158 is just one of many that contain vast resources of platinum-group metals. These are the sorts of precious metals that Lewicki expects to find and mine. His focus, however, remains on discovering the most precious substance of all: water.

Water, while abundant on Earth, is extremely rare in space. And that makes it very valuable. "We currently pay $50 million a tonne just to get it out of Earth's gravity and up to the ISS," Lewicki says. "But there are plenty of asteroids that have it stored under very low gravity already." This water won't be used solely for life support, but also as rocket fuel. "We can convert it into liquid oxygen and hydrogen," Lewicki says. "These are the same ingredients that fuelled all 135 Nasa space-shuttle missions."

To understand the difference the ability to refuel in space could make, consider that spacecraft currently need around ten tonnes of fuel for every tonne of mass that you want to transport.

Current launch systems partially mitigate this through multi-stage design, jettisoning the weight of spent fuel tanks to fall back down into the ocean part way through. Still, once you take into account other factors, such as air resistance, just to escape the Earth's gravity you're looking at a rocket that's 90 per cent pure propellant. For every tonne of additional propellant required for an onward Martian transfer, you would have needed a further ten just to carry that up from the Earth's surface.

Now imagine you didn't have to carry that fuel up with you. Imagine, orbiting around the edges of Earth's gravity well, the Solar System's first space service-station, supplied by asteroids. Somewhere to refuel your engines and refill your water tanks, before setting off on the next mission stage.

"It blows the mind how much this changes things," Lewicki says. "If you could take the amount of energy you had in that rocket to get out to space and refill it again, you could get to Pluto."

Exactly how this water will be extracted is still a work in progress. An early concept design involves a robotic spacecraft that will fully enclose the asteroid, heat the water, then allow it to condense against the outer walls of this container, before releasing the asteroid again and transporting the water to a refuelling station in Earth orbit.

The key resources needed for this are already provided by the environment of space, Voorhees points out. "You have energy from the Sun to heat the water, which will volatilise easily in a vacuum," he says. "Then deep space, which is cold in a way we can't even relate to, will help condense it back again."

John Keatley

And this, for Lewicki, is how humanity will move from throwing robotic probes out over the top of Earth's gravity well for a peek at the Solar System, to climbing up and exploring it ourselves.

"We're already seeing this, as SpaceX and Blue Origin have been getting better at the practice of returning a used rocket," he says. "Asteroids are the most accessible form of resources that will allow us to extend this further into space, to stretch our legs, to set up infrastructure on the way to Mars, and then on Mars itself. Infrastructure that doesn't require 100 per cent of its resupply from Earth. This is how colonisation takes off."

That means not only having the capacity to refuel in space, but actually build up there, too. It's in this environment, rather than on Earth, where those orbiting lumps of pure metal will have the greatest role to play.

"At the moment, most of the engineering and design that goes into a spacecraft is for the first nine minutes of its life," Lewicki says. "It's got to fit into the tiny capsule in the top of its launch vehicle; it has to survive the vibration and acceleration of the rocket ride; and, even when it's just sitting here in our offices, it's got to be able to hold its own weight in Earth's gravity. But if I build it in space, I don't have to care about any of that stuff."

Planetary Resources have already been practising. In the hallway outside their offices Lewicki opens a large padded box and pulls out a palm-sized object. "Don't drop this," he says, handing me a surprisingly heavy moonlander-like complex of delicate struts.

It may be small and merely decorative in function, but this is the first object to be 3D-printed directly from the powder of a pulverised asteroid chunk.

"Now imagine what this could look like printed in space," Lewicki says. "You can make things infinitely large - or light, dainty structures that never have to survive the very violent passage out of the Earth's gravity. This is going to create things that look like something from science fiction, because they have an entirely different set of constraints than engineers have today."

Lewicki continues. "On Earth, to add the 100th storey to a skyscraper you have to take into account how the 99 stories below are going to support it. Space is different. You can just add another level, and another, and another, and keep doing that forever. There's no limit."

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Inside the startup that wants to mine asteroids and transform space travel forever - Wired.co.uk