When Spaniards first encountered platinum in Columbia, they named it platina, which means little silver. What they wanted was the silver and the platinum was a sort of unwanted impurity. But today, on the American Precious Metals Exchange, on September twenty third and twenty twenty four, the price for an ounce of platinum was about nine hundred and seventy eight US dollars, while silver was going for only about thirty one dollars. We have found lots of uses for platinum and other
platinum group metals like palladium and rodium. The chemical industry uses platinum group metals in the production of nitric oxide, which we use to make fertilizers. The metals are also important in the automotive industry. For example, we use them in catalytic converters to try to clean up automobile exhausts, and they're also used in jewelry. Part of why these
metals are so expensive is because they're super rare. For example, platinum we mostly get from South Africa and Russia, and the fact that we get a lot of it from Russia hits home a point when you only get something really important from a few places, there's a risk of the supply chain getting disrupted. For example, right now, we don't really want to buy from Russia because they've invaded Ukraine.
The United States Geological Society has a Critical Minerals List, which is a list of stuff the US really needs that is either like rare or might be hard to get. And three of the six platinum group metals are included in the lists top three. So where can we get more of these valuable metals? Well? Out in space? Vast quantities of resources that are becoming rare or hard to get here on Earth are found in pretty vast quantities
in the asteroids. There are asteroids that contain these platinum group metals at higher concentrations than we know of that can be found on Earth right now. And maybe you've even heard that the first trillionaire will be the first person who who can successfully mine asteroid resources and then sell them back here on Earth. But is there really that much money to be made in asteroid resources? And how expensive would it be to go out and get these resources in the first place, Do we have the
technology that we need to do it? And if you can do it, who owns those asteroids. Is it legal to extract those resources and sell them on the open market? And what other resources are out there? And could we use those resources to build the first settlements in space. On today's episode, Love, Fear, Greed, and Asteroids, we talked to astronomer and space resources expert doctor Martin Elvis. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle basist and I never want to go to space.
Hi. I'm Kelly. I'm a paris potologist and space settlement nerd, and you know I also don't ever want to go to space. I'm sure it would make me puke and I'm worried I would die.
But you know, space might be filled with glittering jewels, which makes me wonder. Kelly, here's a question for you. What is the most expensive thing that you own?
WHOA okay, so other than the farm that I live on, in my cars? And then I guess my laptop because I am a snooty person who really loves my MacBook Pro. I think those are my most expensive possessions.
What about you me too, I'm not like a fancy jewelry person. I don't have like an emerald or some fancy gold chain or anything. I think my laptop is my most expensive purchase other than of course house and car. So I don't really worry about like getting burgled very much have anything expensive in there? You know, there's a bunch of old New Yorkers. You know what else is somebody going to steal from me?
So we have a tractor, but I feel like that's just another form of car. But the tractor costs more than my laptop. But yeah, I don't like fancy stuff for the most part, because I know that i'd break it or my kids would, so why bother?
Yes, exactly right. I don't trust myself with fancy stuff. But of course there's lots of fancy stuff on Earth and out in space. Right, It's filled with all sorts of shiny stuff that people could make money on.
Well, okay, so is it? So there is a lot of shiny stuff out there that people could make money on. But maybe you've watched Star Wars. Of course you've watched Star Wars, and you know when like Han Solo and everyone's going through the asteroid field and there's like asteroids everywhere. They're dodging back and forth. Actually, those asteroids are way more spread out, like you could stand on one and maybe not see another one. And when you are standing
on one, it's probably not a solid rock. In a lot of cases, it's like a rubble pile. We had Phil Plate talking about this the other day, how you might sink inside of one.
They probably don't have huge space worms inside of them.
Yeah, I know as a biologist, I would be interested in the space worms, but probably not so.
Star Wars not a documentary.
You're saying that, and the Martian not docum memories, and the Expanse and the Expanse none of those are documentaries, but they're all wonderful, and we'll be interviewing the Expanse guys for an upcoming episode, which I'm excited about, very excited.
Yeah.
So I think that you imagine mining for space resources, and maybe you don't have a grasp on like how far away those resources are and how rare they are, and how spread out, and how little we understand like the location of these resources and the quantity of these resources out in the Solar System. It gets complicated, But we've got an expert today.
Don't do your space pessimism thing. Kelly, I just want to think about huge nuggets of platinum floating in space that I could just grab onto and then I'm the first tillionaire or quadrillionaire. Don't rain on that parade.
Okay, I won't rain on that parade, and I will say that every once in a while, I'll note that I have been told that I'm relentlessly depressing. Today's guest is the person who told me that I'm relentlessly depressing. So anyway, I look forward to Martin's optimism. But first, we wanted to get a handle on what people think are the most valuable resources out there. So I asked my social network what are the most valuable resources in space? And here are some of the answers that they gave us.
Probably asteroids that we could mine, but maybe also sunlight.
Okay, the most important resource from outer space, as far as I'm concerned, are ideas about the universe, understanding of where we are, appreciation of Earth as a resource and what it provides for us. All of the things that come from outer space, sort of intellectually rather than necessarily physically.
I'm going to guess minerals, so I'm biased towards life the whole biophilia thing and so on. So I would think that some of the most valuable resources in space are actually not in space because they're birth found things like food and organic life. That being said, I guess the other valuable things in space would be water and oxygen, and I suppose sense there could be some theoretically valuable
raw materials such as metal. And to get more abstract with it, one of the most valuable resources in space is possibility. Maybe there is unknown life or as yet unknown life out there, and maybe there are materials to do amazing new things with.
It might just reflect the fact that these were like my friend group that got asked these questions, but I really loved that a common answer was possibility and the things that we could learn along the way, and not necessarily platinum or something. But I think realistically platinum is what we're going out there for. But I loved the optimism.
It's nice to think that we're not just a new version of conquistadors, you know, out there to plunder and enrich ourselves. That you know, we're wanting to enrich ourselves in other ways intellectually scientifically, I want.
To believe that too, and I say, thank goodness that there are not indigenous people living on those asteroids that we want to be mining.
There could be indigenous microbes, there could be what about microbes, that's true. I wanted to say microbes are people too, but I know that they're not.
So yeah, it does as a biologist, if there is another instance of life out there, like you know, the cases of evolution, there's an an equals too for us to discover. That would be way more exciting to me than platinum. But we'll just have to wait and see.
But platinum is so shiny.
It is so shiny, and it makes pretty jewelry. But I'm guessing neither of us own platinum jewelry.
I own zero platinum, that's correct, Yes, I can confirm that.
So platinum is used in catalytic converters to clean up automobile exhaust, so we might have some platinum in our cars.
I have two electric cars, zero mission vehicles.
Oh, I've got hybrids.
But there might be platinum in some of the electronics.
Actually, m hum, Okay, well you win the hippie contest we just had there. You have more points than I do.
All right, more Berkeley points from me that's right.
All right, Well, let's go ahead and jump in and chat with our experts whose last name is Elvis, which is great.
Is he gonna tell us all about what it's like to build a heartbreak hotel in space?
You know, if I were a better podcast host, I would have looked up more Elvis song names. But I'm so glad that we're a team and you've got us covered.
I got you back there, Kelly, got your back, Thanks, Daniel.
All right.
On today's show, we have doctor Martin Elvis. First thing to know is that he has an awesome last name, and second is that he's an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His work on quasars got him concerned about the cost of space telescopes. This got him interested in asteroid mining as a way to cut the costs of
this research. I personally appreciate Martin's work because I think he's done an incredible job of drumming up loads of excitement for mining space resources while still making clearer that there's a lot of technological, political, and economic hurdles and reasons why space mining might be tough. Asteroid ninety two eighty three, Martin Elvis is named after him. That's pretty awesome. That's a new life goal of mine. And he wrote an excellent book called Asteroids, How Love, Fear, and Greed
will determine our future in space. Welcome to the show, Martin, Hi, good to be here. Good to have you. How's your nay going?
That's not very interesting, Actually it's all bureaucracy so far, but this will help.
We had Phil Plate on the show to talk about how asteroids might crash into the Earth and cause problems. So you are going to give us a more upbeat perspective on asteroids today.
I suspect, yeah, that's one of the things. But there's other things to love about asteroids too, So okay, well let's.
Jump right into that. So your book lays out three motivations for working on resources in space, Love, fear, and greed. Let's start with love and fear. How do these motivations work in space?
Heere is what you're totally phil Platt about, because that's killing off the dinosaurs and could it happen to us? And the answer is yes, and eventually it will. If we don't do something about it right now, there could be a thousand delays dinosaur killer type asteroids out there. We found nine hundred and something of them, but it only takes one, so we better find all of them, right, and there are plans to do that. So that's a really good thing. And then what do you do if
you find one? You have to move it, change its orbit enough to stop it hitting the Earth. And that's why NASA did the dart test, hitting the moon of another asteroid and watching you change its orbit that way, the first time humanity has ever changed the Solar system, at least deliberately.
That went well, amazingly.
Well, yes, nice, let's hope we're not fooled by that, and say, okay, we don't need a really big rocket to hit this thing. It just a regular sized one. And then the next one that's actually going to kill us all doesn't respond as effectively as we'd like, then you're all going to die.
Oh good, good, So I reckon.
We need to practice just a few more times to make sure that wasn't an outlier.
We don't want any of these asteroids to enter the atmosphere and become hunks and hunks of love.
Do we?
Is that some kind of Elvis joke? Kind?
That was my best Elvis joke. But you raise a real issue there, which is that we don't know what these asteroids are made out of, so we don't know how they'll respond to a push. Right, some of them might be piles of rubble, other ones might be mostly ice. What do we know about what's inside these asteroids.
That's right inside is really tricky. We know what the surfaces like, what is made of for about a thousand or two thousand of them, something like that, but there's like many, many times that out there that we'd love to know what they are. And then what you can do is take a spectrum look at the colors of an asteroids reflected sunlight, so it reflects sunlight like everything.
And if it turns out that it's got a dip in its colors that one's missing basically way in the infrared beyond what we can see, then you know it's got water on the surface, or at least water is bound into clays.
So it's a wet thing because it's absorbing light of a certain frequency.
Water at absorbs a particular kind of frequency of light or wavelength of the light. But we can't do that very easily because that's a very difficult wavelength to look at from the ground, so we really need a telescope in orbit to do that, and I think some observations with the James web Space telescope are trying to do that for a few objects, but that's much too valuable piece of equipment to spend a huge amount of time
and doing asteroids. Most astronomers think of them as vermin of the skies, right, just a little bit of rock get in the way.
What about the theoretical side. You've told us about what we could do to see these asteroids bounce light off of them, But what about our models of solar system and development? Do they tell us that asteroids should be made of the same stuff that the Earth is made out of? Or different stuff?
Ballpark? The whole solar systems made out of the same stuff, right, But in the case of small things like the Earth or asteroids, most of the hydrogen has disappeared. That's only left attached to the big planets that have a strong enough gravity to do that. So apart from hydrogen and some helium too, then we're more or less the same. Now, all geologists and planetary scientists got really annoyed with there no they're not. There's fascinating differences, yeah, yeah, true, but
overall everything has the same composition. The differences come from processes like when you make an asteroid or any big enough body, it starts to melt and get hot because of the radioactive decay on the elements, and that's enough to liquefy modest sized planets, including the Earth at first, and even the normally the precursors of the asteroids called planetesimals. They were like a thousand miles across, and that was big enough that they kept enough heat in that they
melted and differentiated. That is, the heavy stuff fell to the center and the light stuff stayed on the top, and so you get the same kind of structure you have on Earth, where you have metal core made of solid iron and whatever dissolves in iron, which turns out to be very interesting because those are the platinum group metals, very expensive things because they're rare, and they're rare because most of the platinum on Earth is six thousand kilometers
beneath your feet in the core of the Earth.
Right, Well, that's not very helpful. Yeah.
Around the metal core is a pile of silicate rock, which is kind of not interesting to me that I'm sure the details are really fascinating. And then sometimes at least around that is a sort of crust which isn't quite the same as it's a bit that never got hot enough, so it's still got the original composition of the Solar System. And that's where there's lots of water
because water is very common in space. It turns out not what you'd think, but it is because hydrogen oxygen are two of the most common elements, and that's the simplest thing molecule they can make, and it happens in all sorts of star forming regions. Dark clouds are full of water.
That's lucky for us.
I think that's something a lot of people don't appreciate how much water there is in the Solar System, you know. They imagine we'll have to bring water with us from Earth or something. But like the ice giants are basically huge balls of water, right.
There are icy moons that are pretty solidly water.
What about Neptune and Urinus.
Well, when they call them ice, we're not talking about water ice.
Oh, Astronomers have a different meaning of the word ice, don't they, As we.
Do with metals. The astronomer's periodic table says hydrogen helium metals, So you know, we like to gloss over fiddly detailed for convenience of some time.
One of the things to me that was most surprising in your book was that you argue that one of the first resources that's going to be the most valuable in space is water, which I think we take for granted because we live on like a super wet planet. Can you go into a little bit more about why water will be so valuable in space.
If you're living on the International Space Station right now, you don't use a lot of water. Actually, you reuse a lot of water, as you were pointing out in a.
Recent talk yesterday's coffee.
Yesterday's coffee.
Mmm.
But I can't see after the first few tourist types go up there, or researchers or industrial people, they're not going to put up with the kind of conditions that these right stuff kind of astronauts do. I mean they have that sort of a macho thing about it. I think that yeah, we can put up with this. That's not going to fly for most people. So they're going
to need showers toilets that really work. Eventually, they're going to have to grow crops in orbit because it's ridiculously expensive to take a salond from the ground and bring it to the space station, and it wouldn't be all that fresh either, right, So there's going to be a bigger demand for water in orbit if there are all these other people going to orbit, and that depends on how well tourism really takes off, which I think is likely to be getting a lot cheaper quite quickly once
the initial exploration has been done, trials have been done. If we get real space stations that replace the International Space Station, which would be a lot cheaper to operate and use, then it could become economical to first have a space hotel, and that would be occupied by people who think five star hotels are a bit of a calmdown, so they would have to have some serious facilities on
board to make them comfortable. Then you're going to have ordinary scientists doing research, not astronaut scientists, because at the moment you have to learn Russian and then spend two years training for every mission. No a scientist can actually afford to be away from their work for two years because you completely get out of touch with where the field's got to I'm sure you appreciate that.
Can we go back to space hotels? Though? I feel like I've been hearing projections that space hotels are ten years away forever. When do you think we're going to have the first like space hotel and people can actually go and spend their honeymoon, you know, looking at the stars.
I was pretty keen on Axiom Space because they seem to be clued into the whole NASSA network and they knew what was going on. They seemed to have a good plan. I apparently very in financial difficulties right now, so that's unfortunate. They were planning for like twenty thirty to launch a module, one piece of a space station that would start off attached the International Space Station, but then later detach once the International Space Station has reached
its end of life. And I read just now this morning that there's a leak in one of the Russian pieces of the space station that's been there since twenty nineteen and presumably getting a little worse and getting people really worried. Now if it breaks off, what does that mean? Hikes, that's exaggerating. I don't know that that's going to happen, but they're concerned. Let's see.
I think leaks happen on the International Space Station and other space stations before that way more often than I would be comfortable with if I were an astronaut. There was a story a little while ago about a soyez having a hole in it that appeared to have been drilled, and it was not clear if well the soyers was being made. Somebody accidentally drilled a hole and then patched it in a crappy way, like didn't do enough, and then when it got to space the patch came off.
Or then the Russians were saying that one of the astronauts wanted to go back to Earth really quickly and was angry, and so they drilled a hole to try to like force an emergency landing. International politics on the ISS. It's exciting stuff.
That's just the case of somebody going crazy, right.
That's right space madness.
But the point is everything is harder in space. I think running a hotel down here on Earth is a pretty small margin business. Twenty thirty seems very optimistic for having a space hotel. Are we talking decades and decades into the future.
I don't think so. I mean, if everything works with well, even without starship, the SpaceX starship, which it should bring the cost of doing things and getting to low Earth orbit down by tenfold, we still have just with Folcan nine and presumably with Blue Origins coming up their new Glen rocket, that should enable access to space at a much better price than people are currently paying. What the guy's name, Jared something who just went up and did a space.
Walk, I don't remember his name, but yeah, they're.
Paying tens of millions of dollars, maybe fifty million dollars per person. That's kind of too much for a real market. I mean, there's a billionaire market. That's great, but then there's no reason to test to cost that much. I think they're paying a premium for being first, and it should come down to just a few million handfuls of millions soon. So you know, I just opened that piggybank and awhere you go.
Yeah, so I'm still not going.
You've read all about the dangerous holes that get drilled in the side of.
These things, you know that would be on my mind too, But also I don't have the money.
But there is a much bigger market for one million dollars than for ten million. Dollars and so right, so.
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I can imagine some people saving, you know, their whole life for like that amazing trip, and I'm sure it would be incredible holes in the habitats aside. But so you had mentioned that, like tourists are probably not going to want to drink water that was recycled from urine, and so they're going to want clean water. Why would you get it from asteroids or somewhere else in space rather than shipping it from Earth?
Even with starship, it's going to cost you a million dollars a ton just pure water, and then you have to put in a container of some kind, so it probably goes up to two million dollars a ton, So it's still expensive even then, and if you need many tons, maybe it's cheaper to bring it from an asteroid, but that depends a lot on whether we can bring the cost of mining an asteroid down to something less than that. So it's a business case. It's not a physics problem, right.
The physics tells you that the energy terms, it's much better to get it from an asteroid because you're both already out in space away from the gravity well of the Earth. As opposed to trying to climb out of that every time. So energy wise, yeah, it's absolutely much better to go to the asteroid or the moon. There are asteroids that are easier to reach and get back from than the moon.
But I want to point out, and we'll come back to this later, I think that this is a scenario where you find the resource in space and you use the resource in space. It's not like you're mining it in the asteroids and then you're bringing it down to Earth or something. Craasies like that in situ, right, But this touches on sort of the bigger picture here. Kelly talked about love and fear, and you're really talking about business like greed.
Well, this is sorry, How did I get onto that? It's just my natural averice.
You're in the US, so it's fascinating.
If capitalism is really going to drive our exploration into space, you see that as the future of this field.
Well, yeah, the trouble is I wrote this for a conference called Building a Space for Civilization. I wrote this chapter where I said, you know, we talk about going to the stars and thinking that we'll take our better solves there, but immediately when we start talking about how we're going to do it. It's the same old stuff we do anyway, and we're really just going to reproduce our civilization in space. You know, it'll look a bit different. But the things that are driving us so like profit,
it's how we get started, for sure. Is there any way to not do that later on and get an or perhaps nobler way of doing things, maybe that we don't need anything like that. And it's fine, but I get a bit depressed because in some ways, because in the longer term, if we keep on growing our economy the way we have for the past two hundred years since the industrial revolution started, then in four hundred years we'll have finished with all the resources of solar system
that are accessible. Because it's exponential growth and that runs away, right you go one, two, four, eight, sixteen thirty two, and very soon you're into big numbers.
I thought. Our population so like the number of babies that every woman is having globally is projected to fall below replacement rates, so every you know, man and woman on average will have less than two kids. Is that going to help with the resource use? It seems like it should go down at some point.
You would think so. And also there's some kind of belief that some numbers to suggest that energy use and material use per dollar of GDP is going down. So we're getting better at making things that don't actually need huge amounts of iron and concrete and so on, And that's like information and related stuff mostly. I assume on the land there is a bigger physical underpinning to that. And will we reach a saturation point in that? I
don't know. Yeah, I guess I was getting annoyed in a way with Jeff Bezos because he's saying he has a vision of a future where there's a trillion people living and working in space. You know. First of all, I guess he said a trillion because it's the only number that still impresses him. He's really wanting that trillion here.
He might get there.
He might, He might, and so might mister Musk if he doesn't mess up further.
Who knows, But what's your objection to the number of a trillion?
If you imagine a trillion people living in working in space, they can't be all on planets because there aren't enough room on planets, So you have to be living in these artificial space cities that are rotating cylinders, so you stand on the inside of the wall of it. I mean, if you feel one g gravity like Earth. But I looked at I happen to have Handy just over there
on my shelf. As nineteen seventy seven study of these things, And it turns out, although the illustrations show pictures of greenery stretching away and then Renaissance cathedral here and a French bistro there, it's actually going to be kind of crowded. It's more like the Bronx. The amount of space you get is really small per person. You get a two bedroom apartment per person and a little bit of outdoor space per person, but for a million people it adds
up to like five central parks. I think it is wow, not small, but there's nothing like a wilderness area that you can really get lost in for a few days that won't be available.
Let's take a quick break and we'll get back to I don't want to miss my chance to rant about rotating space stations, So when we get back from the break, I'll take my moment, okay, and we're back. One of the other things that I wonder about when I look at those rotating space stations so first of all, the xterior is always glass, which I think is just not going to work with space radiation that you're going to
get baked inside of there. But then also like you look along the bike tire shaped habitat and there's no airlocks separating each of the different things, right, and so if base is filled with junk, if something crashes one of your windows, everyone's getting sucked into the abyss.
Yes, absolutely, you've got to divide it into air tight sections.
Yes.
And as a bio person, you'll be pleased to realize that when your food growing areas also very much have to be sealed off and kept pristine because if you get potato blight or the equivalent in one of them and it spreads, you all die. Yeah, So it's going to be at least I would say ten or a dozen sections.
Yeah.
On the plus side, that will make it hargh of any years there would be dictator to take over the whole place, because each sector would have to be self sufficient, so they couldn't say I will turn off your oxygen supply if you don't do everything I say.
Charles Kuqul would be very happy with this design.
That's how it came up because he was talking about his freedom engineering and his modular designed stuff. It's just like the Titanic, only slightly improved, separate sections hermetically sealed. And then it's difficult and each one would have to have escape ponds that could get to the next one of these space cities, and.
These space cities presumably were building them in space, and so we're going to need resources, which I hope takes us back to the question of asteroid mining. What's in the asteroids and can we use those asteroids to like build these fantastical space.
Yes, indeed, because precursors of the asteroids were these planetesimals, But then they weren't formed on random orbits, so they tended to collide with each other and break up. And so the cause the iron cores had got exposed. And there's a mission on its way to sixteen Psyche called Psyche,
which is terrible idea confusion all around. You mean the asteroid or you mean the mission or anyway Psyche is about to see if sixteen Psyche, which is the formal name of the asteroid, is made of solid metal, is it really the core of a planet or planetesimal, a little planet and if it is, then that there's huge amounts of iron there, and iron in orbit could be used for construction. For instance, you could build space cities,
or you could build giant telescopes. Oh Am, I letting my astronomy show.
So all of the use cases for the resources that you've noted have been in space. Is there any resource that would be worth bringing back to Earth to sell? Is the only reason to go out and use the space resources?
To use them well talked about? Right? One of them is not from asteroids, but only from the Moon. The one from asteroids is the platinum group metals, because I mentioned they dissolved in liquid iron early on and got sank to the core. So sixteen psyche should be rich in platinum and palladium and other very expensive, rare precious metals. So you could mine those and bring them back to
Earth and in principle make a profit. You could sell them for a lot of money anyway, Right, And I did ask some banking people, and they thought that the market was elastic if I got it the right way round. That is, if you sell more, the price stays constant as opposed to declining. You've saturated the market or whatever.
It's called okay.
But again, these metals are also present here on Earth, and presumably we've got much more of them in the Earth than we do in the asteroids. Is the reason they might be accessible economically in asteroids, just because asteroids are smaller, so it's easier to get to them. You have to dig as far into them as you do into the Earth.
No, I think in total the asteroids will have more accessible platinum than the whole of the crust of the Earth because we can't get to the core and mine our own platinum from the molten core of the Earth. But most of the platinum, which I didn't really get into it comes from collisions with asteroids in the early Solar System. They used to plunge in, go right through the crust, but then get recycled into the crust through convection and stuff, or as geology things that happen.
I don't know this, but it really is about access, it's about where they are on the object.
There's also the strategic thing that there are two places which produce ninety something percent of the platinum in the world, and that's Southern Africa and Russia. Neither is a particularly stable place, so you might worry that the supply would disappear or be highly curtailed at some point, But they're worth fifty million dollars a ton roughly, so you don't have to bring back ten tons, and you've got a
serious amount of money. But of course you have to be able to bring that amount back for less than you going to get paid for it. So whether that's true is another business case. And I don't know that.
Could you walk us through, like where are these asteroids? What kind of technology would we need to extract this stuff? Like what would it look like to actually try to do this?
Yeah, so absolutely always the asteroids you first go to are the ones that are energetically easiest to reach. That means your rocket has to be less powerful than it would otherwise, and that most of those are in what orbits that come near to the Earth, and they're cleverly named near Earth objects. They're not always near the Earth, but they do come near the Earth at some point.
They're only ten or twenty thousand of those that are reasonable size, like because a football stadium or something like that, which you could mine, And then only a few percent of those are actually going to be made of iron and have platinum in them, and of those only a quarter will be rich in platinum. And that's based just on the numbers we get from picking up iron meteorites on Earth and which are just little fragments of asteroids, so we have some idea how often we get that.
So some small fraction, like one or two percent of all asteroids are going to be rich in platinum, and that comes down to two hundred or so candidates, and you would go to the biggest one because that obviously
gives you the most payoff and start mining it. Extracting platinum from these asteroids, although they're rich in platinum, that's still grams per tone, so a fraction of an ounce per ton, a small fraction of an ounce per ton, So it actually takes quite a bit of clever chemistry to extract that platinum and the other metals there, like palladium.
And even before you extract it from the ore, how do you get the ore? I mean, you have to deliver some mining equipment to this asteroid.
Presumably you've done all your prospecting remotely with telescopes, and then by going nearby and getting samples of the surface or maybe hit it with a laser, let it evaporate and see what it's made of that way, or of course, my favorite method is X ray fluorescence, which is because I'm an extra astronomer, so I naturally think of that.
And the Sun's X ray from the Sun hit the surface and that excites the atoms to emit and part killar energies of X ray wavelengths, and and you can tell what it's made of from that, and it's particularly good for heavy elements like iron and platinum and on. Anyway, however, you done it. You've done that that kind of prospecting work. Now you have to send out quite a few tons
I would think of mining equipment. Right, So the Osiris REX spacecraft weighed two tons when it got to Benu, the little asteroid Benu, which is about the size of asteroid you'd be mining. You think, well, two tons, that's about the same as an F one fifty pickup. So that's pretty hefty, you know, seriously. But then you're backing that F one fifty up to the rose bowl and saying, okay, I'm going to start digging and taking away the stadium
and get extracting the valuable bits from it. It's like Yeah, let's say that's optimistic or a minimum. So you have to get at least two tons, probably ten tons at least before you can get serious about mining.
But the mechanics of mining, like the technology the robots that we have here on Earth, apply at all. Or is it completely different problem to get the ore off the surface and into your processing pipeline.
We'll know a lot more about that after Psyche has done its job. Because is it one solid lump of iron like it melted, it's set, solidified and never broke up again. Or is it a pile of rubble, which like many rocky asteroids are made of just piles of rubble, in which case you can actually scoop it up pretty easily. So it's going to make a huge difference whether it's solid iron or not. If you're after the iron, it's great. You can just chop it into pieces and here's a chunk and you take it home.
Sorry, how do you chop solid iron into pieces in space with a saw? I mean they do that in my garage all the time.
Yeah, of course you do. But you have to worry that different problems come up. I mean you have to have to use special vacuum grease to keep it and you'd have to have some way of cooling yet because it's going to get hot, and there's probably a bunch of other issues coming up. But I don't think you can actually tell now what the best way of doing it is. You're going to have to learn about these asteroids, do some little tests, and there's going to be a lot of learning on this.
And that makes me wonder about the balance between, you know, government research funding and capitalism business funding. I think a lot of times in our history we've had the government fund research for a long time when it was very long term before it would have any payoff, and then at some point it becomes commercial and industry rushes in
and of course there's a lot more resources. Do you think we're at that point where like business is ready to invest in these technologies to develop these tools even when we don't know, like what the basic mechanism will be for extracting this stuff from the asteroid, or do we need a little bit more government funded exploration to answer these questions.
I would think we're the kind of the beginning of the wedge where commercial interests so if you start doing things we've had our first round of asteroid mind companies that were all very famous for a short while and then they're fifteen minutes was up and they didn't get anywhere. There's a new crop coming up. Now. They should always be doing this. This is what capitalist systems do. You keep trying until someday you'll hit the right moment of
which to do this. Before that, everybody fails and then suddenly it's a great success. And if you wait longer, then you've missed the boat, right, So you have to keep trying. But I'd say this, first of all, we're going to know a lot more about the whole asteroid population in ten years time, and that's not an arbitrary time.
The telescope now just starting up in Chile, which is the Verira Rubin Observatory, and is doing what they call a large scale survey in space and time, which means they take a photograph of the all the night sky that ever comes up in South America. Every three nights. They cover the whole sky, and they are particularly working to make sure that they can see asteroids which have come up as look like stars, but they move, which
stars don't. So then now you know it's a little rock in the Solar System going around somewhere, and by tracking how our fasts moving and exactly which way it's going, you can get its orbit, and we will get the colors of this thing, and you'll be able to tell for sure if it's just a boring, stony asteroid made of silicate rock. And that's all the ones we know now that are near the Earth, eighty five percent of
just rock. And that's not very interesting toward capitalist anyway, we have rocks here are if you're a geologist, that's very different. Right.
So we've talked a little bit about how we don't really know enough about the asteroids, and because we don't know enough about the asteroids, we don't really know enough about what kind of techniques we would need to extract the stuff that we're interested in. Let's take a break, and when we come back, let's talk about the legal
aspects of going out there and collecting the asteroids. So you mentioned that there was a round of asteroid mining companies that kind of peaked and fell, So Planetary Resources I think is probably one of them that you had in mind. And I was talking to Chris Lawicki, who was one of the big guys at Planetary Resources, and he helped get some of the US laws on the books to try to clarify what's allowed with these asteroids.
But my sense from talking to him was that a lack of clarity about what's allowed in space was a big problem for planetary resources and getting investors. So what is the current status of Like, if you land on one of those two hundred asteroids that have the levels of platinum that would be worth getting, does that belong to you? Are you allowed to collect it and mash it up and sell it? What are you allowed to do in space?
Okay, the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven says you cannot own any celestial body or part thereof right, no one can, no country in particular, So that's still true. But the Act of Congress that Chris Lackey helped move along said that, yes, but if you pick something up from a celestial body, including the Moon, and it becomes property at that point, So if you pick it up
and put it in the bag, it's now yours. Right And in fact, I don't know why this isn't actually widely accepted, because those Apollo Moon rocks clearly belong to the US government and nobody else, and they can do what the hell they like with them. You want to argue, no, right, no, sir no. And the same with the Japanese samples of the asteroids, the Chinese samples from the far side of the moon, and the old Soviet samples that came back
from the lunar missions. So everyone's been acting as though that was absolutely the case forever.
But you're using the word samples, which does have a legal definition and is different than collecting an entire giant asteroid and selling it off. At that point, you're not talking samples anymore.
Okay, I don't know the legal definition of sample. Do tell me.
I don't have it memorized, but it's something to let you go and you collect it, and it's a quantity that you need to like figure out, like what is it made out of? What could you do with it? So none of those things were collective for profit. They were collective for science to try to understand it better. Some of them did end up on the auction block
at so the bees setting something like precedent. But I still feel like it's a little bit unclear that if you collected one of those giant asteroids and said this is all mine.
Well, I think there's a difference between tay. If you went to an asteroid and took big pieces away, right, then maybe you can get away with that up to some point. But some of the ideas I wrapped the entire asteroid in a sealed bag and heat it up and drive off the water and collect the water, and then that whole asteroid is being put in a bag, right, it's all yours. You might even mine it so it doesn't exist anymore at all. And you could destroy to
celestial object, but you never claim to own it. You only hold the product. So you can see the horrifying loops that space lawyers will be getting into.
I mean there's an issue here of relativity. Also, because you land on an object, you pick up a rock. You could say, okay, I've picked the rock up off the asteroid. You could also say I've picked the asteroid up off the rock. I mean, physics doesn't really care and the like. You could say, oh, now I picked up this whole asteroid and left the rock behind. I'm going to happily claim that. So yeah, I think the lawyers are going to have a field there.
It keepts even more complicated. There are no such things as mining rights therefore, because you can't only celest your body in any way, say they market as mine for mining purposes. So without those rights, you're going to get a lot of sketchy behavior going on, right because people will start spying on you to see where you're going, and then maybe they'll try to jump the claim and get there first and start mining before you do, because they didn't have to invest all their money in finding
a good asteroid. They just built a bigger rocket and got there faster. There could then be rustling of asteroids. You've found the right asteroid, but somebody else rushes there and put a little rocket motor on the inside of it and pushes it goes off into some orbit that they know but you don't. You've lost your asteroid and they've got it. And finally, this piracy, which is just just intercept your inning guts of platinum on the way back.
Of those four different things, the only one that's actually illegal is piracy. That's definitely illegal. Under the Outer Space Treaty, spying is actually encouraged. You're allowed to visit other people's facilities in space, and you're not allowed to not say no. In fact, really.
All these are laws that we set up decades ago when we didn't really anticipate what was going to happen. Do you foresee, like somebody's going to make a whole new set of laws once things really kick an eye gear and people want to protect their interests and we sort of understand the dynamics of the space economics.
Well, yes we need those some laws like that. And then you've got this terrible thing of if you make a set of laws too soon, you may lock in some stupidities that you didn't anticipate the realities of what doing this kind of mining is. Space mining is like if you wait too long, there'll have been a free for all, and people have established positions and they aren't going to give those up lightly because it cost a
lot to get them. So it's a very tricky job to get the whole international regulation right.
Where are we now? Are we too soon? Is it time or have we missed the right time frame? Where are we?
Personally? I think we'd better hurry up and do something in the next few years, especially on the Moon. There's going to be human bases on the Moon and competing ones and they're going to have a lot of issues. It's where that all these issues are first going to arise. And right now, of course, NASA has the Artemis of Courds with thirty something other space agencies, and that's great and they're all going to work together, etc. Except they
don't include China or Russia. It may help set some standards, but it's not going to be definitive without those countries. The other possibilities going to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of out US Space COPUOS.
I never remember congratulations. I can never remember the acronym.
Oh, some of us have great talents in these areas.
It's true.
I even remember the alphabet. Okay, they're studying the issues, right, but they tend to move slowly, and so maybe they'll have a report on what the issues are in four years and they'll then start considering what to do about it. So that would be good because it's totally international. The Chinese and I'm definitely on board with it, and that is essential. But maybe it will be too late by the time they actually come out with some rules. I don't know. It's such a tricky one.
One of the things that I learned from reading your papers, is how rare the good stuff is, or like how concentrated it is. I looked at the Moon, I'm like, oh, it's all like this gray stuff kind of seems the same. But you know, like the water and the great places to set up your solar panels, it's really concentrated. So what do you think the implications are there for geopolitics moving forward?
I think you're going to get a lot of people wanting to do land grabs and say, these peaks of eternal light are mine?
What are those?
Ah, what are the peaks of eternal light? Well, at the poles of the moon, right, if you imagine a single mountain at the south pole of the moon, for instance, the sun will just circle the horizon all the time because there's essentially no seasons on the Moon. The Earth is tilted over twenty three and a half degrees, and that's so sometimes the sun is very low in the sky all the time. That's winter, and sometimes it's very
high and at summer. Great the moon instead is tilted one and a half degrees, so there's a tiny effect. But basically there are places on the south pole of the Moon where the sun only sets for a day or so instead of fourteen days on the rest of the moon, and then comes back up and stays for a long long time and then disappears. That's just it's going behind some distant mountain on the south Pole. And
so you can map out where these places are. And there are no places that are really one hundred percent illuminated all the time throughout the month. But if you go up a few meters a few yards above the surface, they get much more illuminated because you're getting above the local ridges and mountains and things, and so pretty quickly you can get mighty something percent in a few small places.
Ninety percent of the time is the sun is shining on there, which is great because you get permanent solar power, and your equipment isn't cycling between extremely cold and really really hot all the time. It stays pretty hot. Then it's easier to deal with because you add radiators and so on. Anyway, but there are only a few of these places, like really a few.
I think it was like one billionth of a percent of the moon surface.
Tiny, tiny fraction of the Moon's surface. But even if you just stick to the South Pole region, it's really only crater rims that get illuminated like this, and occasional ridges connecting one crater to another. So it's kind of long, skinny regions maybe a mile or so long by a one hundred yards wide. So everyone will want to land there and put their solar panels there, And because there are so few of them, the chances that two different agencies or whatever will want to land in the same
place is not small. I've mapped out where NASA has said they want to land. They had thirteen hundred eate sites where Artemis three, the first human lander for fifty years, will land thirteen sites the Chinese have mapped out I think nine and three of them overlap. Three or four of them overlap, So already there's a pretty decent chance the very first time you want to land, somebody else
will have landed in your favorite spot already. You can't land next to somebody because when you land, you kick up enormous amounts of fast moving sharp rock, which could damage the next spacecraft over. That's definitely a no no on the Outer Space Treaty.
One of my favorite ways to explore these questions is to read science fiction, because in some cases they really have thought this through and imagine like what it would be like. Like have you ever read science fiction that tackles these questions in a way that you think is insightful or realistic? You know? For example, there's the show on Apple TV called four All Main Kind where they talk about a lot of these issues and they even, I think, try to redirect an asteroid and all this
kind of stuff. Have you seen anything realistic and impressive in that category?
Yeah? I enjoyed that whole long series. Yeah. They start having international disputes on the Moon fairly early on. Right, for some reason, they have guns. I've forgotten why they have guns, but there's some excuse. The Chinese race off and do something. They and the Americans go to the Chinese base and destroy it and the vice versa, and I don't know what kind of mess they get into
after that. But yeah, there's another what was that other science fiction movie which was mostly terrible and got panned. But when they get they land on the Moon before going off to I don't know where, Jupiter or something, and they have this huge base with advertising Arby's Roast Beef and the so on, with big Neon figures, and then they get into a fight with the neighboring base, which belongs to some other country. I don't know which.
Brad Pitt was in this, right, his dad had like lost his mind on some spacecraft and he was supposed to Oh what was it called?
Right? Could be yeah, but.
I remember he went up the elevator and there was an RB sign and I thought that could be pretty accurty.
Yeah. I thought that was the first time I've seen that in a science fiction movie. You know, although if you go back to two thousand and one, we all remember that had PanAm as they shuttle and the Hilton was in the space station. Another thing they got right, which apparently Arthur C. Clark didn't like, but Sanley Kubrick insisted on, was that when they land on the Moon, they have this giant thing that opens up and they come inside out like in the crater and land in
there and then it steals up. That's actually much more plausible than you need have guessed, because now we know there are these big skylight on the Moon that are one hundred yards across and they open into huge spaces underneath call lava tubes, which is where you probably want to build your base. So actually, maybe that was a super smart idea of mister Koprick's.
I guess that wouldn't necessarily save you all the trouble of worrying about regalis and rocks getting blown, because you'd still probably do that on the way down if.
It's big enough, If you keep going back to the same place, you build a landing pad, and then you don't have the rocks problem.
As someone who's excited about base resources, what in the next decade will you be looking for as a sign that things are moving in the right direction, that this is going to happen and it's going to happen in a good way. I never ask people like how many years until we figure this out? Because those kinds of questions depend on your political will and blah blah blah. What are you looking for to happen to show that, like we're taking this seriously.
Sore several things ares actually surveys for asteroids that I've already talked about, and there's another one that's going at It's a NASA mission will look for very dark asteroids, particularly called the Near Earth Objects Surveyor, which can find huge amounts more water than we currently think is out there. So there's government surveys. There'll be some replacement for the International Space Station, one assumes, and that could be commercial.
If it's commercial, that starts to open up that whole regime of an in space economy we were talking about. Are the mining companies that are starting up again. What astro Forge is a particularly busy one. They are very active. They have a test some of their equipment in orbit now and they're going to do a test going to an asteroid which they will not name soon And that's the beginning of this problem of not having any kind
of mineral rights. If they tell you where they're going, then it gives away that a lot of their intellectual property, so it's a whole big legal issue. There's going to be stuff on the Moon. We think that Chinese who want to land there by twenty thirty. NASA keeps saying it's going to land there earlier, but that will be a challenge because it depends on Starship not only working reliably, but also being able to be refueled in orbit and then having a special variant of it which can land
on the Moon and take off again. So that's a lot of work to do in a very short time. If they're going to be twenty thirty. Yeah, but you know that sort of stuff is happening that will spur a lot of this legal stuff, I suspect.
So are you overall feeling optimistic? What do you think?
I'm getting a lot older than I was when I started this, and so I'm not so sure I'm going to see much of it.
It never moves as fast as you want it to.
Yeah, but it could happen.
I think it will happen eventually. I just want to see it happen peacefully.
But ucefully and hopefully with a good ethic going forward, so we don't actually run out of space resources in four hundred years.
Well, as much as it's going to make everything more complicated, I'm really hoping for a bunch of surprises. Hoping when we get out there and we test out these asteroids, we discover weird stuff in there that doesn't make any sense. We'd learned something new about this system, and that might upend some startup companies plans for extracting the platinum, but that's my preference.
I like that, And in fact, I had a high school student, I'm an undergrad who made a list of meteorite minerals, minerals that are found only in meteorites, not on Earth. They had like seventy of them when they finished the list, So there are strange things out there that we do not know.
That seems like an exciting note to end on to be Thank you so much for your time, Martin. It was great chatting with you and we're all keeping our fingers crossed that this goes forward ethically and ethically.
Thank you so much. Great fun.
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you, We really would.
We want to know what questions you have about this Extraordinary Universe.
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Danielankelly.
Dot org, or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on all of those platforms. You can find us at D and K Universe.
Don't be shy write to us