House Committee seeks to promote commercial asteroid use

[frigidmagi]

Spacepolitics

A bill introduced Thursday by two members of the House Science Committee seeks to promote commercial asteroid ventures, including securing property rights for resources extracted from asteroids by American companies.

The American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act of 2014, HR 5063, was introduced Thursday by Reps. Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA), members of the House Science Committee. The relatively short bill (about four and a half pages in the copy provided by Posey’s office late Thursday, since the bill is not yet posted on Congress.gov) would direct the president, through the FAA and other agencies, to “facilitate the commercial exploration and utilization of asteroid resources to meet national needs,” “discourage government barriers” to asteroid resources ventures, and promote the right of American companies involved in those activities to both explore and utilize asteroids as well as transfer and sell them.

Perhaps most importantly, the bill provides property rights to resources extracted by those companies: “Any resources obtained in outer space from an asteroid are the property of the entity that obtained such resources, which shall be entitled to all property rights thereto, consistent with applicable provisions of Federal law.” The bill does not extend those property rights beyond the resources a company extracted, such as a claim of property on the asteroid, or of an asteroid itself. The bill also provides for freedom from harmful interference, noting that “any assertion of superior right to execute specific commercial asteroid resource utilization activities in outer space shall prevail if it is found to be first in time,” at least among companies subject to US law.

“Asteroids are excellent potential sources of highly valuable resources and minerals,” said Posey in a press release announcing the bill. “Our legislation will help promote private exploration and protect commercial rights as these endeavors move forward.”

“We may be many years away from successfully mining an asteroid, but the research to turn this from science fiction into reality is being done today,” said Kilmer in the same release. “Businesses in Washington state and elsewhere are investing in this opportunity, but in order to grow and create more jobs they need greater certainty.” That’s a reference to Planetary Resources, a company headquartered in the Seattle area (although not in Kilmer’s district) that has long-term plans to mine asteroids.

Getting the bill passed, though, is no certain feat. Besides drumming up support for the bill in both the House and the Senate, the bill’s advocates have to deal with a tight legislative schedule the rest of this year: the House is scheduled to be in session for only ten weeks for the rest of the calendar year.

You can read the bill here

I should note the bill does attempt to avoid conflict with the Moon-Space Treaty (one of my least favorite) which prevents national and corporate enitities from claiming bodies in space.

[Josh]

Fuck the Moon-Space treaty. Putting shit up for mutual development insures that nobody will do jack diddly shit. What brings people along is the chance to put their name on something and claim stakes on it.

So yes, this is a good thing and in the off chance that it makes it out of our moribund congress, rock on.

[Batman]

I'll worry about this when we get around to actually being able to do asteroid mining. Which I predict to be mid-7019AD. If ever.

[Hotfoot]

The Moon-Space Treaty is the first thing thrown out the window the moment there's a viable reason for it to go. It's a nice piece of paper that made the US Moon Landing something that we weren't going to lord over the rest of the world by saying that we owned the fucking Moon. The second the Moon is valuable to us or the Chinese or anyone, it's getting borders put on it. Thing is, it's a hunk of rock. It's not got much value for mining, it's got minor value as a waystation to the rest of the solar system, but that's about it. If we ever do get a major orbital presence, the Moon is a good base of operations if for no other reason than we can build underground and that will save us some money and materials. That said, any gravity well you have to escape is a pain in the ass, even Luna's. Microgravity orbitals will be more useful for a lot of operations and that's just really the bottom line unless there is a fundamental change in technology.

As far as asteroid mining, yeah, it could be profitable, possibly. Someday.

Today? Not even remotely.

We're running low on certain things, other things are just plain rare or difficult to get our hands on. That much is true. With our recent population explosion over the last century and change, some things will get more rare. Until we are no longer able to get our hands on certain materials without phenomenal cost, asteroid mining just won't be worth it. There's basically two ways asteroid mining will work. Either we send people there long term and have them haul back materials (which is going to result in SO many deaths), or we remotely put thrusters on a rock and gently guide it back to Earth, a process which involves something along the lines of a year or two mission for a remote-controlled spacecraft (which if we fuck up could result in bad shit the sort we DO NOT want to play with), and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars minimum each time we do it. Then we need people to mine it in space and bring back down the raw materials safely (or refine it, also in space, which could have very interesting complications). Then we've got all MANNER of additional debris in our orbit (or we're spending more money on puncture-resistant coverings to envelop the asteroids in, which will mean several more tons of materials blasted into orbit), which makes further spaceflight and satellites difficult.

And for what? We're not likely to see an asteroid the size of London filled with rare earth materials. I mean, sure, one probably exists, it's definitely possible, but more likely we're going to find basic shit that's already pretty common on Earth.

I wouldn't be opposed to a mission sending out several surveying probes to the asteroid belt to try and collect data on what's actually out there, I think that would be pretty cool, honestly, but there's a lot of shit in that belt and that would take a long goddamn time. By the time even a dozen probes were finished, we'd probably have a colony on Mars already. Mining on Mars, by the way, probably would be pretty profitable in comparison, though most of the stuff mined there would probably stay there if we were to set up a long-term colony.

If we could possibly clear up Venus's insane atmosphere, I'd be willing to bet that there's a lot of useful stuff there too, but that's a huge long shot.

Anyway, yeah, cool though the concept may be, the cost/benefit really isn't there right now, nor is it likely to be for the foreseeable future, though I would like to see a survey mission done.

[Lys]

Cleaning up Venus' atmosphere would require dumping 4e19 kg of hydrogen into it and leave Venus covered in a meters thick layer of graphite, plus an ocean on top of that over 80% of its surface. This makes it somewhat inconvenient to mine, but yes there are probably a lot of valuably minerals in there.

As for asteroid mining, we could be doing it today, but the catch is that it's only really worth it for the purposes of supporting a large space-based infrastructure. At present our space infrastructure consists of a single research outpost in low-Earth orbit and a constellation of small, unmanned artificial satellites. In so far as manned outposts go, humanity has a bigger presence in Antarica. There's basically no point in mining asteroids to support these, and there won't be until we decide to get serious about space colonization. When will that be is anyone's guess. The limitations aren't really technical as we could have started to build up a permanent space presence back in the 70s, but nobody went for it. It really didn't help that the Space Shuttle was made of suck and fail. On the plus side our materials science has gotten much better in the intervening period and will continue to improve, so there will be less growing pains whenever the will to really go into space materializes.