‘Major Takeaways from the 2019 Mining Space Summit
White Paper from the Luxembourg Space Agency focusses on opportunities for collaboration between terrestrial and space mining sectors
LUXEMBOURG (Luxembourg Space Agency PR) — On 9 October 2019, the second Mining Space Summit gathered more than 180 experts, from 24 countries, working in fields as diverse as oil & gas, terrestrial mining, space, finance, and government.
Held in Luxembourg, the goal of the Summit was to understand the technical and economic challenges facing the space resources industry and make recommendations for the future growth of this high technology sector.
The White Paper – available on the LSA website – provides a compact summary of current thinking on a sector which will be central to our future expansion into the solar system.
Major insights
Following a morning of presentations which included an update on the Luxembourg SpaceResources.lu initiative, an outline of the ESA Space Resources Strategy and an introduction to some commercial ventures in this domain, delegates split up to discuss the industry in six sessions, split equally between economic and technical questions.
The experts agreed that collaboration between terrestrial mining and commercial space will be crucial to the development technology and mission capabilities needed for a viable space resources industry.
Suggestions which might help jump start the collaboration process included a global competition based on the Google Lunar XPRIZE model and the development of ‘dual use’ Earth/space technologies.
Demand for space resources could potentially be driven by offworld outposts, space laboratories, Moon-based facilities and space tourism.
However, early development will require support from governments around the world, with sound legal agreements on ownership of resources and stable markets to sell them.
Governments and their agencies will also play a central role as the primary source of demand for this fledgling market.
17 responses to “‘Major Takeaways from the 2019 Mining Space Summit”
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Summary, without government funds, nobody is going to be mining anything.
Also funny that anyone still mentions GLXP as a positive model for anything
It’s far from obvious that government money is going to be the major impetus to space mining and refining, though governments could well be significant customers for the products of same. Looking at the linked white paper, the majority of the participants appear to be Europeans – not a major surprise for a conference held in Luxembourg. Europeans simply take it as a given that governments will be central players in any major project so it is entirely unsurprising that their work product would reflect this strong political/cultural bias. That doesn’t invalidate the entire effort by any means. Once one filters out the reflexive European statism, a lot of what is contained in the document makes sense regardless of whether government or private business winds up being the dominant driver of space industrialization.
Despite the fact that the GLXP didn’t succeed on its own terms, it was not without considerable positive knock-on effects. A number of the participants in the GLXP are still around and working on lunar landers. Several of these should fly within the next couple years. The jury is still out anent a final verdict on the GLXP but indications thus far are that, even unwon, it will prove to have been much more positive than the original X Prize, despite the fact that the latter was won.
The whole concept of space mining requires some sort of targeted and very large impact investment
There are only so many viable means of obtaining that. Public and philanthropic means are most likely
And GLXP failed, by any reasonable metric
Space mining will certainly require investment. But it’s hardly a given that proof-of-concept and pilot operations need be hugely expensive, especially anent processing of regolith on the Moon.
We’ll have to disagree on where the means will come from. Governments certainly don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to pony up, except maybe that of Luxembourg. The philanthropic “community” seems entirely absent. That leaves private enterprise.
I think the consequential early player will be SpaceX with Blue Origin chiming in later as it is able. Both the extractive-refining industries and those needing the output of same will need to be stood up pretty much in parallel. SpaceX, with Starlink, has already established the largest extant model for doing this sort of co-development but it will hardly be the last such.
Traditional mining companies may have relatively little to do with this process. These companies have always been pretty much free to work solely to improve the economics of their technology without having to first stand up markets for their output – those markets have existed for millennia. Off-planet, that won’t be true.
As noted, the ultimate verdict on GLXP requires first seeing if any of the companies that were participants can actually deliver working and useful lunar landers that also form the basis for viable businesses. Thus far, the answer is “no,” but that may change within the next two years. If, say, five years from now, no private entity formerly associated with the erstwhile contest has yet placed a lander on the Moon, then GLXP can pretty definitely be declared a failure.
Deep space missions are hugely expensive, period.
For reasons that seem lost to many space enthusiasts
There is no private-market financial instrument that could feasibly fund this, apart from very, very outsized philanthropy – which is about as likely as Bigfoot sightings
And comsats are hundreds of millions each. Starlink. Things change.
do you ever notice that satellites get gradually more expensive, the higher they go ? Starting with cubesats that cost like 10k a pop ?
Maybe think why that is
Cubesats are obviously getting hit with all the minimums on cost. Much of the higher and more cost is that all the higher and far distant ones to date have been by the legacy gold plated model. When explorer missions are sent five thousand a year instead of five, there will be a shift in methodology. If the individual Starlinks were built in the same methods as the legacy comsats, they would be so expensive as to destroy the business plan as unaffordable.
Cheaper launch and mass production count.
As does fault tolerance via proliferation.
Cubesats/smallsats have been to the Moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt. So much for that theory.
I once had a canary bird that flew at 10km altitude for hours
In cargo, couldn’t take the little bastard to cabin
Well, deep space missions are certainly hugely expensive if one uses my personal household budget as a measuring stick. And they are, literally, astronomically expensive if one imagines the venerable sovereign state-MIC contractor matrix gets handed the job. But for an entity like SpaceX or Amazon/Blue Origin that won’t necessarily prove true.
You seem to be echoing, though less stridently, Gary Church’s old mantra of “there is no cheap.” Sure there is. But first one must be motivated to seek it. That lets all the traditional usual suspects out right from the start.
I’ll give you a riddle: how many probes to Pluto will the market support in next 10 years ?
( Hint: fault tolerance, price of the textbooks, and groundstation maximum SnR figure are all directly related to this )
10 years zero probes as I doubt rich backers will be found when there are so many other interesting and more useful things to reach.
20 years, maybe 2. How many people actually care about Pluto and have their own resources?
> 20 years, maybe 2
LOL.
> How many people actually care about Pluto and have their own resources?
substitute “Pluto” for “space” and you almost solved the riddle
Okay, and we’ll change your name to Gloomstalker while we’re at it. Private probes already in action, your riddle is a joke right?
Good question. You might more reasonably put it to the good folks at Xplore, though, than to me. Xplore, by the way, is a startup, looking to build low-cost deep space probe hardware affordable by entities not previously within a country mile of being able to afford such things.