Asteroid mining: It’s a science-fiction staple you can find in Star Trek (the search for dilithium crystals) or in the Asteroid Wars series of novels by Ben Bova.
Now, however, a group of entrepreneurs, including Avatar director James Cameron, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page, and other Silicon Valley luminaries, say they plan to do it. Planetary Resources, Inc. says it will mine near-Earth asteroids for substances ranging from water to precious metals. “A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history,” says the company’s supercharged press release. It expects asteroid mining to become a trillion-dollar industry.
Presumably, the company has done some cost-benefit analyses and consulted with experts on mining and space manufacturing. We might expect the coverage to examine the evidence for the feasibility of this project. Maybe this is a reasonable proposition; maybe it’s crazy. The reporting should give us some sense of whether Planetary Resources might succeed, beyond the claims of the company pitchmen.
Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press leads with “Space-faring robots could be extracting gold and platinum from asteroids within 10 years,” but quickly backs off–almost. “Outside experts are skeptical about the project because it would probably require untold millions or perhaps billions of dollars and huge advances in technology,” he writes, and then he immediately gets back on the ride. “But the same entrepreneurs pioneered the selling of space rides to tourists — a notion that seemed fanciful not long ago, too.”
In the version of the story I found at USA Today, Borenstein spends a lot of time quoting the proponents before he gets to the critics–far too much time, in my view. After noting that some scientists not involved are both thrilled and wary, he quotes company founders Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson extensively before getting to Andrew Cheng of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, who was the chief scientist for a NASA mission to an asteroid a decade ago, according to Borenstein. “A depot within a decade seems incredible. I hope there will be someone to use it,” he tells Borenstein. The story continues with quotes from Harvard and MIT critics, but ends with Anderson talking about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Borenstein, a solid reporter, tilts too much toward the enthusiasts here, without giving us any reason to believe them. If he could find no evidence to back up their claims, he should have told us that.
Over at The Wall Street Journal, Amir Efrati is even more willing to swallow the investors’ claims. He quotes the company extensively, interrupting the flow only once, to quote a scientist who says the effort may be “decades ahead of its time.” Efrati then takes another draught of the Kool-Aid and resumes his recitation of the company’s spectacular claims. The Journal is usually skeptical about investor promises, but not this time.
Alex Knapp at Forbes was much more down to Earth, raising questions other stories missed:
One thing that the press conference left frustratingly vague, however, is how the company plans on mining the asteroids for resources. The only technical aspects they discussed were getting through the prospecting stage. Probes capable of reaching the asteroids are not a new thing, though the autonomous use of robot swarms would definitely be new. But going from prospecting to mining is a big step, and its a technical problem that definitely needs to be solved. The company did not provide a timeline for the start of actual mining, either, though Peter Diamandis noted that it will take about a decade just to prospect and identify priority mining targets. Hopefully more information will be released about this in the near future.
What Knapp did not do was to ask any experts outside the company what they thought about any of this. And note that Borenstein reported that mining could begin in 10 years; Knapp reports that it will take that long just to identify targets. They can’t both be right.
In a blog post at the Los Angeles Times, Deborah Netburn (is that her real name, or a nom-de-net?) takes a “who-knows?” approach. “As projects go, this one is definitely ambitious and insane sounding,” she writes. And: “It all sounds a bit crazy to us, but tech billionaires have a pattern of thinking way, way, way outside the box, and they have the cash to do more than dream about their out-there ideas.” That’s not what you’d call straight news reporting, but it’s more critical than many of the other stories I read.
One space enthusiast who neatly and properly kept his enthusiasm in check was Alan Boyle at his Cosmic Log blog at MSNBC. Under the headline “Reality Check for Asteroid Miners,” he writes: “Space entrepreneurs laid out a lot of the details for their billionaire-backed plan to extract resources from near-Earth asteroids today, but other details — such as how much they’ve received in investments, or exactly how they’ll get their hands on precious water and precious metals — are still being held close to the vest.”
He continues, laying out the company’s plans in considerable detail, but always with a skeptical eye. We’re all entitled to dream about what a spectacular achievement asteroid mining might be, but while some reporters did so in their stories, Boyle wrote his with a cool head and posted it before he sat back to dream. And he quoted one source saying that proposals to mine asteroids would surely draw the ire of environmentalists, wary of exploitation of nature’s resources on Earth or in space. Mountaintop removal is nothing compared to devouring asteroids.
Philip Plait at the Bad Astronomy tells us exactly what he thinks: ” I love this idea. Love it.” His enthusiasm for the project is based on the people behind it.”These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around. So what’s the deal?” His post, written before the company’s press conference, goes step-by-step through the company’s plans, with little skepticism. In his conclusion, he writes:
…look at the investors: Film maker James Cameron. Google executives Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, and Google investor K. Ram Shriram. Software pioneer Charles Simonyi. Ross Perot, Jr. These are all billionaires, some of them adventurers, and all of them have proven to have patience in developing new ventures. I don’t think they’ll turn tail and run at the first setback.”
Maybe not, but this says nothing about the feasibility of the project. Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Not extraordinary people.
In a short post at Scientific American, Michael Moyer writes under a headline saying the “crazy plan…may not be so crazy.” He briefly recaps the Bad Astronomy post and cites no critics.
Others:
Kenneth Chang at The New York Times isn’t as pie-eyed as some of the others, but he doesn’t seek out critics. It’s a surprising oversight by a generally reliable reporter.
Adam Mann at Wired writes a long, nicely detailed piece, but is also light on the potential pitfalls of such a venture.
Space.com goes wild with a package of stories. The mere scope of its coverage gives too much credibility to the project.
Everything about this project seems designed to stoke the enthusiasm of Avatar fans, space enthusiasts, and Silicon-Valley watchers. But let’s remember this is mining we’re talking about. Two years ago, the Upper Big Branch Mind disaster claimed 29 lives in West Virginia. I understand that this project is handled by robots, not miners, but, even so, there is nothing especially romantic about carving up asteroids to feed an unsustainable demand for metals and minerals. A major push for more recycling here on Earth is not likely to attract the interest of wealthy dreamers, I suppose. But it might make a lot more sense.
The coverage should have been far more skeptical. If Planetary Resources doesn’t have the charts and tables to show that its project can work, all the stories should have said so. The best that can be said of James Cameron’s Avatar was that it was a glorious failure. This venture might not do even that well.
– Paul Raeburn
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