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The race to the riches of asteroids is on, with several private companies vying for funding to become the first space miners. Andrew Glester digs into the issues involved in making money from asteroids

“I’ll make a prediction right now. The first trillionaire will be made in space.”

So said Texas senator Ted Cruz, shortly after a bill was signed to increase NASA’s budget for 2018. To untrained ears, his claim would have sounded extraordinary. It might even have stretched credulity for those familiar with the challenges of space. But on closer inspection, Cruz was not being that revolutionary. Peter Diamandis – founder of the X Prize competition to encourage tech developments – made the same prediction back in 2008 and expanded on the theme in his 2015 book Bold. As for how those trillionaires will make their riches from space, both he and Neil DeGrasse Tyson – the US astrophysicist and TV host – reckon it will be done by mining asteroids.

Progress is already under way. The first asteroid company, Planetary Resources, was founded in 2012 by Diamandis, Chris Lewicki and others in Washington. Within a year the US company Deep Space Industries was set up by Rick Tumlinson, Stephen Cover and a host of others. A handful more firms have since been established, and while some are admittedly are less serious than others, the race to the riches of space is on.

Despite the existence of such firms and Cruz’s declaration, however, Donald Trump’s 2018 NASA budget cancelled the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which planned to bring an asteroid into an orbit around Earth where it could be studied and mined a lot more easily than one in the asteroid belt. A NASA spokesperson told me the ARM team is ensuring that the key knowledge from the mission so far is not lost, but NASA pulling out has left the asteroid-mining community without a valuable learning tool and places asteroid mining firmly in the realm of the private space sector.

Nevertheless, the investment bank Goldman Sachs has reassured its clients about the financial benefits of investing in asteroid-mining companies. “The psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower,” it said in a report published last year. A Caltech study put the cost of an asteroid-mining mission at $2.6bn – perhaps not surprisingly the same estimated cost of NASA’s erstwhile ARM. It might sound a lot, but a rare-earth-metal mine has comparable set-up costs of up to $1bn and a football-field-sized asteroid could contain as much as $50bn of platinum.

There are, however, potentially major challenges for anyone wanting to mine such an asteroid. How do you get it back to Earth through the atmosphere and land it without destroying the planet? Who do you sell it to in space if you can’t get it back to Earth? And even if you can bring it to Earth, all of a sudden platinum is no longer rare. Given that common metals aren’t as expensive as rare metals, will mining an asteroid really be worth it?

Metals and water
Scientists have studied asteroids using ground-based telescopes and space missions – such as NASA’s Galileo and Dawn crafts – which together have gathered close-up imagery and data. Perhaps the most important data came from Japan’s Hayabusa, which in 2010 became the first spacecraft to have landed on an asteroid and successfully returned home with samples. These studies have revealed that there are two types of asteroids of interest to the mining community.

The first are achondrites, which are rich in platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum). These precious metals gravitate to the cores of planets as they form, meaning that they are very deep down on Earth. In the turbulent early solar system, however, some burgeoning planets were smashed to pieces in collisions and became some of the achondrite asteroids that may provide a treasure trove for today’s space miners.

The other asteroids of interest are chondrites. They are perhaps the more immediately valuable, being rich in water. Astronauts need this vital resource not only as a drink and to hydrate food, but also because it is a very efficient radiation shield. Water will be precious for the Moon bases and hotels promised by today’s space entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk (founder of SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (founder of Blue Origin).

But water is heavy and therefore expensive to launch out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Indeed, it costs between $9000 and $43,000 to send a water bottle into space – which is why it is all recycled on the International Space Station. However, Hubble images of the largest known asteroid, Ceres, suggest that it could hold more water than our planet. Smaller asteroids hold lots too and a technique known as optical mining would use the heat from the Sun to bake the water out of the rock.

The elements of water can also be used for rocket fuel. Asteroid miners are already planning to split the water from chondrites into hydrogen and oxygen, which would serve as fuel and oxidizer respectively. They are hoping to set up fuel stations in low-Earth orbit and the asteroid belt so that spacecraft can fill up on their way to the outer planets of the solar system. Currently, around 90% of the weight of modern rockets is taken up with fuel, so if you can carry less fuel on take-off because you can fill up off-Earth, space flight becomes much cheaper.

Within our reach
But how many asteroids are potential mining hotspots? Martin Elvis, a Harvard University astrophysicist with an interest in asteroid mining, developed an equation in 2013 to estimate the number of asteroids that might be potential mining candidates with our current technology. The equation accounts for the number of asteroids within reach of today’s rocket ships, the likelihood of them being worth mining, whether it is practically feasible to mine them, and whether they would yield a profit. When he first ran the numbers back in 2013, Elvis estimated that around 10 potentially metal-rich asteroids, and 18 sufficiently water-rich, lie within our grasp.

SpaceX’s development of increasingly powerful rockets has bolstered the hopes of asteroid miners because it means we can travel further into space. But Elvis told me that recent press reports claiming he thought the successful Falcon Heavy launch on 6 February had burst open the sky to potential asteroids were wide of the mark. “I made the remark at a conference in Texas recently and the press missed off the word ‘might’, but the truth is that I haven’t run the numbers yet. We need more data before I can run the numbers again, but a wild guess might be that this new fleet of heavy rockets could increase the numbers by a factor of 10.”

Elvis was not just referring to Falcon Heavy either. Blue Origin’s New Glen rocket and, in the longer term, the New Armstrong rocket can all be added to the mix when Elvis next runs his equation. Yet even though the SpaceX rockets are boosting the hopes of asteroid miners who could one day provide his explorers with fuel and raw materials, Musk does not seem convinced. In fact, in 2003 he called asteroid mining “bogus” and, at least publicly, has not updated that view.

Amara Graps, an astrophysicist who organizes the bi-annual Asteroid Science Intersections with In-Space Mine Engineering Conference (ASIME) and founded the Latvian initiative Baltics in Space, is more optimistic. “Elon will come around. He’s a clever guy and he’s surrounded by clever people. He’ll get there but I don’t know how to reach him to sell it to him.” Half the delegates at the most recent ASIME conference, which took place in Luxembourg in April, came from asteroid-mining companies, with the rest being asteroid scientists. Indeed, Graps believes the interface between scientists and business people is essential. The asteroid scientists’ role is to provide scientific support to the companies; addressing some of the companies’ largest asteroid science questions.

Need riches to get rich
Asteroid companies have one major cash-flow issue: if there are riches in space, the miners are reliant on faithful funders to get them there in the first place. That’s why Graps believes communication is key. “Everyone is struggling in their own way,” she says. “So it helps if we can talk to each other. And share. And use our own resources more efficiently.”

Before any company reaches an asteroid, they’ll have to fill that gap in their finances with other revenue streams. The business model for asteroid-mining companies is therefore currently much more Earth-bound. Planetary Resources, for example, which uses its expertise for mining here on Earth, is still reliant on wealthy bankers. Indeed, after missing a funding milestone last year, the company laid off many of its 70 employees. Asteroid-mining companies need to convince potential funders that the claims of untold riches in space are believable and achievable.

But rather than just targeting wealthy investors, Mitch Hunter-Scullion, chief executive of the UK-based Asteroid Mining Corporation, has taken a different tack. He’s turned to crowdfunding for his first asteroid-prospecting mission, which he hopes to fire into space in 2020. “We’re launching APS-1 [Asteroid Prospecting Satellite 1] from India, because it is orders of magnitude cheaper than elsewhere,” he says. “We’re aiming to raise £2.6m through crowdfunding, which, in space terms, is not too overwhelming.” That may be true, but £2.6m will still require a lot of backing from the public for what, to many people, seems like a distant dream. If they do manage to raise the funds, he then plans to sell the data they own to raise more revenue.

A boost for public interest might not be too far away. Although NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has been cancelled, its OSIRIS-Rex sample-return mission to asteroid 101955 Bennu left Earth in September 2016, before Trump took office. It will reach Bennu in December this year and then return a sample to Earth in 2023. Asteroid miners will be watching closely, just as they did when Rosetta landed on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko…and then bounced along its surface.

“We knew a lot about the composition of the comet but that was still a surprise,” Graps tells me. “We need more science before we land on an asteroid to mine it. You don’t want to be bouncing off.”

Graps believes that the asteroid-mining community was distracted by the wrong thing to begin with. “I think [they] wasted time focusing on the metal-rich asteroids,” she says. Her view is shared by Planetary Resources, which puts the platinum-rich asteroids in its second wave of targets. They believe you’re better off targeting chondrites as they have water, which will be your revenue stream in the near future. You mine the water, you own the rocket fuel stations in low-Earth orbit, on the Moon and on the way to deep space. Whether it will make anyone a trillionaire is another question, however. You can use the heat of the Sun to bake the water out of the asteroid but you then need to stop it sublimating off into space. None of this is particularly cheap and you need the spacecraft to come along relatively frequently to keep your revenue streams buoyant. As Elvis says, “In space, no-one can hear you sell.”

How to be a trillionaire
Legally, nobody can own an asteroid, but the US Space Act of 2015 allows companies to own the materials they mine from bodies in space. Luxembourg passed similar laws last year and Hunter-Scullion tells me he is lobbying the UK government to follow suit. Graps is hopeful Latvia will join the party too. In fact, the country that gets the laws right might just win the most lucrative business in space. After all, if your space-mining company is making billions of pounds in space, the money will, for the foreseeable future, be spent on Earth.

There are fabulously wealthy and intelligent people who claim that they will become trillionaires from asteroid mining. Personally, I find it easier to imagine the tidal wave as their asteroid splashes down into the ocean, and the price of platinum dropping through the floor as it becomes suddenly and abundantly available. A future where the metals, rock and water that we mine in space are used in space feels more achievable. Whether that happens soon enough to make the investors of today rich is, I imagine, their big gamble. Elvis for one is convinced that asteroid mining will take place in our lifetime and gave me a top tip on how to become a space millionaire. “It’s relatively easy,” he says. “You just start with a billion.”

https://physicsworld.com/a/the-asteroid-trillionaires/

JINJIANG, China — With a dragnet closing in, engineers at a Taiwanese chip maker holding American secrets did their best to conceal a daring case of corporate espionage.

As the police raided their offices, human resources workers gave the engineers a warning to scramble and get rid of the evidence. USB drives, laptops and documents were handed to a lower-level employee, who hid them in her locker. Then she walked one engineer’s phone out the front door.

What those devices contained was more valuable than gold or jewels: designs from an American company, Micron Technology, for microchips that have helped power the global digital revolution. According to the Taiwanese authorities, the designs were bound for China, where they would help a new, $5.7 billion microchip factory the size of several airplane hangars rumble into production.

China has ambitious plans to overhaul its economy and compete head to head with the United States and other nations in the technology of tomorrow. The heist of the designs two years ago and the raids last year, which were described by Micron in court filings and the police in Taiwan, represent the dark side of that effort — and explain in part why the United States is starting a trade war with China.

A plan known as Made in China 2025 calls for the country to become a global competitor in an array of industries, including semiconductors, robotics and electric vehicles. China is spending heavily to both innovate and buy up technology from abroad.

Politicians in Washington and American companies accuse China of veering into intimidation and outright theft to get there. And they see Micron, an Idaho company whose memory chips give phones and computers the critical ability to store and quickly retrieve information, as a prime example of that aggression.

Three years ago, Micron spurned a $23 billion takeover offer from a state-controlled Chinese company. Today it faces a lawsuit and an investigation in China, which accounts for about half its $20 billion in annual sales.

Then Micron was the target of the heist in Taiwan, according to officials there and a lawsuit the company has brought against the Taiwanese company that employed the engineers, UMC, and the Chinese company it says wanted access to the technology, Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company.

Other companies may face predicaments similar to Micron’s, industry experts said.

One state-backed factory in the city of Wuhan, owned by Yangtze Memory Technology Company, or YMTC, will be turning out chips that look similar to those made by Samsung, the South Korean chip maker, said Mark Newman, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

“The YMTC one is virtually identical to Samsung’s, which makes it pretty clear they’ve been copying,” Mr. Newman said.

A Samsung spokeswoman declined to comment, and YMTC officials did not return calls for comment. President Xi Jinping of China visited YMTC’s production facilities this year, one way China’s leaders show their endorsement for projects.

China defends Made in China 2025 as necessary for its economic survival. It still depends on other countries for crucial goods like chips and software, and China is offering funding for homegrown labs and for entrepreneurs who hope to grab a piece of the future.

But Trump administration officials in a report this year recounted how Chinese officials have at times helped local companies get intellectual property from American firms, including in the energy, electronics, software and avionics sectors.

American business groups worried about Made in China 2025 point to Micron. The account of its struggles was based on Taiwanese and American legal documents.

In 2015, representatives from Tsinghua Unigroup, a Chinese chip maker with major state backing, approached Micron with an acquisition offer, which the company rejected. It later also turned down several partnership offers from Chinese companies out of concern for protecting its technology, said a person with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified because the person lacked authorization to speak publicly.

That was when one Chinese company resorted to theft, Micron said in documents filed last December in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California.

Micron’s accusations focus on efforts by Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, a state-backed chip maker, to build a $5.7 billion factory in China’s Fujian Province. Two years ago, Jinhua tapped UMC, a Taiwanese company, to help it develop technology for the factory. Instead of going through the lengthy steps required to design the technology, Micron said in its suit, UMC and Jinhua decided to steal it.

A UMC spokesman denied the allegations and declined to comment further. Jinhua did not respond to requests for comment.

First, UMC lured away engineers from Micron’s Taiwan operations with promises of raises and bonuses, according to the Taiwanese authorities. Then, it asked them to take some of Micron’s secrets with them, according to Micron’s court filings and the authorities. The engineers illegally took with them more than 900 files that contained key specifications and details about Micron’s advanced memory chips, the authorities said.

Micron grew suspicious, according to its court documents, after discovering that one of its departing engineers had turned to Google for instructions on how to wipe a company laptop. Later, at a recruiting event in the United States aimed at Micron employees, Jinhua and UMC showed PowerPoint slides that used Micron’s internal code names when discussing future chips it would make, according to the court documents.

Alerted by Micron, the Taiwanese police tapped the phone of one Micron engineer, Kenny Wang, who was being recruited by UMC. According to an indictment in Taiwan against Mr. Wang and others, UMC reached out to Mr. Wang in early 2016 using Line, the smartphone messaging app, while he was still working for Micron. UMC explained it was having problems developing its memory chip technology. Mr. Wang then grabbed the information it needed from Micron’s servers, and later used it to help UMC’s design. The police said Mr. Wang received a promotion at UMC.

When investigators showed up at UMC’s offices early last year, the police said, some employees rushed to hide what they had taken from Micron. Mr. Wang and another former Micron employee gave laptops, USB flash drives and documents to an assistant engineer, who locked them in her personal locker. She then left the office with Mr. Wang’s phone — the one that the police had tapped, which was quickly tracked down.

UMC filed its own criminal complaint against Mr. Wang last year, which Taiwanese prosecutors rejected. Mr. Wang and other engineers who were charged said they had taken the trade secrets for personal research. Mr. Wang did not respond to emails and phone calls for comment.

In January, Micron was hit with a patent infringement suit by Jinhua and UMC over several types of memory. As part of the suit, the companies requested that the court bar Micron from making and selling the products and pay them damages. The case is being heard by a court in Fujian Province. The Fujian provincial government is an investor in Jinhua.

In a letter sent to President Trump, Senators Jim Risch and Michael D. Crapo, Republicans of Idaho, expressed concern about the entire case and specifically the rapid pace with which the patent lawsuit has proceeded. The case could block Micron from selling some products in China.

“If the case against Micron moves forward, and the Chinese government once again rules in favor of itself, it would cause substantial damage to Micron and the U.S. tech industry as a whole,” said the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times.

In May, China’s market regulator opened a price-fixing investigation into Micron, along with the South Korean memory makers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Memory prices have jumped over the past year, because of spiking demand and limited production by the three companies, which dominate the market. Another China regulator, which has said it is also monitoring the price jump, also gave a multimillion-dollar grant to Jinhua.

Jinhua and other Chinese chip makers face hurdles in catching up. Production of semiconductors involves a highly complex and automated process that controls everything down to the atomic level.

Jinhua and others are spending big to get there. In Jinjiang, a city in Fujian Province once known as a shoe-manufacturing center, Jinhua’s new factory is almost finished. Rising five stories and stretching several football fields long, the structure boasts 100,000 square feet of new office space.

Economic planners in Jinjiang said they were hoping to attract more talent from Taiwan. In addition to adding more flights there, the town was in the process of building out a bilingual international school, a hospital with international accreditation and upscale apartments. The new plant is just a short drive from the airport.

“Most of Made in China 2025 is likely to succeed. Not all technologies are rocket science,” said Dan Wang, a technology analyst in Beijing with Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm. “With enough subsidies, Chinese firms have a good shot at catching up to the technological frontier.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/technology/china-micron-chips-theft.html

I'm actually quite surprised there hasn't been some sort of a market boost based on this news.

For me, this only raises further questions.  If the money really has been there all along, why wait until now to prove it?  Why not allow a full audit if there's nothing to hide?  And why only show that one, specific day?  How do we know the money was there on May 31st and earlier?  Maybe I'm unnecessarily suspicious, but this just doesn't sit well with me.  People have had suspicions of impropriety for some time now and this doesn't really feel like much of an attempt to allay concerns.  Rather than just a quick snapshot of records on that one day, I'd be more reassured by some records over a more prolonged period.  A full audit is still needed before I''ll be convinced.

If I had to guess, the money doesn't normally just sit there.  It gets "invested" (read "gambled with").  Which is why a full audit won't happen.  People would see what risks they're taking.

I do not know why you are linking between regulations and these complaints ?