As plans to extract resources from the Moon, Mars and asteroids develop, a UNSW mining expert says the world needs to consider who will benefit and what happens to countries left out of the new space economy.
If valuable resources are discovered and extracted from the Moon, Mars or asteroids, who should benefit from the profits?
Should the spoils go to the companies that develop the technology, the countries that fund the missions, or people around the world who may never travel to space?
It might sound like a question for the distant future. But Professor Serkan Saydam , a mining engineering expert at UNSW Sydney, says the issue of who owns space resources - and how their benefits should be shared - needs attention before an off-Earth mining industry becomes established.
The potential rewards are attracting interest from governments, researchers and private companies.
That's because resources found beyond Earth are likely to be vital in supporting future human activity in space, including potential colonies on the Moon or Mars.
Meanwhile, valuable deposits of materials such as silicon, titanium and rare earth elements are increasingly important in the production of solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries and other renewable energy technologies back on Earth.
In addition, helium-3 is a rare isotope implanted in the lunar regolith by the solar wind and is considered a potential non-radioactive fuel for future nuclear fusion energy.
But the ability to reach and extract such resources is likely to be concentrated among a relatively small number of wealthy countries and companies.
On the latest episode of the Engineering the Future podcast , Prof. Saydam acknowledges that there is a difficult question that needs to be addressed: Could an industry built beyond Earth create new economic divides back home?
"Most of the mining activities are currently done in the low-income countries on Earth, except Australia and Canada, so they have significant economic benefits of doing mining," he says.
"If we move to mining the Moon, or Mars, or asteroids in the future, let's say within 50 or 100 years, what's going to happen to those nations?
"That's called space gap. Because space-faring nations are high-income countries."
In the full podcast episode, Prof. Saydam explains the engineering problems that need to be solved in order for mining on the Moon, Mars and asteroids to be feasible, and digs deeper into the reasons for doing so.
He also discusses the economic challenges of spending millions of dollars on research, development, equipment and skills to obtain material from such faraway places and whether the subsequent cost of the entire process makes it financially viable.
Sustainability is key
Prof. Saydam, the Director of the ARC Research Hub for NextGenMIN , Chair of Mining Engineering at the School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering and Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research , also says it is important that off-earth mining is done in a sustainable way.
And that's if the engineering issues can be resolved.
"At the moment, we don't know how to do it. We've got ideas how to do it, but there are lots of challenges. What equipment will we use? And it is also a very extreme environment we are dealing with," he says.
"On the Moon there is no atmosphere, so you get a lot of meteoroids that land on the surface. As well as that, there is radiation exposure and the dust on the Moon and Mars is very difficult to deal with because it is extremely fine and very abrasive.
"But to me the distance is the biggest challenge because it's an extremely high cost to go and get these materials. And we don't have the financial power to do it right now, specifically for Mars."
Prof. Saydam warns that without clear frameworks and agreements, competition for valuable resources could encourage monopolies and increase the risk of tensions between companies and nations.
He says that future off-Earth mining should be developed with both sustainability and ethics in mind, including full consideration of environmental and cultural impacts.
"Off-Earth mining operations must be sustainable as well as ethical," he adds.
"We also need to consider cultural impacts, plus the environmental impacts to that other environment. We need to carefully look at everything. That's what we haven't done in the past very, very carefully.
"And what's the emissions impact? We talk about the monetary cost of launching, but there's also the emission cost and impact of the launching. Using the current fuel systems in rockets, how much emissions are we creating?"
