Low Earth Orbit Resupply Station for Asteroid Mining
SpSt 595 – Space Studies Capstone
Dr. Fevig
Fall 2016
Table of Contents
Mission Statement:
The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has completed many large and impactful projects which have changed the everyday life of people throughout the globe. Now looking to send humans to Mars and beyond, one of the biggest problems that NASA faces is the issue of obtaining resources in a space environment.
In our solar system, large amounts of resources can be found in asteroids that continuously orbit around our Sun. These resources come in many different forms and can range from ice, to gold, to platinum, and many others. This mission will be designed to construct a means for prospecting, mining, and processing these resources in space without ever having to touch the ground. This new method of resupplying space crafts is important, as it serves as a stepping-stone to assist in the completion of cheaper, longer, and more complex missions in the future.
Mission Objectives
The goal of this mission is to create an entirely robotic infrastructure in space, built to prospect, mine, and process the resources found in asteroids that have been placed in lunar orbit. The mission will focus on extracting water from ice and turning it into necessary spacecraft consumables, such as rocket fuel, radiation shielding, potable water, etc. This infrastructure will then serve to support more far-reaching activities, acting as a resupply and refueling station. This mission includes the following goals in their respective sub-disciplines of space studies:
Space History
Werner von Braun, the world famous aerospace engineer, attempted to lay out an architecture as to how future space missions may be made possible. This was through his paradigm of shuttle, station, Moon, and Mars, which laid out an incremental approach to space travel. Ultimately, this paradigm was not followed by the United States space program, which skipped the shuttle and station in an effort to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. As a result, this accelerated effort caused the United States to end up without a sustainable infrastructure in space to continue pushing human influence further into the solar system. Therefore, an objective of this mission is to add a complimentary piece to Werner von Braun’s paradigm, through the creation of a refueling station in low Earth orbit. This refueling station will push missions deeper into space and will promote the beginnings of a true space economy.
Space Engineering
Asteroid mining requires a logistical base in Low Earth Orbit that allows the assembly and fueling of craft, and in a first phase, accepts semi-processed raw materials coming from asteroids and processes them further into saleable fuel and to construction materials in orbit (Brown, 2008.). Therefore, one of the main objectives of this mission is to design, launch, and assemble a series of completely automated crafts, beginning with a space station in low Earth orbit. The most logical step for this would be to utilize the International Space Station, updating it, refurbishing it, and building out from its components that already exist. Though the life of the International Space Station will ultimately expire, it will still hold an extremely large amount of usable parts and hardware. To contain all necessary facilities, the station must include a series of capsules, each designated to a specific job, including storage, resource analysis, resource processing, maintenance, etc. These capsules could be constructed by companies such as Bigelow, who have already been constructing and implementing inflatable modules on the International Space Station. “The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is an experimental program developed under a NASA contract in an effort to test and validate expandable habitat technology” (Bigelow, 2016.). This space station will then be moved to orbit at a LaGrange point, meaning that processing and prospecting facilities will be in an area much closer to the suspect asteroids.
The entirety of the space station and its facilities will be robotic, meaning that life support systems and habitats would not need to be included. Astronauts would have to be sent to the space station occasionally for repairs and general maintenance; however, their continuous assistance would not be needed.
Space Science
While the construction of the space station and resource harvesting vehicles would take considerable engineering, it would also require an adaptation of current earth based sciences. Once resources have been mined and returned to the space station, their extraction and processing can begin. Another major objective of this mission is to include in the space station a means for turning the extracted water into fuel. New scientific research will need to be conducted in order to determine the most efficient, low cost methods of doing this. In addition, another problem presents itself in the form of determining the composition of candidate asteroids. Another objective in the science discipline is to create a method for figuring out an asteroid’s composition without utilizing a large amount of resources. A distributed research network utilizing current ground and LEO systems can be combined with potential future missions for asteroid candidate selection.
Lastly, this spacecraft will also contribute indirectly to science missions by offering a way of extending the life of future science missions, and even resurrecting old science craft. Currently once a craft is nearing the end of its fuel reserves, it is either deorbited or transferred into a graveyard orbit. This station can help extend the lifetime of those craft and provide many more years of scientific data.
Space Business and Management
A mission of this size and scope would fall under the category of a megaproject which has three major characteristics: a project that delivers a substantial piece of physical infrastructure with a life expectancy of decades; the client is often a government of private sector organization; the main contractor or consortium of contractors are usually privately owned or financed and often retains a stake in the ownership of the infrastructure (Sandres J., 2012). For this project, we are focusing on the station that will be used as the refining and refueling station, but this is just a first step in where this project needs to go and it is critical to identify the risk factors and efficiently handle management for stakeholders.
Since the first immediate customers for refueling would be private and government satellites in Earth’s orbit, especially those in GEO (Zhou et al, 2015), it would be in the interest of international governments to partner with private companies to insure success of this infrastructure. The key will be insuring that risks and costs will be minimized through effective management techniques and using what infrastructure is already available.
As stated before, the existing International Space Station could be utilized, which would provide a large cost savings. Costs could also be saved by using asteroids retrieved by missions like the NASA ARM mission or using asteroids that are naturally captured by Earth.
Space Policy and Law
To serve as a catalyst to encourage other nations to develop legislation that will allow for the development of an international space resource utilization industry, the U.S. administration has drafted H.R. 2262. Hopefully, in doing this, other nations will be made aware of the economic, environmental, and social importance that this industry will bring to their countries. In addition, the U.S. seeks to sign agreements which mutually recognize one another’s mining claims. These types of agreements have already been made, relating to things such as mining of the deep-sea bed (Deep Sea Mining Act, 1981.).
When dealing with activities in outer space, actions are governed by several international treaties, acts, and laws, which state what can and can’t happen. For example, The Outer Space Treaty, entered into force on October 10th, 1967, is made up of a series of articles which state that activities in space must follow several guidelines, including promoting peaceful cooperation, maintaining international security and peace, and providing mutual assistance between states in space. In addition, several of these actions directly assist the mission at hand; specifically, where the United States has decided to legally protect its commercial space industry in the prospection, extraction, and return of minerals from a celestial body without national appropriation claims of sovereignty. As a result, a final objective of this mission will be to ensure that all mission goals are completed, while still following all treaties and laws.
Appendices
Appendix I: Team
This project proposal was prepared and written in a combined effort by the following students from the University of North Dakota:
• Christopher Birkinbine
• Andrew Carnes
• Bryan Maher
• Hannah Oshier
• Alex Zimmer
Appendix II: Bibliography
1. Andrews D., Bonner K., Butterworth A., Calvert H., Dagang B., Dimond K., …, Yoo C. (2014). Defining a Successful Commercial Asteroid Mining Program. Acta Astronautica. 108, 106-118.
2. Bate, Roger R., Mueller, Donald D., White, Jerry E. (1971) Fundamentals of Astrodynamics
3. Bigelow Aerospace LLC (2016) Beam: The Experimental Platform. Retrieved from http://bigelowaerospace.com/beam/
4. Brown, James., Kaliciak, Jan., Scheuermeier, Ueli., Wilson, James., Wilson, Terry. (March 2008) Alpha LEO Station: First Low Earth Orbit Station as base for Asteroid Mining.
5. Capabilities and Services. (2016). [ Chart giving the max performance characteristics of the Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 Heavy]. Capabilities and Services from SpaceX. Retrieved from http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
6. Deep Sea Mining (Temporary Provisions) Act 1981, Chapter 53. Section 3: Licenses granted by reciprocating countries. London: Published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office and Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament
7. Everett, David F., Puschell, Jeffery J., Wertz, James R. (2011) Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD
8. H.R. 2759. Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. Public Law 96-283. 28 June 1980. 30 use 1428, Sec. 118: Reciprocating States.
9. Kfir, Sagi. “Is asteroid mining legal? The truth behind Title IV of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015.” Available at https://deepspaceindustries.com/is-asteroid-mining-legal/, last visited, 24 June 2016.
10. Misic, S., Radujkovic, M. (2015). Critical Drivers of Megraprojects Success and Failure. Procedia Engineering, 122, 71-80.
11. Nocera, Daniel G. Personalized Energy: The Home as a Solar Power Station and Solar Gas Station, Chemistry and Sustainability: Energy & Materials Vol 2, Is 5 Pg 387-390 May 25 2009
12. North, John (2008) Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology
13. Outer Space Treaty, 1967
14. R de Levie, The Electrolysis of Water Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry Vol 476, Is 1, Oct 21 1999 pg 92-93
15. Sandres, J. (2012). Risk, Uncertainty, and governance in megaprojects: A critical discussion of alternative explinations. International Journal of Project Management, 30, 432-443.
16. Sellers, Jerry Jon (2005) Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics
17. Sonter M. (1998). The Technical and Economic Feasibility of Mining the Near-Earth Asteroids. Acta Astronautica. 41, 637-647.
18. United States Government, House of Representatives, (H.R.) 2262, United States Competitiveness Act, Public Law No. 114-90
19. Zhou, Y., Yan,Y., Huang, X., Kong, L. (2015). Optimal scheduling of multiple geosynchronous satellites refueling based on a hybrid particle swarm optimizer. Aerospace Science and Technology, 47, 125-134.
Appendix III: Colloquium Speakers
• Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Retired NASA, PhD
• Neil Degrasse Tyson, PhD Astrophysics
• Michael Gaffey, PhD, University of North Dakota planetary sciences
• Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer of Planetary Resources In.c
• John S. Lewis, Chief Scientist at Deep Space Industries
• Daniel G. Nocera, Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy, Harvard University
• Matthew Beasly, PhD, Principal Instrument Scientist, Planetary Resources
• David Hyland, PhD, Director of Space Science and Space Engineering Research, Texas A&M
• Marc Rayman, Chief engineer and mission director for NASA’s only mission to the asteroid belt
• Gavin Beer, Metallurgical consultant, Met-Chem Consulting Pty Ltd, Australia
• Chris George, Mineral Processing and Chemical Engineering Consultant, Australia
• Lee Valentine, PhD, Executive Vice President of the Space Studies Institute, Princeton