Cracking the chicken-and-egg problem of utilizing resources in space has been a difficult challenge for over half a century. Getting enough infrastructure built up is necessary to collect those resources effectively, but doing so is too expensive without using the resources themselves. Trying to crack that problem has been the focus of a variety of space exploration enthusiasts, and one of them, Don Barker, is currently the Gateway HALO Utilization & Visiting Vehicle Integration Lead at ARES Corporation. He published a paper in 2020 that detailed how the space exploration industry could use a modified version of a framework from the oil and gas industry, which he calls the Planetary Resource Management System (PRMS), to calculate where we should focus on settlement efforts.
PRMS is set up as a two-step process: finding resources and then developing the technology to utilize them. Ideally, those technologies would advance to a point where those resource processes would be commercially viable. Let’s look at the process of finding the resource first.
The most basic level of resource finding is a remote sensing picture around 100m or more per pixel. This can be done with a relatively good camera on board an orbiting spacecraft. Next up would be a remote image between 5m and 100m per pixel, combined with geophysical evidence that a resource is available. Importantly, this would be combined with a resource assessment that includes estimations like economic impact and technological availability.
A final step of the PRMS’s “prospecting criteria” is a remote sensing image of less than 5m per pixel resolution, geophysical evidence of a resource’s presence, and proof that it is accessible using current technology. This would again be combined with an assessment of the economic viability of recovery to ensure that the effort would be supported in the long term.
Technology, such as surface miners or extraterrestrial drilling rigs, enables the accessibility of the resources the prospecting projects would find. Three categories of recoverable resources – possible, probable, and proved – go along with the three categories of prospecting listed above. The framework also uses a metric called Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) to reflect how much of a potential resource deposit could ultimately be mined.
Calculating the various numbers for a deposit of a given material (such as water ice on the Moon), the framework can be combined with overall mission architecture and human exploration goals to determine the importance of that particular deposit to “mission success.” This is where things get tricky, as “mission success” is primarily defined by whoever pays for that mission.
NASA is the largest funder of these types of projects for now, but even they don’t necessarily abide by this framework. Last year, they canceled the one rover project, VIPER, which could have added to our prospecting knowledge of the lunar south pole. Such a lack of foresight frustrated Dr. Barker, who bemoans the lack of structured support for permanently implementing a human presence off the planet rather than scientific outposts similar to McMurdo station in Antarctica.
For now, that is the best we can hope for in terms of a sustained human presence in space – the main driving force behind Artemis, NASA’s project to get humans back to the Moon, is to set up a scientific outpost rather than start utilizing resources to supply a permanent habitat. However, the agency has done some research on that topic. VIPER would have been a great addition to that research, and the agency claims that other missions will cover its scientific objectives. But suppose it continues to cut funding to programs that could help implement the framework. In that case, a different organization will likely have to take on the mantle of utilizing resources in situ.
SpaceX seems to be the leader in that area, but it is currently focused, rightfully, on building bigger, better, and cheaper rockets. If and when it is able to more closely focus on its stated goal of making humanity interplanetary, then at least it will have a framework for utilizing the resources needed to do so.
Learn More:
DC Barker – Lunar and off Earth resource drivers, estimations and the development conundrum
UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?
UT – NASA Wants to Learn to Live Off the Land on the Moon
UT – Researchers Developed a Test Bed For Separating Valuable Material on the Moon
Lead Image:
ISRU system concept for autonomous construction on Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech