Economic Assessment of High-Thrust and Solar-Sail Propulsion for Near-Earth Asteroid Mining

TARGET GROUP: ASTEROIDS

OBJECTIVES

·        To find the maximum achievable economic return for a single return trip to a target asteroid for which the semi-major axis, eccentricity, and inclination are defined.

SUMMARY

For many years, science-fiction writers, space scientists and engineers have hypothesized about the potential advantages of asteroid mining (Lewis, 1996). However, due to technical, financial, and political challenges, commercial asteroid mining seemed to remain a distant fantasy (Gerlach, 2005). Nonetheless, the last few years have shown that asteroid mining is moving from a conceptual stage into a development stage, with a number of related companies emerging, aiming at commercial asteroid mining (European Space Agency, 2019; Meurisse and Carpenter, 2020; SpaceResources.lu, 2018). In the meantime, Earth-based observations and studies, combined with a number of missions to asteroids, have demonstrated that asteroids indeed contain vast quantities of valuable resources. Asteroid mining has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of in-space manufacturing, production of propellant for space transportation and consumables for crewed spacecraft, compared to launching the required resources from the Earth’s deep gravity well.

REFERENCE

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/218314/7/218314.pdf