What’s a heaven for? Tiny Luxembourg’s big space dream

And now for something completely different: Tiny Luxembourg wants to start mining asteroids.

Last week the country’s minister of the economy announced the Grand Duchy will designate asteroid mining as a “key high-tech sector” for its economy and seek to position itself as “a European hub in the exploration and use of space resources.” It also said it would invest in related R&D projects and may directly invest in companies active in the field.

For a country better known for banks and tax avoidance, Luxembourg has stirred some debate with its plan. It actually does have a large space satellite sector already, and the financial muscle to pay for its ambitions. But its expertise in space travel is more limited, and the legal and economic details of mining asteroids is terra incognita for everybody. Nevertheless, as a new approach to national innovation policy, the announcement was hailed as out of this world – for good or bad.

Cheering the news was Candace Johnson, co-founder of one of Luxembourg’s huge satellite operators, SES, and now President of the European Business Angel Network. She called it a “beautiful vision which should incentivise and inspire young entrepreneurs” in the country to create new space vehicles and launchers.

More cautious was Brian Harvey, an Irish author of numerous books on space exploration: “Luxembourg's role in space communications tends to be underestimated, but I think suggestions that it will do space mining are getting a bit ahead of themselves,” he said.

“What needs to happen first is an in situ mining demonstrator,” said Harvey. “And then the devising of systems that can fly the mined product to where it is needed – in other words technical feasibility and then economic feasibility.

Luxembourg brand management

Last week’s announcement can perhaps better be understood as part of a broader promotion of industry that the government hopes will help the world see more in the country than banks and low taxes.

And a small metamorphosis is visible. Today, some 700 employees work in the aerospace sector in Luxembourg, in R&D, manufacturing and operation, with the number of people working on private sector space projects rising by an average of 15 per cent a year.

The government’s interest in asteroid mining has already caught the attention of two ambitious American companies, Deep Space Industries (DSI) and Planetary Resources; both likely commercial partners for Luxembourg, set up with the long-term aim of harvesting space materials (Planetary Resources is also backed by Google and Virgin’s Richard Branson).

Business pitches are being sharpened for possible trips to the Grand Duchy, where the government said there is money available to invest. Jaan Praks, an assistant professor with Finland’s Aalto University, may be one interested candidate. He builds nanosatellites, and says they can be used by asteroid miners as scouts or communication relays. “Our team is actually working on a project for the European Space Agency where nanosatellite usage for close range spectral mapping of an asteroid is studied,” he said.

In 2005, Luxembourg became a full member of the European Space Agency (ESA). It now allocates 0.03 per cent of its yearly budget to ESA - hardly a king’s ransom, but enough to rank it in the top five among European countries in terms of per capita space investment.

Aside from SES, which established itself in the country over 30 years ago, Luxembourg hosts some 20 other space technology companies, including Euro-Composites, LuxSpace, Gradel and HITEC Luxembourg. Last year a start-up, Vibrationmaster, penned a supply contract with SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by superstar entrepreneur Elon Musk. Annual space sector turnover is around €2.3 billion.

Eight public research laboratories, including the country’s first and only university, and the public research centres Gabriel Lippmann and Henri Tudor, are involved in space research in close partnership with local industry.

SES has a strong presence in the University of Luxembourg and sponsors lecturers on space law. It has also been known to take smaller companies under its wing. Aerospace company LuxSpace operated from SES’s premises for eight years before going to a new office building in 2012.

Legal obstacles

The idea of space mining actually goes back a long way – as early as American physicist Gerard O'Neill's, who talked about building space habitats from materials mined from asteroids in the early 1970’s. But no one is convinced the fledgling industry is going to get into orbit overnight.

For starters, there’s a legal problem: What company is going to spend billions in pursuit of asteroids if they don’t own the minerals once they’ve mined them?

Last year the US passed a law which gave US companies property rights over resources they obtained from asteroids. But some legal experts have suggested this contravenes the UN's Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which decrees that space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”. 

Aspiring miners use a fisherman analogy to argue why they should be allowed to harvest asteroids. Fishing boats, bobbing on the sea, can lay claim to the fish they capture but have no entitlement to the oceans they travel in, they say.

“The high seas analogy can be useful, yes,” said Jill Stuart, a space politics specialist with the London School of Economics. “But it can only go so far. At some point, the unique aspect of space geography requires new legislation and coordination.”

Filling stations in space

Companies say the real prize in asteroids isn’t expensive metals like platinum, iron or nickel. It’s water.

Water, when broken down into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen, can be used to make rocket propellant. This could lead to the creation of space service stations, executives with DSI and Planetary Resources claim. It would also cut down on the International Space Station’s water bill. Every year six tonnes of water are delivered to the station to sustain six astronauts, costing $50 million per tonne.

Mining will also be the precursor for a future human space settlement, predicts Nina Hooper, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“There’s billions and billions of litres of water in space,” she said, tied up in asteroids. “We can build reserves of water in order to get space ready for people.

“For people to go and live in space, we need food, drink and protection from powerful cosmic and solar radiation. Water miraculously does all three of these things.

“We can drink it. We can hydrate dried food. We can grow new food. And we can [build] thick walls full of water to simulate our atmosphere and provide us with the same radiation protection,” she added.