Why Larry Page Backed a Plan to Mine Water From Asteroids.
Aadhya Tibrewal, Jadetimes Staff
The Google co-founder invested in a startup that wanted to turn water found in space into rocket propellant. An Indian rocket helped put one of its test satellites into orbit. Building a business around what the satellite could find proved much harder.
In April 2012, a group of entrepreneurs announced that they wanted to mine asteroids. Platinum made for an obvious talking point. It was valuable on Earth, and the idea of bringing it back from space sounded like the sort of thing a mining company might do if it had a rocket. But one of the most interesting things Planetary Resources hoped to find was water. Larry Page, then Google’s chief executive, was among the investors who backed the company.
On Earth, water is heavy and relatively cheap to move. In space, getting it to the right place can be expensive because every kilogram has to be launched. If a company could find water already in space, collect it and deliver it to a spacecraft, its value would come from where it was available. That was the intriguing premise behind Page’s investment. An ordinary resource could become valuable because the nearest tap was millions of kilometres away.
The case for a filling station in space
Rocket planners have to think about the weight of fuel twice. First, the fuel has to do its job later in the mission. Before that can happen, the rocket has to lift it off Earth. Carrying more propellant for a distant trip adds weight at the very beginning, when the rocket is already doing some of its hardest work.
Planetary Resources proposed finding water-rich near-Earth asteroids. Water could, in principle, be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used as rocket propellants. A spacecraft able to refuel along its route could start out carrying less for the later stages of its journey. The company also talked about bringing valuable metals back to Earth, but the water proposal pointed to a different kind of customer. The buyer would be someone who needed supplies in space.
That customer was the hard part. Imagine opening a petrol station before anyone has committed to building a road past it. A company might hesitate to design a spacecraft around an orbital fuel stop until it knows the fuel will be there. The supplier, meanwhile, has little reason to build that fuel stop until enough spacecraft are likely to use it. Page was backing a venture that had to solve an engineering problem while waiting for its market to take shape.
An Indian rocket carried one of the first tests
The idea moved beyond the announcement stage. In January 2018, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched the company’s Arkyd-6 satellite aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The small spacecraft carried an infrared instrument to test technology that could eventually help identify water resources. Earth orbit gave the team somewhere to test its equipment before committing to a much longer and more expensive trip to an asteroid.
Prospecting would have mattered even if extracting water were easy. A mining company would have to decide whether a target held enough useful material, how difficult it would be to reach, and whether the return trip made sense. The richest asteroid on a list might be a worse choice than one with less water and a much easier route. The first product of the venture, in practical terms, would have been information about where it was worth going.
The satellite flew. The mine never opened.
Later in 2018, blockchain company ConsenSys acquired Planetary Resources. The original venture did not establish a commercial asteroid mine. Its progress shows how far apart two milestones can be. Getting a sensor into orbit meant the team could begin testing how to look for useful material. Getting water to a paying customer would have required reaching an asteroid, extracting the water, processing it, storing it and delivering it to a useful location. Every step would have added cost and risk.
Page’s role was that of an investor. What he backed was a bet on how a future space economy might work. Today, someone planning a mission starts by deciding what has to go on the rocket. The world Planetary Resources imagined would let that planner ask a second question. What could we pick up along the way?
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