Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources: Mining Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Episode Date: February 18, 2013

Chris Lewicki is the passionate President of Planetary Resources. He leads the company's mission to find, capture and deliver asteroids to its space-resource hungry clients.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The sound and fury of a 10-meter meteor exploding over a city of 1.1 million. Welcome to Planetary Radio, where it may seem like we've been asteroid radio for the last few weeks. Can you blame us? What with one rock shattering windows in Russia, followed hours later by a much bigger rock that missed our world by a cosmic whisker. We'll pick up the stories with Emily Lough-Dawalla in a moment. Bill Nye is best heard this week on the webcast we produced, as asteroid 2012 DA14 was whizzing by.

We'll tell you how to catch the on-demand version of that show in a minute. I'm also very proud to welcome back the president and chief asteroid miner of planetary resources, Chris Lewicki. Emily, it really did seem like the sky is falling. Yeah, it's funny. The best joke that I saw last week was that asteroids are like buses. There's no one for forever. Then suddenly there's two at once. I love that. I hadn't heard that. I did hear somebody call it a cosmic coincidence, which sure seems like an apt description. It was a major coincidence. And that one's really hard to explain. And it's a major coincidence that the other biggest one we've ever known of was also in Russia. Russia is a big country, so that's not maybe all that surprising.

Yeah, you could see, though, they might think they're being unfairly picked on every hundred years or so. Absolutely. What did you discover? You do have this great blog entry that you posted on, I think, the 15th, last Friday, the day of the asteroid flyby and the unexpected meteor. All these great resources. One of the wonderful things about the modern internet and the age of Twitter and YouTube, that all of these resources, they just appear all at once. And really, the value of somebody who knows what they're talking for us. And I said, you know, Phil, you know more about asteroids than I do. Let me help you make this list of videos and images, and you can do the interpretation. I'll send people to you for that. Great team there. So what were you most impressed by? I mean, what made the greatest impression on you? Was it the video? It was the video. It was the sonic booms. It's kind of hard to imagine. I've obviously never It's kind of hard to imagine.

I've obviously never experienced any kind of bang like that. The loudest sonic boom I've ever heard was one of the times that the shuttle came to land at Edwards Air Force Base. And I heard the distinctive double bang at a distance of it coming in, emitting a sonic boom as it landed. But that was obviously nothing like the one that shattered, I think it was a thousand, no, a million square feet of glass were shattered by the sonic boom of this asteroid coming in over this factory town in Russia. Wow. All right. So is this all wrapped up or can we look forward to more coverage? Well, hopefully there will be more coverage. Right now we're hearing the first reports of some meteorites being picked up. Those reports are unconfirmed. But this was such a large one that presumably they will eventually find and verify some meteorites.

And then there will be some great science to be done on where this thing came from, what it was, and also a lot of reflection on the fact that this could very well happen again and we'll have exactly as much warning as we did this time, which was none. So people, keep an eye on the blog. It's at planetary.org. Emily will continue to follow the story. And if you want to see our PlanetCast webcast, which took place on the 15th, Friday the 15th, just about the time of the close pass by 2012 DA14, we had almost 4,000 viewers live.

And we've since then, at this point, we've had about 20,000 for the video. Just go to planetary.org slash planetcast. That's one word. planetary.org slash planetcast for the live coverage by Dr. Bruce Betts and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Emily, thanks so much. See you next week, Matt. She does

know what she's talking about. She's our planetary evangelist and senior editor, and she's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. It is an audacious company mission. Find, capture, and deliver asteroids to their customers. Chris Lewicki is the guy who leads development of the technology that will someday fulfill that mission for planetary resources.

I first met him 12 years ago when he was a key player in the creation of Yuri's Night, the celebration of humans in space. He went from there to a very busy career at JPL that included work on the Mars exploration rovers. Chris, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It has been a good long while since I think the last time we talked to you, you were busy driving rovers on Mars. Sometime around then, I think we had Spirit on its way, Opportunity had just landed, and then I had got some time to engage with fine activities like this. So how does one go from helping to start Yuri's Night and being a very active student

interested in space development to driving rovers and other stuff at JPL to, I have to tell you that I once told the planetary protection officer that she had the coolest title in the world. You have bumped her, in my mind, as president and chief asteroid miner. Indeed. It's a very popular title. But I think it fits. So going from Yuri's Night to rovers to asteroid mining has been certainly an epic journey. I'd say it takes some curiosity. It takes doing a lot of jobs that no one else will do and also, you know, not taking no for an answer. That's helpful, especially when you're taking on something as truly revolutionary, as out there, bleeding edge, as deciding to mine asteroids.

Where did this come from? Well, everything is science fiction at some point. Somebody's got to turn it into science fact. And Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis, the co-chairman and co-founders of the organization, approached me and we talked about the possibility of this and how one would do it. And it was really right then that I knew that these things don't happen by people waiting around. These things happen by passionate people choosing to do things and choosing to pursue them. And I had that in me, and I still have it in me today. And we're making progress.

We'll be there soon. Peter and Eric, a couple of very conservative guys there. I mean, they really haven't taken on any major challenges in the past. Not at all, no. That's quite an interesting triumvirate that you have there. I have a good deal of faith that you guys will be able to advance this. But it is a daunting task that you have taken on. It's very daunting.

But, you know, if you're going to think at all, why not think big? Peter and Eric have started an industry prior. We're there at the beginning of the space tourism industry. And having done that, looked and saw what's going to really be the next thing that is going to open up space and is going to push us out there. And space tourism is great. It's taking off. It's starting a new industry, quite literally. exploration programs have done a tremendous amount of things over the past 50 years and have really laid the groundwork for people like myself and small companies all over the world to think big, try hard things, stand on the shoulders of giants. That really is what we're doing. And what we see is resources are an economic driver that is going to overcome government budget funding cycles and is going to overcome a budget funding cycles and is going to overcome a passing fancy of what's going to be in space because all great things really happen when

there's an opportunity and there's a driving reason to go do that. And space resources really are that future. So talk about the business plan. Where does this start and where do you hope to end up? It's asteroid mining. It's the detection, the characterization, the claiming, the mining of, and then the delivery of a resource to a point of need. That's an industry that I just described, and it's an industry that does not exist in a vacuum. There's all kinds of other industries that we'll depend on in doing that activity, and there's a variety of marketplaces that are involved with that. But it's really more than an industry. I give public talks very frequently, and the first thing that I made a point of saying when I speak to people

is going beyond asteroid mining, going beyond space resources, and talking about the economy of our planet and the economic sphere of influence of our species, which right now goes just about to the geobelt and ends right there. For it to really go beyond, we've got to have a good reason for doing that. And we want to expand that economic sphere of influence. You will do this by developing these highly innovative spacecraft, robotic spacecraft that are going to do the work for you.

There really isn't, at least as it's seen right now, a human element, not in space anyway, to these plans. So these are really sophisticated spacecraft that you're beginning with. These are, by my experience and certainly by our intent, the most sophisticated spacecraft per pound or per kilogram. We're an SI unit company that we can build. You really just described where we are today, which is the prospecting and creating the information that will advise our plans and will allow us to make those decisions of, you know, do we mine asteroid A or asteroid B? How do we get to that next step?

And all that isn't done all at once. We don't roll in on day one and create the asteroid mining machine. That takes successive attempts and learning and creating test mines in space. So we're starting with the ARCID-100 series in low Earth orbit. That's a space telescope. Not only does it look out and detect and characterize some of the asteroids that we may go to, but it also demonstrates some of the just extremely innovative things that we're doing to dramatically bring down the cost of robotically exploring space.

And, yes, we're going to do this all with robots, all with software. There will certainly be plenty of humans involved, but they'll, for the near future, be here on Earth until we've opened up that economy and we can operate these things closer to the source. So ARKYD, A-R-K-Y-D. Give us the 30 seconds on the derivation of that. ARKYD Astronautics was the company that we started that we could say the name out loud before we wanted people to know that we were doing asteroid mining.

And I'm a fan of Star Wars science fiction and other science fiction. And the Imperial probe droid that landed on the ice planet Hoth in the opening of Empire Strikes Back was built by a company called Arachid Industries. For interest of just making sure that it wasn't an exact duplicate of that, we made a little adjustment to it. And we became the company that will create probe droids to send throughout the galaxy to survey for resources available for mankind. And that was one heck of an impressive autonomous device there that found the rebel base. Yeah, our devices, though, we do not have any self-destruct devices in them. I'm glad, because that would probably disturb your shareholders when you have those.

More of Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources is a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the

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Thanks so much. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. My guest is Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Asteroid Miner of Planetary Resources, which was, up until a couple of weeks ago, the only company with asteroid mining at the core of its mission. It has now been joined by Deep Space Industries. Chris was telling us before the break about the first of a series of sophisticated robotic spacecraft

Planetary Resources has begun to create. So the first step with this ARCHID 100 series is look around, find what's out there that might be someplace you'd want to visit and drag back this way. Absolutely. So Planetary Society has the Shoemaker grant program, certainly has done tremendous work in increasing the reach of finding near-Earth objects out in space. As great as that is, you still have that troublesome atmosphere in the way. And there's that whole thing of the sun being in the sky for at least half the day, sometimes more. So to get up above the atmosphere, like the Hubble Space Telescope,

and to have a 24-hour vantage point that isn't influenced by rain, cloud, night, day, also isn't really influenced by the phases of the moon, we'll have the opportunity to have a lot more telescope time looking for these things. And additionally, we can look into an area of the solar system where we can find things that you just cannot see from the ground because the sun is up. So looking into the interior of the solar system and detecting Atira-class asteroids, which we today know of 19 of the 10,000 near-Earth objects we have found. There certainly should be about 100 times that many, but we just can't see them from the ground. How far are we from seeing the first of these spacecraft out there beginning the search?

So we are through the prototyping phase. We're getting through successive design reviews and making choices of which subsystems to implement and which risks to take and which new innovative technologies to do. We're arranging for launches at the end of 2014 and into 2015, so a little bit less than two years' time. to do some things before that that aren't quite the full ARCID 100 but get us really testing things out in a space environment so that we can know that we're doing the right things. Then the next step is the ARCID 200? Yes, so we have ARCID 100, 200, 300. It's really a series that ends with a swarm of spacecraft out at the asteroid.

Think of five or six or ten ARCID spacecraft kind of simultaneously exploring the near-Earth asteroids. And these are the asteroids that pass relatively close to the Earth's orbit, like 2012 DA14 did recently, because they are energetically easy to get to. There's about 10,000 of them we know today. 10,000 of them we know today. And of these 10,000, about 17% of them are actually easier to send a spaceship to than it is to land on the surface of the moon. Because they don't have much gravity, so you don't have to slow down. And that's just the one-way trip. So there's about 1,700 asteroids that fall into this class. If you want to bring material back from them, you just think of the moon.

You're climbing up the mountain. You have to actually climb up the mountain again to leave the moon. We talk about this a lot. It's more of a rendezvous than a landing. Yeah, you dock with an asteroid. Probably more than half of them are actually easier to recover material from and bring it back to the vicinity of the Earth. That's the ARCA 300s where we really characterize the asteroid. And in between them are really when we go out for a run, and we stretch our legs a little bit, and we start exploring asteroids like 2012 DA14, maybe by doing a flyby of them in proximity to the Earth. We demonstrate our laser communication systems that we're using to be independent of the government infrastructure, and really getting out behind the protective

sheath of the magnetosphere in the Earth, starting to see if some of the things that we've got planned for our spacecraft really will work out in deep space. And we're taking a little bit of risk, and, you know, you can't have reward unless you take a little bit of risk, and we're trying to find the right balance there. You're going to build payloads. You're not going to build launch vehicles. So I assume that you're also helped, your plans, by the developments that are taking place on the launch vehicle side as well. Oh, this is just really incredibly exciting. The past few years, so many more companies and groups are coming together with solutions for access to space.

We, of course, have all the traditional players we've had for quite a long time, and everyone knows about SpaceX. There's groups like Virgin Galactic, and we're actually partnered with Virgin Galactic on using their Launcher One vehicle in a few years when it's ready for taking some of our payloads into space. But, yes, we'll buy those rides. We'll put our spacecraft on them and send them into space. The great thing about what we're doing with our spacecraft is we are building them so small that we can really fit into the cubby holes of these things. So we can hitch a ride, and we can be a secondary payload on these. And that really is what helps us dramatically reduce the cost of doing this. Much as we at the Planetary Society hope to hitch a ride for our little CubeSat-based LightSail 1, we learned just a few days ago that you already have a direct competitor.

Isn't that exciting? I'm glad you feel that way. Well, as they said when they came out, maybe one company is an anomaly, two is an industry. And it really demonstrates that there's an opportunity here. And the time is right. Every new entrant that comes in and sees this opportunity and innovates and competes to do this, this is what this country is based on, people seeing an opportunity and thinking that they can do it better. And having competition out there makes us sharper, makes us go after our goals more vigorously, and ultimately I think we'll be better for everyone to have more than one horse in the race. What is the actual value in the potential resources that may come from one

of these asteroids? If you think about an industry, let's take a few examples. I'll go into one. We've got the transportation industry with all of its different segments. We've got the resource industry, which includes minerals and oil and fuel. And think about how long it took those industries to establish and what the Wright brothers could have foresaw in the demand for aircraft fuel in the 1900s. And they could see 40 years into the future just how many millions of tons of aircraft fuel were being used by their small motors that they were using.

Of course, they could not have predicted it. In an established industry in space resources where we've got a vibrant economy with not only a resource play, but real estate and tourism and industry and even habitats, this is a trillion-dollar industry. And it is with resources like water and volatiles. We humans really enjoy our water. We're mostly made of this stuff. It helps us grow plants and foods.

It helps us with industrial processes. And in space, it helps shield us from the radiation. And with that water, we turn it into a fuel source, take the hydrogen and oxygen. We really have propellant and a near infinite supply of the stuff to do everything else we want to do in space, creating huge space structures out of the iron, nickel, and cobalt that is in not only the metallic asteroids, but actually is present in the carbonaceous and even the S-type asteroids, just not quite as abundant. Ultimately, the prize that's out there that is worth bringing back to the surface of the Earth are the platinum group metals. And not so much

because platinum has a price on the market that everyone wants to look at and make their rings out of because it's rare. But if you look at the six elements that are in the platinum group and think about what they enable in our technological society and how absolutely incredible the material properties of those elements are. What could we do with an abundance of those materials? And there's a story I can tell very briefly about aluminum. And in the mid-1800s, aluminum was the scarcest metal on the surface of the planet. We served kings and queens on aluminum, and we made the local people eat off the gold plates. When we built the Washington Monument, we were so proud of

ourselves that we capped it with a pyramid of aluminum. And just 10, 20 years later, we had figured out how to extract the stuff. And it's the most abundant material in the crust, the metal. And now we fly through tubes of it in the sky. Our phones are made of it, our laptops are made of it, we're sitting on chairs made of it, it's electrical wire, it's everywhere. Imagine a world where aluminum was still rare. And that's the world that is enabled really through the abundance of the right materials for the job. And that's the opportunity that's out there. So thinking of the portion of these resources that is going to stay in space, and the sorts of things that you just mentioned that might be done with them, I think tells me that this dream of mining asteroids,

even that ambitious effort, is still just the beginning. Absolutely. This is the beginning of the next phase of our civilization and our next great quest, the next great frontier. And I look forward to the time when we'll get tired of the inner solar system and we'll want to stretch out and move on to the next star system as we worry about our sun burning out. You sound like somebody who's pretty satisfied with his job description.

This is the greatest job in the world, certainly full of interesting challenges. We're working every day to make the impossible possible. So many opportunities to meet exciting people, think about difficult problems, and, you know, I get to do this every day. This isn't just a hobby. It's a profession. I'm chief asteroid miner, and looking forward to where that will take everyone. Thank you, Chris. Ad Astra. Thanks. Chris Lewicki is president and chief asteroid miner for Planetary Resources. to where that will take everyone. Thank you, Chris. Ad Astra. Thanks.

Chris Lewicki is president and chief asteroid miner for Planetary Resources. I hope that we can talk to you again, maybe when those ARCID 100s start to poke around in the solar system. Absolutely. We're making fast progress. In the meantime, we'll poke around the solar system and a little bit beyond with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up. Live on tape from the Distance Learning Studio at California State University, Dominguez Hills, it's time for What's Up with the Planetary Society Director of Projects, Bruce Betts.

And we've just said hello to your students here because you're in the midst of class. I am indeed. We're doing a dual recording session here at Dominguez Hills as I record the second lecture in my Introduction to Planetary Science and Astronomy class. So anybody who wants to could go and watch that class on its own merits because it's such a great astronomy class and actually enjoy watching instead of just hearing what's up for a change. Yes, you can see how disturbing it looks in person.

Go to planetary.org slash Betts class, B-E-T-T-S class, and you'll find links to the shows and links to Dominguez Hills and such. You can watch it live online or you can watch it archived. And this also proves, beyond a shadow of any listener's doubt, that we actually don't do this with a script. We don't. We have no idea.

Well, we have only the tiniest idea of what we're going to say. You know what the random space fact's going to be. You know what's up in the sky. Or do you? Oh, shoot. Yes, yes, I do. Not using my script. Up in the night sky, we've got Jupiter.

Jupiter is still dominating the eastern sky in the early evening. East, southeast, it's the super bright star-like object. If you come down towards the horizon by the mid-evening, you can see the brightest star in the sky, which is Sirius, which will look more bluish and less whitish. Those are the technical terms, as opposed to Jupiter. You can also check out Saturn coming up in the middle of the night in the east and high overhead in the pre-dawn sky. Saturn much dimmer, looking yellowish and super cool through a small telescope, you can see the rings. We also have Mercury, if you catch it in the next week or so.

Mercury making an apparition over in the west, low in the west, shortly after sunset, looking whitish and pretty bright. Anything happen this week in space history? No. It was completely devoid of anything interesting. Yes, several things happened. Let me tell you about two of them. Please do. Okay. You're just playing it up for the cameras, aren't you?

You think? Yeah. 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth this week. You're right. No big deal. Yeah, no big deal. 1966, there was a big deal. The Soviet Cosmos 110 launched.

Cosmos 110, we've mentioned before in the program, because it holds the record for the longest space flight by dogs. Successful space flight. Went up, came back, all live, all happy, all healthy this time. 22 days. 22 days, 22 days. Vedarak and Ugaljak were the two dogs. It was another seven years before humans stayed that long in space on one of the Skylab missions.

Woof. Woof. So that was a little bonus random space fact. But now we go on to the official random space fact. Astronomers, today in my class, we're talking about telescopes, telescope domes. Astronomers like to keep the inside of their telescope domes at nighttime temperatures, even during the daytime. Why is that? That is so you don't get nasty thermal effects at night. Because if you've got a lot of warmth inside, you'll get convection with air currents, like the things that cause mirages off on the horizon.

And you will also get expansion and contraction of the structure of the telescope and the glass and everything in the telescope. And that wreaks havoc. So they even, like Keck. I know the Keck telescopes actually crank up the air conditioners during the day. No one told me this when I was a poor lowly grad student at Caltech. I went to Palomar and was getting to play with the 200-inch telescope. Beautiful day there, like 70 degrees. I walk into the dome in a t-shirt and just look like the buffoon that I was. That they were hoping you would look like. Yeah, it was like 70 degrees. I walk into the dome in a t-shirt and just look like the buffoon that I was.

That they were hoping you would look like. It was like 35 degrees in the dome. Anybody thinks that scientists and astronomers can't act like college sophomores? Here's the story. Yeah. All right, we move on to the trivia contest, Matt. And we asked last time around, in Earth years, how long is a Sedna year? Sedna being a trans-Neptunian object with a very elliptical orbit out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Very, very elliptical. How did we do?

We forgot to say what the prize was going to be. So I threw in on the website that we are giving away a Planetary Society logo emblazoned hoodie. And that's the prize that Jeff Krohn won. Jeff Krohn in Collierville, Tennessee, who said, Sedna's year is about 11,400 Earth years. Therefore, every living person is less than a year old if they lived on Sedna. We had a lot of comments like that about people never reaching their first birthday or even a substantial fraction of it if we all grew up on Sedna.

It is a different perspective. It is way out there, and even when it comes in to its closest point, it's still more than twice as far away as Neptune. Kathy Hutchison of Maconda, Illinois, she gave us some of the background. Sedna, you know how these objects are named out of mythology. She was always thrown out of her father's kayak and when she tried to get back

in the boat, her father chopped off her fingers so she sank to the bottom of the sea. Doesn't that just inspire you? Sorry, but that's the myth. And this one that I think you'll like from Ken Smith. Thanks for all your hard work.

Listening to planetary radio is like listening to Led Zeppelin IV. Wow. You know why? Because this is a stairway to heaven. That is quite a compliment. What do you got for next time? That is quite a compliment. What do you got for next time?

I'm working too hard on which songs are on Led Zeppelin 4. I own it. Anyway, for next time, and this just, I don't know, might get answered later in lecture two of my class. You can find it elsewhere, too. What's the largest optical refracting telescope ever used for scientific research? I'll tell you why I mention that, because they had a demonstration refracting telescope that was not scientific quality

that was at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. Not interested in that one. Want to know the largest that was used for scientific research. Planetary.org slash radio contest. You have, Bruce, until the 25th. That's Monday, February 25th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And Matt, what can people win? Well, this time, and I will even hold up a picture for people who can see such a thing, that is the famous Revenge T-shirt.

It's a Tyrannosaurus in a space helmet attacking the asteroids as the asteroids once attacked the dinosaurs. And this comes to us courtesy of our friends at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Really, that's an effort by Zach Winersmith, and this design is from Sean Cost. You really can't make it out here, but our colleague Emily Lakdawalla is modeling the T-shirt right there. Oh, fabulous modeling, yes.

All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what you want to get revenge upon on. Yeah, one of those things. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up, and I got to join him here in his astronomy class at CSUDH.

Thank you. Asteroid, I mean Planetary Radio, is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the meteoric members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.