The Asteroid Miners: Space Mining and Resource Making in the Commercial Space Era

Abstract

In 2019, two news articles announced that the "asteroid mining bubble had burst." One, written by prolific space industry journalist, Jeff Foust, explained that the question of whether or not the space mining industry had "boomed" or "bubbled" had been answered, as almost all existing space mining companies at the time had been acquired by other corporations or had gone bankrupt. According to Foust, space mining was a space industry goal which had simply been "too long-term and too far-fetched". Space mining startups which had emerged in the early 2010s required long-term funding, focused technological development, and substantial, persistent, financial backing — none of which they had received. The existence of these articles prompts many questions. First, if an asteroid mining bubble had burst, when had it existed? To what extent had there been "asteroid mining"? And if the bubble had burst, then why have corporations like Astroforge — which also aim to mine space objects— emerged in 2022, years after the bubble supposedly burst? Why do they think they can succeed in such an arguably far-fetched venture where all others have failed? Have they failed? Beyond this, one also might wonder, when did interest in space mining begin and more importantly — why did it begin? At what point did space objects, such as asteroids, comets, meteors, moons and planets, become subjects of commercial interest rather than simply scientific interest? Using ethnographic and archival methods, this dissertation explores the rise and fall of the space mining industry. It makes contributions to three subfields within Science and Technology Studies — social studies of outer space, studies of failure, and studies on colonialism— as it demonstrates how space objects were made resources and what the "failure" of the space mining industry generated. It makes three primary arguments: (1) That the "fall of the space miners" was a failure which was generative, anticipated, and taken advantage of (2) that space mining was real in the way it was realized (3) and that while space mining contributed to a greater project to colonize outer space, colonization also contributed to the commodification of space objects. In sum, this dissertation argues that asteroids, moons and other space objects have become commodities through a process of colonization and space industry commercialization and that this process generated unanticipated byproducts. This dissertation also uses theories of socio-technical systems as a way of understanding scientific and technological development.