The Cornucopia of the Heavens: Space Resources and Development

Chapter 7: Red Moon Rising Serialization

I am sharing insights from my new book, with Peter Navarro, Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier on this Substack. Today, I’m offering you a sneak peek into the chapter on the amazing promise of space resources. You can find the full book on Amazon.

Wernher Von Braun and President John F. Kennedy admire one of NASA’s big rockets.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallow and miseries.

— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In 1957, the International Geophysical Year (IGY), America saw a future driven by the benefits of science and engineering. Nuclear and solar would provide unlimited clean power for a coming flood of labor-saving appliances. Semiconductors would usher in a new era of “transistorized” electronic gadgets. Monsanto’s agricultural technology was revolutionizing food production, and DuPont promised us “better living through chemistry.” Sci-fi movies in 3D were the fad. NASA was founded that year, and space was about to open the planets to human exploration. Automobiles reflected this futurism with outlandish fins and rocket exhaust taillights. By 1961, the future was so bright, our young president had to wear shades as he stared up at the space agency’s shiny new rockets.

Yet, by the 1970s, the world was about to end. A lot of very smart people and prestigious organizations such as The Club of Rome assured us that we had reached the Limits to Growth as our population grew and Earth’s resources became scarcer. Oil was sure to run out soon. Nuclear power was an existential threat. Our chemical saviors seemed to all be carcinogenic, and modern agriculture would exterminate life as we knew it within a few years. The pollution from our rocket-inspired cars appeared to be inducing a new global ice age, or then again, maybe it would roast us all. The popular 1973 film Soylent Green showed us the hellish future of 2022. Edward G. Robinson chose a pleasant death over another day peddling a bike for power while Charlton Heston revealed that we were living on green crackers made from the euthanized corpses of his fellow citizens. Bottom line, there was no way the world could support a population of four billion souls.

So, where is the doomsday Soylent Green promised us? While many of us harbor serious misgivings about the state of our world, and “smart people” continue to warn of looming environmental catastrophes, we are not peddling for power or eating our dead. Since the Reverend Malthus laid out the basic idea of resource peaking more than two hundred years ago, would-be prophets of doom have always failed to account for the heroic capacity of technologists and entrepreneurs to overcome challenges and avert disasters, even the ones they have created.

The US and the USSR each planned to launch their first artificial satellite during the IGY. The Soviets succeeded with Sputnik in October of 1957, while American efforts floundered until January 1958. Both of these spacecrafts rode modified military rockets to space. A hidden irony of Russia’s early space triumphs was that they had been compelled to build more capable rockets because their crude nuclear warheads were so much larger than America’s more refined nukes. The good news is that the Cold War competition drove both countries to produce relatively reliable orbital rockets, a positive externality that has provided a cornucopia of unexpected benefits for everyone on Earth.

A mineral resources map of the Moon. Credit: NASA/USGS

The Moon May Not Be Made of Green Cheese, But Just Look at All That Cheddar!

In our 2011 book, Death by China, we detailed the brilliant mercantilist strategies that China used to gain a global monopoly over the production of rare earth elements. Primarily through a willingness to despoil its own environment, the communist nation now controls more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of metals. Little-known rare earths like yttrium and neodymium are critical to maintaining your tech-enabled lifestyle as well as America’s tech-dependent military. If you think having everything from the avionics in our ICBMs to the computers in our tanks dependent on our top adversary looks like a losing strategy, you’d be right.

How about titanium? You know, the super-strong, super-light metal used in hypersonic missiles, desalination systems, and artificial hip joints? Titanium dioxide even makes the powder on your donuts brilliantly white. Unfortunately, China is now the world’s largest producer of titanium, and much of the rest comes from difficult places like Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The US produces almost none. In order to build America’s SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, the CIA set up fake machine shops in Europe as fronts to buy up Soviet titanium and then shipped it to Lockheed’s Skunk Works plant in Palmdale, California.

What can we do when the global supply chain won’t cooperate? It turns out that all these metals, along with more mundane things like iron and gold, are abundant on asteroids and likely in asteroid impact craters on the surface of the Moon. For example, there may be more platinum group metals on the asteroid Psyche than have been mined in all of human history on Earth. The market value of this space rock has been estimated at ten quintillion dollars, or about six hundred thousand times the annual economic activity of the US. Of course, that valuation is dependent on being able to retrieve this material and ignores the laws of economics. Psyche is in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, millions of miles from Earth and travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Could we even get to it?

Actually, NASA launched a probe to Psyche in October of 2023. When it arrives there in August of 2029, we may find a space gold mine or just do some amazing planetary science. NASA’s principal investigator on the project, Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University, notes that “we won’t know anything for sure until we get there. We wanted to ask primary questions about the material that built planets. We’re filled with questions and not a lot of answers. This is real exploration.”

Greg Autry, is the Associate Provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy at the University of Central Florida. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Institute for Security Science and Technology at Imperial College London. Dr. Autry served on the 2016 Presidential Transition Team at NASA. President Trump appointed him White House Liaison at NASA in 2017 and nominated to be NASA’s Chief Financial Officer in 2020. He chaired the Safety Working group for the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee at the FAA.