Economic assessment of high-thrust and solar-sail propulsion for near-earth asteroid mining

Abstract

Asteroid mining has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of in-space manufacturing, production of propellant for space transportation and consumables for crewed spacecraft, compared to launching the required resources from the Earth's deep gravity well. This paper discusses the top-level mission architecture and trajectory design for these resource-return missions, comparing high-thrust trajectories with continuous low-thrust solar-sail trajectories. The paper focuses on maximizing the economic Net Present Value, which takes the time-cost of finance into account and therefore balances the returned resource mass and mission duration. The different propulsion methods are compared in terms of maximum economic return and sets of attainable target asteroids. Results for

Comparison of material sources and customer locations for commercial space resource utilization

“…Martian surface 5. Representative main-belt asteroid (MBA) More specifically, the NEA 2000 SG344 [22,23] and the MBA 2015 AE282 are considered, based on favorable orbital characteristics (i.e., close proximity to the Earth's orbit and in the inner belt, respectively, as well as a low inclination) and brightness (which relates to its size). However, in Section 4.3 a search of other asteroids is conducted to assess the importance of specific target asteroid selection.…”

“…In order to do so, the total cost for the mission has to be calculated, which is done similarly to Refs. [22,23]. A summary is presented here, but the reader is referred to these papers for further details.…”

“…A genetic algorithm is now employed to find a global optimum without the need for an initial guess [22,23,42,43]. The built-in genetic algorithm in MATLAB ® is used, using default parameter settings, except for the initial population, which is uniformly randomly spread throughout the whole domain.…”

“…in which ∆t O is the transfer time for the outbound Lambert arc, ∆t stay the stay time at the asteroid, ∆t I the transfer time for the inbound Lambert arc, t I dep the departure date for the inbound transfer and λ M P E the mass fraction to divide the spacecraft's dry mass into m M P E and m cargo . Note that rather than absolute dates and times, a combination of one absolute date and three relative durations are used, to aid convergence of the genetic algorithm [22] and remove the need for linear constraints to ensure that the dates are chronological. Depending on the scenario, certain decision variables are superfluous, i.e.…”

Space and Asteroid Mining

“…As the series of missions conducted on asteroids came together with the earth based observations and works, all of these gave rise to realization of that the asteroids contained high amounts of valuable resources. [2] Appropriate experimental works and multidisciplinary approaches have turned this to one of the widely researched area ones. The term "Space Mining" started to develop as a matter of fact that could be carried out in medium term in the beginning of 90's.…”