Updated May 30, 2017 22:58:57

The mining boom on Earth may be over, but in space it could be set to soar, with exploration companies looking to launch expeditions to asteroids in just a few years.

NASA has already sent several missions to explore asteroids and just this month it announced it would fast track a mission to 16 Psyche, an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron.

Last year, the Government of Luxemburg launched a $370 million initiative to become the world centre for space resources and is hoping to attract commercial partners.

Washington-based start-up Planetary Resources has already received funding from the tiny country, and CEO and founder Chris Lewicki told Lateline that potential for mining asteroids is almost infinite.

"If we took all the asteroids that are in the solar system and extracted the metal from them, we could build a skyscraper on Earth that's 8,000 kilometres tall and would cover the entire surface of the Earth," he said.

But how do you catch an asteroid?

Photo: An artist's concept of a spacecraft over the Psyche asteroid. (NASA/JPL: Peter Rubin)

To mine an asteroid, you have to catch one, and the closest asteroids to Earth are still millions of kilometres away, moving through space at hundreds of thousands of kilometres per hour.

Mr Lewicki said his company was looking at asteroids that were between 100 meters and 1 kilometre in size.

He said reaching them was kind of like catching a bus.

"The best time to catch the bus is when it's down at the stop and you want to make sure you're there and ready to go at the same time, and that's the same thing whether you're going to an asteroid or whether you're going to Mars," he said.

"There's a certain schedule you have to follow, you launch your rocket and you essentially put yourself on a course that will allow you a few months, sometimes up to a year to catch up to that asteroid."

Then get ready to dock

Photo: Eros is one of many near-Earth asteroids. (NASA)

Because asteroids aren't big enough to have their own gravity, the spaceship doesn't land on the asteroid, instead it docks with it, the same way it would with a space station.

"This actually is an advantage for us, because we don't have to lift tons of material, we don't need heavy machinery, we can work in the vacuum, in the micro-gravity of space, using solar energy to process that," Mr Lewicki said.

"It's really going to be a new form of mining."

Mining for space

The first goal is not to bring minerals back to Earth, but instead to mine asteroids for water to use in other space missions.

It's inevitable that mankind will return to the Moon, but the arguments for going there have changed dramatically since the Apollo missions, experts say.

"Water is pretty simple stuff but in space of course, you can't get enough of it. It's useful for supporting life but you can also turn it into rocket fuel and to be able to refuel your rocket," Mr Lewicki said.

"One asteroid that's a little bit less than 100 metres can have enough water on it to have enough rocket fuel to fill all 135 space shuttle missions."

Mr Lewicki said the potential for supporting human missions on say, Mars, could then become reality.

"To have millions of people working and living in space, as Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon has talked about recently," he said.

"We've seen recently with Elon Musk's Space X and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin that we've learned how to restart using rockets and if we can start reusing and refuelling them, we really can go a lot farther."

So how far off is all this?

According to Mr Lewicki, it's not far at all.

In fact, Planetary Resources plans to launch a first mission towards an asteroid by 2020.

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With the commercialisation of space already underway, thanks to projects like SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, the industrial space age may not be far off.

There are concerns that the race to privatise space resources could violate the 1976 United Nations outer space treaty, which bans countries from appropriating astronomical bodies.

But the US passed its own laws in 2015 allowing US companies to own and sell extra-terrestrial resources, and Mr Lewicki believes there's no stopping the latest phase of the space race.

"We once crossed oceans, we took to the skies, we took to space, and there's nothing that has limited human ambition," he said.

"We have the technology, we have the knowledge and certainly if we want to continue to thrive, we're going to need to build a future where we have millions and millions of people working and living in space."

Topics: spacecraft, space-exploration, astronomy-space, united-states

First posted May 30, 2017 16:12:52