The Economics of Space Exploration
The Economics of Space Exploration
New tech, mining and exploration are just some of the drivers behind the growing economy of space by Anne Simmons
VIDEO: Navigating Our Financial Times
With ongoing investments in new technologies, mineral extraction and missions for exploration, predictions show the “global space economy” could reach beyond $1 Trillion by the 2030s. Dani DellaGiustina, Ph. D., served as a deputy principal investigator in NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission. She breaks down the different ways public and private sectors are investing resources toward space exploration.
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Linda O'Bryon: Following the successful voyage of Artemis II around the moon, many are asking what's the next adventure that will push the limits of space innovation? We know NASA is planning for Artemis III in and many more Artemis missions for the future. What are the challenges, hurdles and costs anticipated for Artemis and other space exploration? I'm Linda O'Bryon.
Nicole Cox: and I'm Nicole Cox. Thank you for joining us for Navigating Our Financial Times.
Playing a key role in this field. University of Arizona researchers are working to develop instruments for future lunar landings. A leader in this work is associate professor Dr. Dani DellaGiustina. She investigates the surface and near surface structures of small, airless worlds across the solar system. She has been named as one of the Brilliant Ten, the top-up -and-coming minds in science by the publication Popular Science back in 2022.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Dani DellaGiustina, Ph. D.: Thank you, Nicole.
LO: Dani, tell us about how your work dovetails with Artemis and what you're trying to achieve.
DD: Yeah. So part of my work involves developing seismic instruments that can survive in the extreme environments that we find in space. And this includes the lunar south pole, which is a very cold place. The moon has a long day, days and a long night days. So you can imagine it gets very warm and very cold, but especially very cold at the lunar south pole. So over the past two years, I've been working to develop these instruments specifically to survive in the subsurface of the lunar south pole. And this is for deployment by the astronauts that are anticipated in NASA's Artemis mission that will land on the moon and conduct surface operations on its surface.
LO: And what will the outcomes be? What will you learn?
DD: Yeah. So we're hoping to learn a number of things. We're very interested in the seismic activity. So how many quakes are present in the lunar south pole? The Apollo missions that took place in the s and s also landed seismic instruments on the lunar near side. And so we have an understanding of the seismic activity of that region of the moon. But we have no idea what it's like at the lunar south pole.
This is really critical for a lot of science investigations, but also if we plan to conduct future exploration and perhaps build infrastructure like lunar bases on the south pole of the moon, we really want to understand, is this a safe area to to, you know, lay down infrastructure? Is it stable? And seismic measurements will help us understand that.
NC: And when you say subsurface, like how far down are we talking?
DD: Less than a meter. So just a few feet. But that helps our seismic instruments get good coupling with the lunar surface. And that will make it a lot easier for us to, to get high quality seismic events that we can study and try and figure out what exactly those seismic waves have reflected and refracted off to get a better picture of the interior of the moon.
NC: In 2024, Space Foundation reported that the global space economy reached $613 billion, with commercial interests representing 78% of total growth. Space Foundation projects the global space economy could reach beyond $1 trillion by 2032. Can you share a little bit about why this growth is accelerating?
DD: Yeah, I think we're seeing the convergence of a few different things, including the reduced launch costs. It's just much cheaper to put things in space now than it's ever been, as well as private investment. And we're seeing this related to commercial endeavors, right, having satellite broadband internet.
But also we're looking at space more as a place to gather resources from than just to explore. So I think that pivot from exploration to resource utilization is kind of in its early stages. Right now, there are at least two companies that I'm aware of, Interlune and the Seattle area and Astro Forge in Southern California that are looking to both the moon and asteroids for future resource extraction.
LO: And what sort of resources?
DD: That's a great question. So the moon might be a really great place for us to mine helium. It's a finite resource on our own planet, but on the moon, which has no atmosphere, helium can get embedded in the lunar soil due to the interactions with the solar wind. And that's just inhibited on our planet because we have this atmosphere that shields us on asteroids. There is a lot of things that we might be interested in extracting.
Some asteroids are rich in water and volatiles, things that may be used for fuel or human life support. A number of asteroids are rich in platinum group metals. That's something that has a lot of value on our own planet for various industrial processes, etc.
NC: And I think I heard in one of your talks, maybe years ago. It would people would say, ‘oh yeah, you're going to mine asteroids for resources. That's…what are you thinking? Or is that even possible?’ Now, obviously, with OSIRIS-REx. And then you think of, what kind of economic impact could that have or impact in general on Arizona and the University of Arizona?
DD: So the University of Arizona historically has been a key player in studying astro materials. And astro materials are just sort of a catch all term for samples from other parts of the solar system other than our own planet. And so we have sort of a key niche in terms of our expertise for what's out there. And it's something that we've typically pursued to better understand our solar system, its formation and our place within it. But I think that knowledge is going to be just as relevant if we start looking to space for potential resource extraction.
LO: Following the success of Artemis II, will we see more government funding through NASA? Because we've heard that private funding has taken a huge share of total funding, will we see more government funding?
DD: I think there continues to be very strong bipartisan support for NASA, which is important as we look forward across the next decade. In particular, Artemis has enjoyed a lot of support from this administration. The science missions not quite so much.
However, they continue to maintain a lot of bipartisan support in the House and Senate. So I think we will continue to see very strong support across the board for human exploration and for the science missions. I hope that we continue to see strong support, but I think that is maybe on slightly less stable footing now than has been the case in the past.
LO: Why is that? There just seems to be some level of, I guess, disagreement between what is well supported by Congress and what is well supported by the administration. So last year we saw that the administration had proposed to really pull back on funding for NASA science, but they're both, the House and Senate, developed a budget for NASA that was pretty much the same as it had been the year prior. So FY 26 was very similar to FY 25 and that included support for a number of different science missions.
So I think as long as the, you know, Congress is continuing to demonstrate that support, it gets enacted into law and through the appropriations process will be in good shape.
NC: And what about big business? Why do you think big business is investing so heavily in space right now? I mean, like you said, it's bringing the costs down overall?
DD: Yeah. I think it gets to what I was mentioning earlier that for a long time, space was perceived as this final frontier to be explored. And now there is recognition that it is going to be profitable, both in terms of satellite assets that can provide things like broadband. There is a lot of desire for data in this day and age, and remote sensing is an excellent way toto achieve that. In, you know, I'm aware of some remote sensing companies that they gather economic data by doing routine imaging of Walmart parking lots and, you know.
NC: Wow.
DD: Yeah, there is I think there's just been as again, the cost of launching remote sensing payloads has decreased in the past decade or two. It opens the door for commercial companies to, you know, build out the types of products that they can offer. But resource extraction, again, is probably sort of the next step in the commercialization of space, and the investment will probably follow.
LO: You know, after World War II, there was such a big competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Where is the competition today? Is it China, or other areas?
DD: Yeah, I think the main competition as far as space faring nation goes with our nation is at this moment China. And one interesting, one interesting way to look at sort of the capabilities that exist right now beyond just getting assets into orbit around Earth, is thinking about what nations can do deep space exploration.
So very early on, the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union and the US were the only two spacefaring nations that could land spacecraft on the surface of the moon and on the surface of Mars and the Soviet Union, really, that that sort of predominance. It ended in around the 1970s. But in that time they had demonstrated capability of landing on other planets. And since then, the US has consistently demonstrated that we have that capability as a nation across the last five or so decades.
But in the last decade, China has also demonstrated that capability with both Martian rover and some landed missions, including a landed sample return mission on the moon. And so I think that right there tells you that there they are clearly investing in their capability to do this type of deep space exploration, and it is now at the point where it is beginning to rival what the US has established we can do for quite some time.
LO: Does this start to get into a competition for the resource development that you're talking about as well?
DD: It very well could I mean, I think the things like platinum group metals, rare earth elements, these are going to be increasingly important right over the next few decades. And I think whatever reservoirs a nation has access to will position them in a better or worse place. And so I do think it's quite possible it could come to that in the future. Are we there yet? We're not.
LO: We already have that competition on Earth, so it makes sense that it probably will.
NC: Especially if they see a potential return on their investment. Even more reason to invest. We talked earlier about your work on small, airless worlds. How would you define these worlds?
DD: The small, airless worlds of the solar system include a number of different types of objects, but what I typically focus on are asteroids and moons. And so in some cases, these are objects that are so small that they never sort of formed into spheres and differentiated. So their material melted and was able to solidify after the fact. Sometimes they're just debris that has that are the remnants of a giant impact that happened very early on in the solar system's history. So that's one side of the types of objects I study.
The other side are things like our moon, which are rocky bodies. They seem like planets in many ways, but maybe a little smaller. And it's sort of a key feature is that they have no atmosphere on either side. And so their surfaces are exposed to space. And there are many different processes that cause their surfaces to evolve in separate ways from our own planet or from larger objects like Mars, Mars being another example of a planet that has an atmosphere.
So the geology is very different on these types of objects, and it tends to preserve a long historical record of the types of processes that have taken place in the solar system. Because atmospheres have a tendency to erode the planetary surfaces that they interact with and kind of eliminate some of that record.
LO: So you're getting more history, it sounds like, from these objects. So the research you're doing on asteroids is fascinating. Tell us about your role as deputy principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, designed to return samples from asteroids.
DD: Yeah. So the OSIRIS-REx mission was NASA's first asteroid sample return mission. It visited an object called Bennu in 2018. It studied it for a few years, gathered a sample in 2020 and returned that to Earth in 2023. And my role in the mission during the phase of the spacecraft's journey at Bennu, was collecting images of this small asteroid and trying to figure out based on those images, what is the best place to gather a sample from?
We succeeded in picking a good spot because we were able to successfully retrieve a sample and then bring it back to Earth, and since that time, I've been working with the sample analysis results and making sure that as we learn things about this sample, we are connecting them back to what we learned when we were remotely sensing the asteroid with the spacecraft, so that we're kind of providing a coherent and integrated picture of this object and the object that it derived from. So Bennu is like one of like what I mentioned earlier, it's a small rubble pile asteroid, and it likely represents the collisional debris of a much larger body that was just cataclysmic, destroyed very early on in the solar system's history by a large impact.
NC: In April a very large asteroid called Apophis will have what's been calleda close encounter with Earth. It will weigh as much as 61 million metric tons, with an area close to 1500 x 500ft. What can we expect? How has the work you're doing helped inform what we can expect?
DD: So we can expect that Apophis is going to safely pass by the Earth in the year 2029, which should give everybody a sigh of relief, because when it was discovered in 2004 there was an initial scare that it might impact the Earth with about a 3% probability in the year 2029. It was discovered right around here at Kitt Peak, and from the initial set of observations there was a prediction of its orbit.
But there were big error bars, big uncertainties on that orbit. And so scientists spent the next six months studying it, looking in other places for data that might have captured Apophis, so they could try and get a better orbit determination in place. And at the end of 2004, we knew it was not going to impact the Earth in 2029 But then they were worried it might impact the Earth in 2036. So exactly seven years later, and that led to a large effort to continue to study Apophis in about, I think, 2013 or 2014 we retired that risk.
We now know that Apophis will safely pass by the Earth throughout all of its close encounters in the next century, but it does get within this unusual range of or this ambiguous range, I should say, of distances from the Earth where we think it could be resurfaced. And what I mean by resurfaced is we think there could be some activity that is caused by Earth exerting a tidal force across itt hat might lead to landslides. It might sort of loft material from the asteroid surface, which then sort of settles back down. And so we are really excited to study it with the spacecraft that was used by the OSIRIS-REx mission.
LO: Where would these landslides be?
DD: It's a great question. So we, any area on the surface of the asteroid that has a high slope is going to be more easily subject to failure. And so these might be the areas that we would look at for any potential signs of landslide-like activity. When Apophis does make its close approach to the Earth, our spacecraft is going to distantly observe it and the Earth in a single shot. So we'll be viewing this asteroid as it sort of swings by. We'll be looking at the night side of our Earth, because that's the side where Apophis is making its close approach. And it's quite possible that we might see some activity, some shaking, some dust cloud form around this small point of light. And I think that will be a really important thing for the public to see, just to understand, you know, how vulnerable we are in this place, in our solar system, and that investing in things like planetary defense and characterizing these asteroids that do have Earth crossing orbits is an important thing to do.
LO: It's good to know you're tracking this. Apophis is the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian deity of chaos, darkness and destruction. So let's hope that this asteroid does not live up to its name. Just ahead, we'll talk about the role of AI in research and exploration. You're listening to Navigating our Financial Times.
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NC: Welcome back to Navigating our Financial Times. I'm Nicole Cox.
LO: And I'm Linda O'Bryon. Our guest is associate professor Dr. Dani Dellagiustina. You are also researching water distribution across the solar system and how to establish its presence. How do you find the presence of water and why is this important?
DD: Yeah, so we use a number of remotes ensing techniques like spectroscopy, seeing how light is reflected against different wavelengths, imaging and sometimes in situ measurements to look for water or something called hydroxyl, which is just the O and the H rather than the H2O. But you can imagine it's related to water, and it usually indicates the presence of water across other solar system bodies.
And we do this because water is tied to both habitability. So where what are good habitable places for perhaps life to form or even exploration as we start thinking about, you know, expanding human presence across the solar system, water is one of these key ingredients for life as we know it, which also includes essential chemicals and a source of energy. So anytime we find all three of those in another place in the solar system, we're very interested in studying it from the perspective of whether or not that object could be habitable.
LO: Where have you found water?
DD: Everywhere. So one of the most interesting things from my perspective, is somebody who's been in this field since I was a student is just how ubiquitous water appears to be in our solar system. So we see signs of water on these airless bodies, like the asteroid Bennu, which we return to sample from on OSIRIS-REx, and where the way water appears on this asteroid is bound up in mineral structures. So it's not like free flowing water, but it indicates that there is the molecular presence of something, either water or water-like, as I mentioned, hydroxyl earlier, but we see signatures of water also in icy satellites in the far outer solar system. These are moons that have large oceans, but not on their surface like our own planet. Instead, they typically have icy shells, and the ocean is below and the source of heat that keeps that water liquid on those objects is typically tidal interactions with large planets like Jupiter or Saturn. So there seems to be a lot of water in our solar system. And I think that kind of begs the question, you know, is there perhaps life elsewhere in the solar system and future NASA missions are planning to answer that very question. You know, are these other worlds perhaps habitable? And so I think in the next decade, we'll have a much better understanding of some of these small, icy satellites.
LO: Could it also portend future life? It's an interesting question. I mean, there is a lot of science fiction that has thought about, you know, what happens when humans need to leave our own planet to find resources elsewhere. And the icy ocean worlds that we see in the outer solar system might be good candidates to harvest those resources from.
NC: While recently NASA has received very positive reviews in recent months, that hasn't always been the case. Those who oppose space exploration often cite the huge financial costs that could be redirected to issues such as climate change or health care, or social issues on Earth. What would you say is the counter to that argument?
DD: Yeah, I would say that the counter to that argument is, it's really not a zero sum trade. So investment in space, t drives innovation. It drives workforce development and economic growth that is going to feed back into society. And many of the technologies that we rely on and will help us with big challenges like climate change and also help us with things like disaster relief. I'm talking about GPS and weather satellites. These types of technologies were enabled by investments in in space exploration and also just basic research.
And so I think that it's very important to continue this type of work because we don't know every application that some basic technology might eventually feed into in the future. And then of course, missions that do things like study hazardous asteroids, those are directly relevant to us, perhaps one day protecting our own planet against a potentially hazardous asteroid that's on a collision course. So say that it's very important to continue this type of investment. It is not cheap by any means, but that doesn't mean it doesn't worth it.
LO: How does AI play a role in research now? And maybe in the future?
DD: AI is playing an increasingly larger and larger role in research. So if you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have probably a slightly different answer, because I'm just seeing the acceleration of adoption of AI in scientific research. Think some of the key ways that AI is being used in, in the type of work that I do include things like sifting through very, very large data sets, you know, things that would be incredibly difficult for a human to do in a time efficient manner, and understanding if there's trends, underlying trends in those large data sets that were perhaps missed by human analyst.
One of the things I'm most excited about seeing AI feed into is autonomous spacecraft operations. So in the types of missions that I have worked on, they are very human intensive, and you need sometimes or shifts of work in order to make sure your spacecraft is being appropriately navigated, especially around a small body like an asteroid, where gravity is very, very small. You're talking about microgravity environments, which means that your spacecraft likes to drift away from the object and making sure that you are doing having a human operator in the loop to conduct spacecraft navigation is expensive, and it's it's hard on people. And so I'm in the early stages of some work to better automate that for my own spacecraft that is on its way to asteroid Apophis.
But I think as we look to the future, that might be something hat AI can play a bigger and bigger role with, and perhaps not just reduce the amount of staffing that's required to do some of these deep space exploration missions. But, you know, in turn also reduce the cost.
NC: In addition to your other roles, you teach a course on asteroids and comets to undergraduate and graduate students. I am curious, does the topic of funding or proposal or grant writing ever come up?
DD: Yes. The topic of funding comes up quite a bit, especially with graduate students. And so we sometimes in a classroom setting and sometimes in an advising setting, I do spend a lot of time talking about the grant funding process. You know, typically those of us who do space sciences look to NASA or the NSF to fund our research, but private funding and foundations and commercial operations are also becoming a bigger and bigger part of that equation.
And so the way in which we typically talk about this in sort of the mentoring setting is how to explain your research clearly and concisely to an external audience, how to demonstrate its value, and make sure that that case is something that you can articulate. And it's a skill, right? Not everybody has that knows how to do that out the gate. So it is an important part of education.
LO: Does there need to be more public education about what is happening in space exploration? For example, May 2nd has been designated as National Space Day, and it really is to recognize the entire aerospace community. The original focus was from Lockheed Martin in 1997 to promote math, science, technology and engineering.
Are there other ways that we, the public, the general public, can be looking at space and understanding it more?
DD: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there is always an onus on the scientists that are doing this work to make sure they are taking every opportunity to communicate with the public about it and help the public understand the value of scientific research.
As I mentioned earlier, we we have seen some changes in, you know, support for NASA science from this administration. And in response to that, omething that I feel is very important is to make sure we are clearly articulating to our stakeholders, including our members in the House and Senate, the value of this work. What is the return to the taxpayer and why is this valuable? I think there is a really it is really important for scientists to see this as a core part of their job, because it's quite easy to take for granted this the funding that we often receive from federal sources. And it shouldn't be.
NC: So when do you think we'll see a person return to the moon?
DD: I am optimistic that it will happen before the end of this decade. I know that NASA has sort of pivoted a little bit with the Artemis program. We were hoping Artemis III would return boots to the moon and the seismometers I was developing. I am developing for that mission. Would, you know, be on their way just next year, but rightly so, NASA is taking a more deliberate approach to ensure that some of the testing of technologies that will be vital to ensure we can get humans safely on the moon takes place.
And so we're hoping we'll be included in Artemis IV or Artemis V, but I am confident it will happen before the end of this decade.
LO: More information about University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is available at lpl.arizona.edu. Thank you, Dr. Dani DellaGiustina.
DD: Thank you.
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