OTTAWA — Canada’s expertise in mining in difficult conditions should make it a leader in exploiting resources on the moon, says a report for the Canadian Space Agency obtained by The Logic.

But there’s a problem: getting Canadian mining companies interested.

“The two industries of mining and space do not have any idea how to talk to each other,” said Sean Mitra, co-founder of Lunar Water Supply Company, a Calgary startup that hopes to place itself between the sectors as an interpreter and integrator.

The consultants’ report is titled “Economics of Space Resources Utilization Study (SRU).” Dated April 16, it was prepared by Euroconsult and released to The Logic, with minor redactions, under the Access to Information Act.

The consultants lay out targets for three phases of moon mining:

• First, getting water from the ice in the moon’s craters, to be turned into hydrogen propellant. Water is cheap on Earth, but as expensive as anything else to send to space—thousands of dollars a litre. Mining water that’s already up there to use as fuel would improve the economics of space exploration and travel.
• Second, extracting minerals to be used for bases and equipment on the moon.
• Third, and well into the future, mining resources to be transported back to Earth.

“Given the similarity of activities involved, there is a potential crossover between SRU and terrestrial mining,” the consultants wrote. “As mines become increasingly more remote, a greater importance is put on mining exploration, infrastructure development and risk-reduction practices similarly to those needed for SRU.”

However challenging the conditions on Earth, there’s usually air, familiar gravity, not much cosmic radiation. But Canadian mining companies are more accustomed than most to working in “difficult, confined and inhospitable environments while using technology with minimal impact.”

The consultants found, at best, “growing curiosity in the mining industry,” whose members see space mining as an activity at least 30 years in the future. But others the consultants interviewed think the time horizon is much shorter—potentially as little as 10 years.

The miners the consultants talked to “did not show interest in conducting mining operations in space” and “have difficulties understanding the added value that collaborating with the space industry for technology transfers could bring to their organization … especially if they [are required] to invest and dedicate their own resources.”

The Logic wrote to Canadian companies Nutrien (which mines potash), Barrick (gold and copper), Trevali (zinc, lead and silver) and Teck (numerous metals, plus coal), seeking interviews on the challenge of translating Earth mining expertise to the moon and whether the idea has any appeal. Only Teck replied.

“Teck is focused on implementing a copper growth strategy to meet growing global demand driven by the low-carbon transition,” spokesperson Chris Stannell wrote. “This strategy is anchored by our QB2 copper project in Chile, which is expected to double our consolidated copper production by 2023.”

Established miners think any space project would just be too risky, Mitra said. “They don’t know how to get to space, they don’t know what the operational requirements are. They don’t want to have to deal with the funding.”

If a global energy transition dries up work in Alberta’s oilsands, we’ll have expertise to spare, he added. “This is one of those rare opportunities for all those underemployed and unemployed geologists and engineers to basically work one to one in terms of skill sets. It’s a vastly different problem, but we’re not telling them to learn to code; we’re not telling them to pick up an entirely different industry.”

Meanwhile, space agencies don’t inherently know a great deal about prospecting, mining or processing, Mitra said. The basic idea always seems to involve rovers trundling from mine sites to depots with blocks of stuff on their backs, which makes no sense if you’re mining water ice, he said.

“Why would you do that and not fill a pipeline? Like, it just makes no sense to me—there’s so many more points of failure on a rover than a pipeline between your point of extraction and wherever you need to go.”

Mitra is a lawyer with a dream. At the other end of the continuum is Greg Baiden, a former manager of mining research at Inco Limited, robotics professor at Laurentian University and pioneer in “telemining,” who now runs Penguin Automated Systems, a robotics company in Sudbury, Ont. He agrees with Mitra about the mismatch between space experts and mining experts.

“I don’t believe that many of the agencies like NASA and CSA and the European Space Agency truly understand the economics equations that go along with creating this level of business off-Earth,” Baiden told The Logic.

A commercially viable ice-mining operation on the moon would have to be on the scale of the former Inco operation in Sudbury that’s now in the hands of global mining giant Vale, he estimates. “The Inco smelter today and all the mines around it are probably something in the order of $100 billion, to set up a plant of that scale, with ongoing costs of several of at least $1 billion or $2 billion a year. When you start looking at mining companies, that whole thing is much bigger than any mining company in Canada is capable of supporting, and it’s much bigger than any international company is today capable of supporting, including the big ones.”

The consulting report makes clear that governments might be less needed later, but they will have to plan and pay for the first work on the moon; the finances are simply too terrifying otherwise, and, as Baiden said: “The mining industry is an industry that is looking to make a profit.”

But he sees a commercial argument for mining companies to at least get involved: the technologies we’d develop for the moon could be put to use on Earth’s seabeds.

“I’ve seen deposits that are under the oceans that are massive, and so we have no need to go and get minerals off-Earth,” he said.

Nevertheless, the idea that the moon is a technological waypoint on the way to terrestrial seabeds is a hard sell. The consultants say Canadian mining companies want to be “first to be second” at new things. Mining the moon is a first-to-be-first undertaking.

Last December, NASA announced agreements with several companies—all of them in the lunar-rover business, not any sort of resource-extraction—to provide it samples of moon dust and rock.

One reason for those deals is just to establish that, legally, you can mine the moon. The United States passed a law in 2015 formally permitting it (as have Japan and Luxembourg), but it hasn’t actually been done commercially yet. NASA’s contracts are meant to create a precedent.

Which raises another obstacle for Canadian companies: Canada has no such law. In 2020, Canada signed the Artemis Accords, a set of principles for “the civil exploration and use of the moon, Mars, comets and asteroids for peaceful purposes” that explicitly permits moon-mining, but hasn’t turned them into domestic legislation.

“It, to me at least, really sucks that we’re having to talk to a lot of investors and the question always comes up: ‘Well, is this even legal?’ And I have to say, ‘Well, yes, in America and Europe, but not in Canada,’” said Mitra.

As part of a national space strategy released in 2019, the Liberal government promised to review and modernize the regulatory framework for the space industry.

In consultations that concluded last March, the CSA reported afterward, participants strongly supported the idea of Canadian legislation allowing and setting limits on space-resource utilization and pointed out that time might be short.

“The feedback received during the course of the consultation will be used to inform Canada’s national and international efforts to develop and strengthen frameworks for space exploration activities,” CSA spokesperson Andrea Matte told The Logic. Those include a UN-led process for establishing recommendations for a framework, which she said is just beginning.