Materials - Manufacturing and Mining

While resource extraction on earth often harms the environment, space offers new avenues for the sustainable manufacture and mining of materials.

The space environment provides unique conditions and valuable opportunities to discover and develop new theoretical models and materials with application across many industries.

For example, the microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) can enhance our understanding of material properties and solidification processes for industrial manufacturing.

Material Exploration in Space

In microgravity, a range of materials can be explored including:

• Structural materials fundamental to construction and manufacturing, such as steel, aluminium and magnesium.
• High-performance materials essential for aerospace (high mechanical and dynamical loading) and high-temperature applications, including nickel and cobalt superalloys.
• Functional materials crucial to electronics and photovoltaics for the energy transition, including semiconductors.
• Novel materials which offer exceptional strength and wear-resistance properties, such as Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMGs) and High Entropy Alloys (HEAs).

These materials can also improve manufacturing processes on Earth, including casting, deposition techniques, and additive manufacturing (3D printing). As the use of additive manufacturing technologies increases, there is growing demand for recyclable and high-strength polymers both on Earth and in space.

The Prospect of Extraterrestrial Mining

Space has the potential to open a new era of mining with access to untapped resources from celestial bodies like asteroids, the Moon and Mars.

This is not only an alternative to mining on Earth, but provides the raw materials needed for sustained space exploration and habitation in the future.

A range of industrial expertise from materials, metallurgy, mining, energy and robotics are required for the complexities of prospecting, extracting and processing these resources into products in space.

Access to space is vital to understand how we can use space resources and enables European industry to research, study and improve current methods in resource management, manufacturing and mining.

From Space Mining to Sustainable Earth Extraction

Challenges of resource management, both on Earth and in space, could be helped by new technologies arising from developing solutions to extract water, oxygen and metals from loose surface deposits (regolith).

Space research is already successfully used in mining and manufacturing following the biomining experiments BioRock and BioAsteroid, conducted on the International Space Station (ISS). These explored the use of microorganisms to extract valuable minerals from rock using Biofilm, demonstrating potential applications for enhancing the sustainability of mining on earth. Biomining techniques could also clean-up sites polluted with metals and the copper industry is already utilising this research and stands to benefit from further commercial research applications.