The dynamics of mining on earth are changing as the economics of the industry change. Mechanisation, digitalisation and environment-friendly trends are dramatically affecting the fundamentals of mining worldwide, says enterprise resource planning multinational SAP MineRP marketing VP Empie Strydom.

Value from investments in mining take time to come to fruition, he says, pointing out that space mining is the same. However, the mixture of business and technical skills, as well as business models, and tools used to plan the outcomes in mining exploration on earth can as readily be applied to mining exploration in space.

Similarly, the innovations in data science, analytics and mechanisation developed for space mining can be applied to earth mining and in situ processing.

“Innovation can be triggered by exploration and the development of suitable, relevant skills and capabilities as part of research and development. “Inspiration drawn from seeing people do what has never been done before has a lasting impact on ideas triggered,” says SAP Africa head of innovation Dr Adriana Marais, pointing to the significant increase of people who enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees during and after the decade of Apollo missions to the moon from 1963 to 1972.

Technologies developed to achieve complex mining tasks remotely on distant asteroids can be applied equally effectively to improve conventional earth mining, she emphasises.

Marais, who is also a Mars One candidate – a volunteer to become a permanent Mars colonist – and astrophysicist, notes that the space mining industry will find out within the next decade whether returning asteroids to earth is profitable and how it should invest.

However, while technology develops rapidly, it is the effective harnessing and deployment of inventions that can change an industry and not just the adoption of a technology wave, she notes.

“It is the reimagining of an industry through collaboration, a focus on business imperatives and seeing through the lens of capabilities provided by new technologies that fundamental changes are brought about.”

Emphasising the importance of collaboration, Marais highlights that the Mars One project has garnered $400-million in funds on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Further, she highlights that capturing and returning a mineral-rich, rocky asteroid back to earth can cost about $5-trillion to $7-trillion, with an estimated profit for participants of about $1-trillion. Such projects, however, will almost automatically require collaboration and cooperation to succeed.

Space mining company Planetary Resources cofounder Peter Diamandis and US entrepreneur and author Steven Kotler coauthored the 2012 book Abundance: the future is better than you think, in which they describe the potential beneficial effects that exponential technological advances and using of space resource can produce on earth.

However, a specific aspect of innovation that the book addresses is that the scientific, temporal and technological context in which each person and each company function should not be assumed to be fixed nor necessarily conducive to innovation or progress.