It seems that a bunch of science fiction increasingly becoming true. Let say, some eccentric billionaires has made startup that aims to mine near-earth asteroids. And its not just some mad idea that wasted a lot of money just for show.
The company, called Planetary Resources,
was founded by Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis, who were involved
with the X-Prize space race. The money is coming from people like Larry
Page, Eric Schmidt, and James Cameron.
Planetary Resources is going to start next year with a robotic survey mission to hunt down the right space rocks. There are many potentially of suitable
near-Earth objects that could be accessible to robotic missions.
The survey mission will catalog the asteroids in convenient Earth-like
orbits to see which ones have the necessary resources. It’s not just
precious metals Planetary Resources is looking for, there are other
compounds needed to make the project work.
The next part will be to
actually start mining for resources. The company will have to develop
the technology from scratch to do this, but it might involve slowly
dragging an asteroid closer to Earth, possibly even putting it in orbit
around the moon. According to Planetary Resources, there could be as
much platinum in a single asteroid as humanity has mined in all of
history.
Despite sounding like a near-future hard sci-fi novel, the physics of Planetary Resources’ plan aren’t outlandish. There is a lot of engineering and science to be done, but many experts believe it’s possible.
This is an era where government funding for space exploration is
falling just as private space enterprises picks up. This is the time for
something like Planetary Resources to happen.
Along the way to that mine in the sky, new
technologies will be developed, and science will be advanced. This is just the beginning of the process, but at least
someone is doing what needs to be done to assure humans have a foothold
in space.
