Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia
The rush to mine the moon.
Asteroid Mining: Various missions and simulated missions are making asteroid mining more and more real.
2025 Asteroid Mission
The manned mission to an Asteroid uses new Technologies being used by NASA to make the mission possible.
The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is a new spacecraft designed to hold four astronauts for missions to the Moon, an asteroid, and then Mars. The spacecraft is expected to launch in 2014, with a manned launch sometime in the 2020’s.
The Space Exploration Vehicle is another new Multi-Mission vehicle being tested. The SEV concept is designed to be easily used for multiple missions; The pressurized cabin thats designed for the SEV can be used for in-space missions and on the ground exploration of planets including near-Earth asteroids.
(via the-nuclear-chaos)
Any commercialization of space is a great step forward.
Mining the moon could reap riches, spur space exploration
With billionaire backers, the space mining concept has plenty of potential, but there’s lots to accomplish, including creating an infrastructure and determining who has legal rights to mining resources.
If private enterprise is also bound by the Outer Space Treaty, then space is nothing but a large nature park, and there is no real incentive to explore space.
Can a private company claim ownership of an asteroid based on sending a probe out to it? Can it at least get exclusive mining rights? Would it own the gold, platinum or other materials mined from the asteroid?
Last week, a new private company, Planetary Resources announced an ambitious plan to prospect for and eventually mine near-Earth asteroids. Backed in part by Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, this venture has stirred the pot once again on the question of outer space property rights.
Understanding the legality of asteroid mining starts with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Some might argue the treaty bans all space property rights, citing Article II:
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
Others have argued that because Article II only applies to nations, individuals are free to claim chunks of the solar system. But as we’ve noted before, the treaty also requires nations to ensure their citizens comply with the other provisions of the Outer Space Treaty — including a prohibition against sovereign claims of property rights. So neither nations nor individuals can appropriate territory in space. But what about asteroid mining?
More on Planetary Resources and their team.
2020:
Amun is a goldmine — well, not gold so much. But it does contain a cool $8 trillion worth of platinum, an essential precious metal used in everything from jewelry to fuel cells to computers (and one that’s currently trading at the same rate as gold — $1500 an ounce.) On Earth, only a few hundred tonnes of the stuff are produced every year. The $8 trillion figure is an estimate based on observations by John S. Lewis, professor of planetary science, author of Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets, and now a consultant to Planetary Resources. He also found 3554 Amun to contain another $8 trillion in iron and nickel, and a mere $6 trillion worth of cobalt. (via A $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company)
Last night was the much anticipated announcement of Planetary Resources. See more about it in these posts about Planetary Resources and watch the full announcement here.
The plan is very ambitious and fraught with risk but the potential return is enormous.
Asteroid Mining
The Press Conference is over and The Associated Press reports:
Space-faring robots could be extracting gold and platinum from asteroids within 10 years if a new venture backed by two Silicon Valley titans and filmmaker James Cameron gets off the ground as planned.
Outside experts are skeptical about the project because it would probably require untold millions or perhaps billions of dollars and huge advances in technology. But the same entrepreneurs pioneered the selling of space rides to tourists — a notion that seemed fanciful not long ago, too.
“Since my early teenage years, I’ve wanted to be an asteroid miner. I always viewed it as a glamorous vision of where we could go,” Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of Planetary Resources, told a news conference Tuesday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The company’s vision “is to make the resources of space available to humanity.”
The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for the right type of asteroids.
The plan is to use commercially built robotic ships to squeeze rocket fuel and valuable minerals out of the rocks that routinely whiz by Earth. Company leaders predict they could have their version of a space-based gas station up and running by 2020. […]
[read more] [Planetary Resources] [NASA 2016 asteroid sampling mission] [BigThink Interview with Diamandis]
more at
- Forbes: Billionaire Asteroid Miners To Boldly, Slowly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
- Slate: Is Asteroid Mining the Next Gold Rush? Startup Planetary Resources Is Betting On It.
- PopSci: Technological Challenges Aside, Is Asteroid Mining Legal?
- Nextbigfuture: Liveblogging the Planetary Resources Conference Part 2
- Space.com: Does Asteroid Mining Violate Space Law?
(via futurescope)
Planetary Resources Live Webcast (10:30 a.m. PDT) + some more information about the topic
via nextbigfuture:
- Two of the resources that Planetary Resources plans to mine are platinum-group metals for earth and water for space fuel. [more | more@space.com]
- Planetary Resources will have Personal space Telescopes that are ten to 100 times cheaper by 2014 and then asteroid mining by 2017. Lewicki hopes the personal space telescope will do for astronomy what the personal computer did for information technology. Planetary Resources plans to put the instrument into Earth orbit to survey the sky for potential targets — asteroids that come close enough to Earth often enough to make them reachable, and have a spectral signal that would make them good candidates for mining. The main target is C-type or carbonaceous asteroids, which are dark and not so easy to detect with existing instruments. [more]
from ABC News:
via kurzweilai:
Asteroid takeout — a one-billionaire mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025Cal Tech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) commissioned a study of the feasibility of bringing an asteroid to the International Space Station beginning in September 2011 and issued its report earlier this month.
The targeted asteroid would weight about 500 metric tons and measure roughly 7 meters across.
A robotic asteroid retrieval mission would contribute toward an invaluable advance in human spaceflight, a leap forward in several areas in which humankind must make progress in order to advance into the solar system.
BLASTERS NOT INCLUDED Planetary Resources, Inc., a newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water. Pictured above is an example of spacecraft that would be used to capture asteroids and extract material from them, including platinum-group metals and perhaps unobtanium and that piece of jewelry Rose threw back into the Atlantic Ocean. (Photo via Space.com)
“CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Google Inc executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and filmmaker James Cameron are among those bankrolling a venture to survey and eventually extract precious metals and rare minerals from asteroids that orbit near Earth, the company said on Tuesday.” - Reuters via The Huffington Post
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
.
From the Planetary Resources Site:
Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids
There’s gold in them there hills. You know, those ones floating around in space. Asteroids contain many tons of precious metals, making them irresistible to scientists, aerospace engineers, futurists, fiction writers … and tech billionaires.
A group of wealthy, adventurous entrepreneurs will announce on Apr. 24 a new venture called Planetary Resources, Inc., which plans to send swarms of robots to space to scout asteroids for precious metals and set up mines to bring resources back to Earth, in the process adding trillions of dollars to the global GDP, helping ensure humanity’s prosperity and paving the way for the human settlement of space.
“The resources of Earth pale in comparison to the wealth of the solar system,” said Eric Anderson, who founded the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures, and is co-founder of a new company along with Peter Diamandis, who started the X Prize foundation, which offers prize-based incentives for advanced technology development.
Nearly 9,000 asteroids larger than 150 feet in diameter orbit near the Earth. Some could contain as much platinum as is mined in an entire year on Earth, making them potentially worth several billion dollars each. The right kinds of investment could reap huge rewards for those willing to take the risk.
Outside of NASA, Anderson and Diamandis are among the most likely candidates to realize such a dream. Space Adventures has sent seven private tourists to the International Space Station while the Ansari X Prize led to a spurt of non-governmental manned spaceships.
“We have a long track record of making large-scale space ventures real,” said Diamandis.
Photo Credit: (wired.com)
