MINING SPACE

Science fiction is often the seed for science exploration.  

Silicon Valley depends on rare earth minerals for electronic products.  The main provider of rare earth minerals is China, and the supply is finite.   A new source of rare earth minerals would be valued at trillions of dollars, and the search is now on.   

The newest quest for mineral wealth is in asteroid mining.   Heavy metals on earth sink to the core and are difficult to obtain, but many asteroids are composed of platinum and gold and other rare earth minerals; including diamond.  

We are on the cusp of the technology necessary to mine asteroids.  The NASA mission OSIRIS-REX is exploring the technologies and techniques necessary to develop mining operations on asteroids and comets.  

Commercial ventures are being financed around the world to be on the frontier of this new gold rush; to exploit the vast wealth now thought to be available in space.  Here in the United States investors Larry Page, James Cameron and Peter Diamandis of Google have announced a venture company called Planetary Resources with the goal of asteroid mining. 

The idea is basically to plant a propulsion system on a near earth asteroid and use it at an appropriate time to bring the asteroid out of its normal orbit and place it in an orbit around the moon, or a large asteroid in a permanent orbit around earth.  The minerals could then be extracted by space crews or other methods and ferried back to earth.

An asteroid one mile wide impacting the earth could destroy any major metropolitan area.    And less we forget, it was an asteroid six miles wide, traveling at fifty thousand miles per hour that impacted the earth near Mexico releasing the energy of one hundred million nuclear bombs, that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

What could possibly go wrong?