Science and Technology
6
Asteroid Mining:
Planetary resources of the future
Platinum: the rarest mineral on earth,
but abundant in asteroids.
During the last two decades, several space programs have been
cancelled or cut due to their massive cost. Since the Cold War, when the space race was utilized as a weapon of propaganda, the only reason to go to space has been the progress of scientific knowledge. But now there is a new approach: A company based in Seattle, Washington, USA called “Planetary resources” has the astonishing idea of exploiting minerals and other resources in asteroids, claiming: “One asteroid may contain more platinum than has been mined in all of history”. This would be about 6 thousand tons. So, looking the current cost of it (25.000 pounds/kilo), we are talking about 150 billion pounds in only one asteroid waiting for somebody to tap into this resource.
So, what exactly is an asteroid? In short, it is a space body orbiting a star that is smaller than a planet and has no tail like the comets. That is, a big potato-shaped rock spinning around a sun. They range from a few meters long to several kilometres.
Here is where the guys of “Planetary resources” come in. They say that the 1500 of these celestial bodies which are at similar distance to us as the Moon, are reachable to exploit the minerals and water they contain. They even have plans to do it:
First, they intend to build and place in the Earth's orbit small telescopes in order to study the closest asteroids.
Then, the next step would be building more telescopes with aditional propulsion capabilities and scientific instrumentation in order to send them to explore more closely the most interesting ones.
The third stage would be improving these unmanned spacecrafts and
send them to farther arteroids.
Finally, comes the most amazing thing: Setting extraction equipment
on the surface of some of these celestial rocks in order to extract
water and minerals like platinum. It's thought that the water will be
useful to make fuel for other spacecrafts. So, one of their aim is
also build interplanetary gas stations.
Now you must be thinking they are only a group of dudes that have spent too much time watching Star Trek or reading Marvel Comics. Maybe they have, but all of them have been doing some interesting stuff in the last few years: There are a dozen who have worked in high positions in NASA, MIT, Microsoft and Gulf, other have Ph.D. in Physics or Aerospace, and even we can find a couple are former astronauts and James Cameron, the cinema director, among the staff.
What's more, they don't seem to lack money: They count among their investors such backers as one of the Google's founders (Larry Page), reputed Venture capitalists, and Sir Richard Branson. Well, we could ignore the last if we want to regard this as a serious undertaking.
So, here we have a handful of crazy, smart and rich men and women, planning to do something daring and innovative. If they succeed, maybe someday your cell phone or your car will have some parts that arrived from millions of miles away.
KIC +/ November 2013
By Miguel Alfonso