Last week, a press release from big names like Larry Page, Ross Perot and James Cameron about combining space exploration with resource extraction made it all but obvious that somebody was going to announce some very ambitious plans surrounding asteroid mining. Now, Planetary Resources has officially unveiled its plans. Alex Knapp has more analysis.
The plan will focus on two things: precious metals and water. Materials such as platinum and rare earth elements are crucial to electronics, increasingly scarce on Earth and abundant in space. Planetary Resources thinks it can find enough of the stuff in asteroids to offset the massive cost of getting to it. According to the press release:
A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history. “Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications,” said Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.But water may be the most valuable resource asteroids have to offer. Planetary Resources plans to use near-earth asteroids as stepping stones to exploring the rest of the solar system by using their water to both support life and propel rockets.
With the still-nascent world of space tourism also, it’s clear that we’re entering into a new era of privately-driven space exploration. For the tech luminaries on board, this industry shows the same kind of limitless promise that Silicon Valley did a few years ago.
“I see the same potential in Planetary Resources as I did in the early days of Google,” said Ram Shriram, founder of Shirpalo and Google board member.
“The promise of Planetary Resources is to apply commercial innovation to space exploration. They are developing cost-effective, production-line spacecraft that will visit near-Earth asteroids in rapid succession, increasing our scientific knowledge of these bodies and enabling the economic development of the resources they contain,” said Tom Jones, Ph.D., a veteran NASA astronaut and advisor to Planetary Resources.
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