A New Kind of Space Race (Part 1)

In the 1960's space fever gripped the planet. The excitement tied to the first mission to place man on the moon was emotionally charged; to see 'Earth rise' and to simply say that we humans had managed to travel there. However, in the new space race that looks set to kick off, that emotional tie may be broken and replaced with an economic excitement.

This is due to an idea which, until recently, was seen as a pipe dream; to mine asteroids in order to continue human expansion even when our Earthly natural resources run low. There are currently 9,000 known Near Earth Asteroids, and around 1,000 more are being discovered a year at present; that's a lot of scope to find some valubale bounty!

Artistic representation of spacecraft investigating an asteroid.

 

One company, Planetary Resources, are set to start mining some of these and their preparations are going well. Currently they are developing telescopes to put into Earth's orbit in the next five years. From these they can assess which asteroids are enriched in water or valuable minerals. They propose to do this by looking at the albedo (amount of light emitted) from the asteroids. Using this method they cannot simply point at an asteroid and announce it is swimming with gold, but they can tell metallic asteroids from stony or carbonaceous ones, and so know which ones to investigate further.

 

This they will do by sending spacecraft to their surfaces to run further tests. By doing this it can also be assessed how best to mine the resources; there will be many new problems to tackle here for example the small issue of zero gravity! To read more about the process then click here to read an interesting interview with the guys behind Planetary Resources.

 

Eric Anderson and Chris Lewicki (the minds behind Planetary Resources)

 

So now you have been briefed in how these resources could be reached, tune into Part 2 of 'A New Kind of Space Race' next week to find out what it has been proposed we will do with them once we get our hands on them.