A New Kind of Space Race (Part 2)

Hello again, sorry this post is later than scheduled, but it is time to meet up once again with the wacky world of meteorite mining. In part 1 we saw how the company Planetary Resources intend to access natural resources on asteroids, and now we shall explore what they are planning to do with them once their get their robotic hands on them. Helping me to do this is a recent essay from the online publication 'The Space Review'.

Although it would be fabulous to rock up to a meteorite, scavenge it's supply of platinum, iron and nickel and then fly back to Earth with it, this is not entirely possible. Perhaps one day this could be feasible, but putting aside technical issues, even the cost of doing this would make it invalid currently.

However, all hope is not lost. What if we could use asteroids to further our own space exploration? That is exactly what Planetary Resources and Virgin Galactic intend to do...

They propose to not utilise the valuable metals from these space bodies, but water ice. The point of this being that water ice can be used in rocket propellent in conjunction with other components. To launch just 1kg of propellent from Earth to a propellent depot in our orbit costs up to $100,000; not exactly good value for money. However, take out the step of having to haul the propellent through the Earth's atmosphere and suddenly the costs drop dramatically: to about a tenth of the price.

This makes it far more economically viable that we will be able to have propellent depots orbiting Earth which exploration rockets will be able to refuel at before continuing to carry on scouting out our universe and beyond, extending our knowledge of places beyond our own planet.

Virgin Galactic are giving Planetary Resources a helping hand (at a hefty price!) by taking satellites up on their commercial space flights, which will scout out potentially usable icy asteroids. This partnership is set to start out in 2016, so we still have a little while before these plans will be put in motion, but in my opinion it could be an exciting advancement in space exploration!

For more on this topic please watch this interesting short video on asteroid mining, a particular highlight is the quote used that a single asteroid could contain more platinum than we have ever mined on Earth: