[miningmx.com] – HAVING villified the world’s mining sector with his movie “Avatar’, which described the ruthless mining of a distant, imaginary planet, there’s a certain irony in director James Cameron helping to develop research that could eventually see mining of tiny asteroids, of which there are an estimated 9,500 orbiting earth.
That’s what researchers in the US are doing. There are now two companies – Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries – that believe it’ll be possible soon to mine elements such as methane, an important source of energy, from nearby orbiting asteroids.
Cameron joined Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, once the search engine’s CEO, in a programme that would begin with small, low-cost telescopes that would search space for mineable asteroids, according to a recent report by Reuters.
Talk about geopolitical risk. The risks of mining in space, however are less political than technical, but scientists still think it may be possible to extract important minerals from as early as 2020.
David Gump is the CEO of Deep Space Industries and is something of a veteran in respect of space and technology start-ups. His company is to launch a small hitchhiker space craft called “Firefly’, Reuters said in its article. It will embark on the six month expedition to survey an as yet unidentified asteroid.
Firefly is a 25kg satellite compared by Reuters to the size of a laptop computer and which would launched as a secondary payload board a commercial rocket. In addition to methane, Firefly will seek to mine metals in asteroids such as nickel.
“There is really nothing in the business plan that Deep Space Industries is pursuing that cannot be done with technology research already accomplished in laboratories across the plant,’ John Mankins, a former NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory manager, who is also chief technical officer for Deep Space Industries, told Reuters.
“The technology may not have been used in space for the exact purposes that we propose, but the fundamental technologies are really at hand,’ Mankins told Reuters.
