As always, reality doesn’t quite live up to our noble vision of ourselves. In our movies, we imagined we would be sending heroic teams of astronauts to confront asteroids which were threatening the Earth. In real life, it looks like we’re going to destroy those asteroids by mining them to death. A company called Deep Space Industries is planning to send craft into space which will harvest resources from asteroids–for high profit margins, naturally. Once again, capitalism, rather than romantic self-sacrifice, saves the day. Not to say that this isn’t quite cool–the craft can use 3-D printers to produce things right where they are in space, and we are going to be running out of resources on our own planet at some point, so we can use the expansion. We may even be able to take online asteroid mining courses in the future–how’s that for new career retraining possibilities?
Being the progressive that I am though, I gotta throw in my little government plug, just in case someone tries to use this information to prove that private companies are always better at everything. Deep Space is going to be getting help from NASA in locating the asteroids in question, and is very excited about this partnership. So yeah, good old NASA still comes in handy once in a while.
01/24/2013 at 10:39 pm
Yeah, space mining does sound pretty cool. And I’d give the government even more credit; I bet Deep Space Industries got the technology to put the mining ships into orbit from NASA too.
01/25/2013 at 5:30 pm
I am not at all surprised to hear this. Also, I’ve been told that BBC Radio did a report on this and said it would cost millions of dollars to mine just a spoonful of material. So I may have been getting overly enthusiastic about the possibilities here.
01/26/2013 at 7:07 am
Hmph…and I thought we finally had a cheap source for dilithium crystals to power our warp engines 😐
01/26/2013 at 11:19 am
Right??