James Cameron and several Billionaire “friends” have decided
to start a company with the express intention of mining near earth asteroids.
They will start by designing and launching a fleet of prospecting “telescopes”
into earth orbit that will be used to map and analyse near earth asteroids.
They will than design and build prospecting and mining equipment. They hope to
have an orbital depot of refined metals and water in orbit within 10 years.
I just hope they actually do it. Arguably space industry has
been in humanities grasp for decades now, no one was willing to invest the
money to get it started. The vast amount of resources literally on our front
door, have enticed scientists and investors before but the initial cost has
always been prohibitive. Once the space race was over national governments
could not justify to tax payers the expense and the mega rich did not see a
quick enough return of investment for their liking.
So space industry stalled before it even started. If someone
had had the vision to take the chance 20 years ago who knows what world we would
currently be living in. The availability of water and metals in orbit will make
all kinds of space industry viable, by removing the need to boost raw materials
into orbit from earth. The explosion in space industry will open other markets.
Its the bootstrap principle, if you look at the launch loop
its technically probable now but economically unfeasible. There is not the
payload tonnage needed to make it profitable but dramatically reducing the energy
needed to get things into space would create the demand to pay for it. Its
catch 22 and the weakness of short term capitalism. Planetary Resources will
hopefully create that feasibility in cheaper methods of reaching and coming
back from orbit.
It’s the tip of the iceberg, it’s fantastic news in a world
struggling to regain economic growth. True industry lead growth into a near
limitless new market.
