Rekindling imaginations
Published 3:16 pm Wednesday, April 25, 2012
It reads like science fiction, but the next real-life chapter in human space exploration is being written right here in Western Washington. Its authors, even if they don’t achieve their lofty goals, already are rekindling America’s latent frontier spirit.
That spirit was among the feared casualties as the space shuttle program ended last year and NASA stopped carrying astronauts into space. What would spark the scientific imagination of our youth the way manned space travel had since the 1960s?
Planetary Resources, a private venture unveiled Tuesday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, is one exciting answer.
Backed by a team of well-heeled visionaries, the Bellevue-based company aims to mine precious metals from asteroids using robots — a goal it hopes to achieve in about a decade. First, in the next 18 to 24 months, the company plans to launch a “swarm” of small satellites equipped with telescopes to find good candidates among the many asteroids whizzing past Earth.
(Top-flight engineers or, as the company puts it, “amazing people,” are being sought. Apply at www.planetaryresources.com/opportunities.)
As with any bold, risky venture, skeptics are plentiful. Space travel is incredibly complex and expensive. Mining materials in space, let alone transporting them to Earth, is many orders of magnitude harder. Huge advances in technology will have to be made along the way.
But even the skeptics seem hopeful. “It’s a really ambitious project, and sure, they’ll have their challenges,” Marco Caceres of the aerospace research firm Teal Group told the Los Angeles Times. “But if they are successful and hit a jackpot, it could start a new gold rush.”
Or a platinum rush. That’s one of the materials asteroids carry. If valuable metals can be extracted in large enough quantities, this venture could pay off handsomely — for its investors, and for society by lowering the price of products such as hand-held medical devices and computers.
Further into the future, asteroid mining could also enhance manned space travel. Water is hard to carry into space, but it exists on asteroids. Its components, hydrogen and oxygen, could be used to produce rocket fuel in space, allowing humans greater celestial travel opportunities.
Other materials mined from asteroids might be used to manufacture a variety of things, in space, to aid space travel at a much lower cost than could be realized on Earth.
Will it succeed? No one knows. The billionaire investors backing this venture do know they could lose millions, but also that they’re embarking on an important adventure of imagination and discovery.
This bold effort, like the U.S. space program that preceded it, could inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers whose knowledge and work will benefit humanity, and the planet we live on, in ways we can’t fathom today.
That alone would count as a rousing success.
