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plutherusOK, this is very awesome: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/04/24/asteroid_mining_a_company_plans_to_mine_asteroids_for_gold_silver_and_water.html
And this isn't done by mere idle dreamers. Every one of the people involved (James Cameron, Larry Page, etc.) are people who have a history of accomplishment.
There are, of course, the nay-sayers:
The article points out that:
Kennedy said the exact same thing about the original moon launch in his Rice Stadium speech. Only, he said it as a reason to go. History has proven him right: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/apollo.htm
Also,
Which is frankly a stupid way to put it. It's true, it can cost a billion dollars to get two ounces of material. That number doesn't scale, though. It would also cost about a billion dollars to get two pounds or twenty pounds of the same material. When you get into larger numbers, it will cost more. 20 tons of uranium might cost a billion and a half to get back to earth.
To say nothing of all the advances that would come just from the attempt, even if they fail the first few times to find anything worth bringing back at all.
Did I mention how many new technologies came about because of Apollo alone?
This is, really, the kind of mission that our government should be funding.
I'm rather glad that private industry is doing it without them, though. (Not entirely without, obviously, as NASA did the research and laid much of the foundation for the technologies that these guys'll be using.)
And, as for mining asteroids, I think I've mentioned before how I feel about that:
And this isn't done by mere idle dreamers. Every one of the people involved (James Cameron, Larry Page, etc.) are people who have a history of accomplishment.
There are, of course, the nay-sayers:
The article points out that:
...the plans rely on new technologies not yet invented and appear prohibitively expensive.
Kennedy said the exact same thing about the original moon launch in his Rice Stadium speech. Only, he said it as a reason to go. History has proven him right: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/apollo.htm
Also,
The AP notes that a NASA mission to return just 2 ounces of asteroid material will cost $1 billion.
Which is frankly a stupid way to put it. It's true, it can cost a billion dollars to get two ounces of material. That number doesn't scale, though. It would also cost about a billion dollars to get two pounds or twenty pounds of the same material. When you get into larger numbers, it will cost more. 20 tons of uranium might cost a billion and a half to get back to earth.
To say nothing of all the advances that would come just from the attempt, even if they fail the first few times to find anything worth bringing back at all.
Did I mention how many new technologies came about because of Apollo alone?
This is, really, the kind of mission that our government should be funding.
I'm rather glad that private industry is doing it without them, though. (Not entirely without, obviously, as NASA did the research and laid much of the foundation for the technologies that these guys'll be using.)
And, as for mining asteroids, I think I've mentioned before how I feel about that:
