Cameron and Co. unveil asteroid mining plan
Once the fictional profession of spacefaring roughnecks played by Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, the mining of asteroids could start moving from big screen to big sky in as little as two years, the world heard Tuesday.
“If you think about what has driven human exploration over time, it really has been the search for natural resources,” Peter Diamandis, the founder of Planetary Resources, told a news conference in Seattle. He was there to announce a robotic space mining project that’s getting some big-name backing from such names as Canadian filmmaker James Cameron.
Others involved with the company include Google CEO Larry Page and Ross Perot, Jr., chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group. “Whether it is the exploration 500 to 1,000 years ago of China, or the Europeans heading to the Americas searching for gold and spices or the American settlers searching for timber, land, gold, oil — these are the things that have driven us over the longterm,” Diamandis told a crowd gathered in Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Planetary Resources plans to get the mining process started within two years by launching multiple satellites to seek out viable asteroids for mining. The company expects the satellites to cost only a few million dollars to build.
The company is seeking to mine near-earth asteroids, large space rocks numbering in the thousands, that could provide valuable resources such as platinum.
“We’re going from a species that used to use only resources within a day’s walk, to a species that has access on our planet to a species now that has access to the resources in our solar system,” Diamandis said.
Not only does the company plan to extract valuable minerals from orbit, it hopes to take water found frozen on the asteroids and turn it into fuel, allowing its mining outposts to double as way stations to the final frontier.