Planetary Resources | James Cameron äntrar rymdbrytnings-industrin.

MIT's Technology Review has just gotten news of a mysterious new project that claims it will "create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources.'" Space exploration company Planetary Resources will be unveiled in a conference call on Tuesday, April 24th. Besides the audacious announcement, which promises to "overlay two critical sectors — space exploration and natural resources — to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP,"

Looking at the evidence, asteroid mining seems pretty likely at this point, especially since X Prize founder and perpetual optimist Peter Diamandis is at the head of the operation. In 2005, Diamandis appeared at TED describing an extraterrestrial environment where "everything we hold of value on this planet — metal and minerals and real estate and energy" are available in "infinite quantities." He specifically singled out asteroid mining, claiming that he could finance mining a "20 trillion dollar" asteroid full of nickel-iron alloy by speculating in the precious metals market.

The two major conclusions from the KISS study are: 1) that it appears feasible to identify, capture
and return an entire ~7-m diameter, ~500,000-kg near-Earth asteroid to a high lunar orbit using
technology that is or could be available in this decade, and 2) that such an endeavor may be essential
technically and programmatically for the success of both near-term and long-term human exploration
beyond low-Earth orbit. One of the key challenges – the discovery and characterization of a sufficiently
large number of small asteroids of the right type, size, spin state and orbital characteristics – could be
addressed by a low-cost, ground-based observation campaign identified in the study. To be an attractive
target for return the asteroid must be a C-type approximately 7 m in diameter, have a synodic period of
approximately 10 years, and require a V for return of less than ~200 m/s. Implementation of the
observation campaign could enable the discovery of a few thousand small asteroids per year and the
characterization of a fraction of these resulting in a likelihood of finding about five good targets per year
that meet the criteria for return.