Asteroid Hunt: Private Groups Join Search for Dangerous Space Rocks

NASA is slated to get some help in the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, which is probably a positive thing considering the space-rock drama that unfolded earlier this month.

On Feb. 15, a fireball exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, damaging thousands of buildings and wounding 1,200 people. Hours later, the 130-foot-wide (40 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 missed Earth by just 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers), coming closer than the ring of geosynchronous satellites circling our planet.

While astronomers had predicted 2012 DA14’s close flyby, the Russian fireball caught them (and the residents of Chelyabinsk) completely off guard. The powerful explosion highlights the need for more intensive asteroid-detection efforts going forward, many researchers say.

The “meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk is a wake-up call that the Earth orbits the sun in a shooting gallery of asteroids, and that these asteroids sometimes hit the Earth,” former astronaut Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, wrote in a blog post after the fireball. “We have the technology to deflect asteroids, but we cannot do anything about the objects we don’t know exist.”

NASA-backed ground-based searches have spotted the vast majority of potentially dangerous near-Earth objects to date. But the B612 Foundation aims to join the hunt soon, and a pair of asteroid-mining firms hope their efforts also help keep our planet safe from marauding space rocks.

Undiscovered asteroids
Mapping out the orbits of near-Earth asteroids is a big job. Astronomers think 1 million or more such space rocks are out there, and just 9,700 have been identified to date.

The good news is that NASA already has a handle on the biggest, most dangerous asteroids — the ones at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide, which might end human civilization if they hit us. Researchers have now identified roughly 95 percent of the 980 behemoths thought to cruise through Earth’s neighborhood, and none of them pose an impact risk for the foreseeable future.

But the numbers get worse as the asteroids get smaller. Scientists have detected less than 30 percent of the 4,700 or so 330-footers (100 m) that come uncomfortably close at some point in their orbits. Such space rocks could destroy an area the size of a state if they slammed into Earth.

And less than 1 percent of asteroids the size of 2012 DA14 or bigger have been identified, B612 officials say. These space rocks can cause severe damage on a local scale, as the 1908 “Tunguska event” shows.

That year, a 130-foot-wide object exploded over Siberia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River, flattening roughly 825 square miles (2,137 square km) of forest.

A civilian space telescope
What’s really needed to make a dent in these numbers is a dedicated asteroid-hunting space telescope that would scan the sky in infrared light from a Venus-like orbit, said B612 co-founder and chair emeritus Rusty Schweickart.

Such a spacecraft could peer outward at Earth’s neighborhood without having to contend with the sun’s overwhelming glare, allowing many more space rocks to be detected.

Over the years, a variety of different studies and advisory groups have recommended that NASA mount such a mission, Schweickart told SPACE.com. But the agency hasn’t had the funding to get it done, so the B612 Foundation decided to take action.

“We looked at the situation and said, ‘Look, this is really the most important missing element, and it does not look as though — given the chemistry in Washington and the priorities that NASA has and the total circumstance — that this was going to get done anytime soon,’” said Schweickart, who is a former Apollo astronaut. “So we looked at that and said, ‘Why don’t we take that on?’”

The result is B612’s infrared Sentinel space telescope, which the group plans to launch toward a Venus-like orbit in 2018.

In about 5 1/2 years of operation, Sentinel should detect 500,000 near-Earth asteroids, including the rest of the mountain-size space rocks and more than 50 percent of the 130-footers, B612 officials have said. The goal is to find big, dangerous asteroids several decades before they may hit us, giving humanity enough lead time to mount a deflection mission.

Private funds will pay for the Sentinel mission, which will likely end up costing around $450 million.

Asteroid miners join in
Sentinel won’t be the only civilian space telescope scanning for incoming space rocks, if an asteroid-mining firm’s plans work out.

Planetary Resources, which counts Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its financial backers, says its fleet of prototype asteroid-prospecting spacecraft should aid in the search as well. The company aims to launch the first of these telescopes, known as Arkyd-100s, in 2014 or 2015.

The technology Planetary Resources develops to characterize and mine space rocks will also help protect Earth “by giving us the infrastructure to routinely and swiftly interact with and move asteroids, like 2012 DA14, which could someday pose a threat to Earth,” company co-founder and co-chair Peter Diamandis said in a statement.

Planetary Resources’ asteroid-mining rival, Deep Space Industries, is planning to launch its own prospecting craft, known as Fireflies, beginning in 2015. Fireflies could examine potentially dangerous asteroids up close, gleaning insights about their composition that may be vital to deflection efforts, company officials say.

“Placing 10 of our small Firefly spacecraft into position to intercept close encounters would take four years and less than $100 million,” Deep Space CEO David Gump said in a statement. “This will help the world develop the understanding needed to block later threats.”

Efforts to Protect Earth From Asteroids Are Under Way. But Will It Be Enough?

In the wake of Earth’s largest meteor strike in more than a century, the world’s attention has turned skyward.

The 17-meter bolide exploded in the air over the Chelyabinsk region of Russia on Feb. 15, shattering windows and injuring around 1,000 people. But had the meteor come in at a slightly different angle, the space rock could have impacted the ground and the fallout could have been much worse.

More money is already flowing toward future asteroid detection and mitigation strategies, but we may never be able to fully protect ourselves.

There are plenty of programs already in place for monitoring relatively large near-Earth objects, and more will be coming online soon, both from government space agencies and the private sector. However, even the best efforts will not be able to catch objects the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor — rocks that are small enough to evade detection by current technology until they are streaking through Earth’s atmosphere, but large enough to be dangerous.

The technology to actually stop any killer asteroids that we do manage to detect is also far in the future. Many techniques have been proposed, including using nuclear missiles, laser beams, or even spray paint, but none are proven or anywhere near becoming reality. A lot more research and development as well as an unprecedented international effort will be needed before we can even begin to be protected.

But we’re working on it.

Certain scientists and members of the spaceflight community have long and vocally advocated for better methods to track potentially dangerous objects and more funding for mitigation research. But the odds have always been small and attention to this potential natural disaster has mostly been on the back burner. The probability remains the same — Chelyabinsk-like events tend to occur between once every 10 years to once every century — yet now people’s attention has been refocused.

Simply looking for potentially hazardous asteroids is one of the most important parts of this effort, said physicist and former astronaut Ed Lu, who helped found the B612 Foundation, a private non-profit dedicated to spotting dangerous objects from space.

Asteroid orbits can be easily estimated once they’re spotted, potentially giving years or even decades of advanced warning to civilization. Astronomers already know of more than 400,000 asteroids, of which 6,500 pass near the Earth, but there are many gaps and uncharted objects that could still pose a danger.

“How stupid if we got hit because we weren’t looking?” said Lu. “That seems crazy to me.”

In 1992, a congressional study named the Spaceguard Survey Report recommended that NASA find 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids more than 1 kilometer in size within 10 years, a goal mandated by Congress six years later. In 2005, the target was redefined to spotting 90 percent of objects 140 meters or larger. Perennially underfunded, the project last year received less than half of the money it needed to complete its task. But since the Chelyabinsk event, members of Congress from both parties have written statements and op-eds rallying greater support for these efforts.

Unfortunately, U.S. legislators are preoccupied with other issues for the time being. Budgetary squabbles may lead the country to gut a significant portion of national spending as part of the sequester, including NASA funding.

While no new money is likely to be coming to asteroid-spotting activities, the Russian strike may cause “a shift in priorities to looking at this more than we have at the past,” said space policy expert Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University.

Many ground-based telescopes are already actively watching the heavens, most coordinated through NASA’s Spaceguard program. These include the Catalina Sky Survey, the U.K. Spaceguard Centre, and the Japanese Spaceguard Association. A similar undertaking from the European Space Agency, the Space Situational Awareness program, works with amateur astronomers to monitor dangers from above, including near-Earth asteroids.

A new endeavor coming online in 2015 named the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System Project (ATLAS) will provide an early warning system that could provide one week’s notice for city-destroying 45-meter asteroids and three week’s notice for potentially devastating 140-meter objects.

But the next and most important frontier is watching from space. By sheer coincidence, a Canadian Space Agency project that started in 2008 is scheduled to launch on Feb. 25. Named the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), this suitcase-sized spacecraft will circle the planet every 100 minutes, scanning space for asteroids that may someday pass near the Earth.

Being in space means that NEOSSat will solve one of the main problems with current asteroid-watching techniques: You can’t do them during the day. A telescope aimed at the sky when the sun is up will see nothing other than bright sunlight. This is the reason the Chelyabinsk meteor went unnoticed — it came in from the dayside of our planet. The NEOSSat project will begin operation shortly after launch and look for some of the most dangerous objects larger than half a kilometer.

Even more robust space-based telescopes are now being readied by the private sector. Planetary Resources, Inc., a company that aims to mine asteroids, intends to launch a small telescope named the Arkyd-100 that will sit in low-Earth orbit and scan for nearby space rocks. Though its primary goal will be to find valuable asteroids, the spacecraft will be able to watch for possibly dangerous objects coming from the sunlit side of Earth. Arkyd-100 is expected to launch in 18 to 20 months.

A more targeted effort comes from the B612 Foundation, which plans to launch the Sentinel telescope in late 2016. This spacecraft would sit inside the orbit of Venus and constantly be on the lookout for killer asteroids, whichever direction they come from. Sentinel will spot nearly all asteroids 150 meters or larger and identify a significant portion of those down to 30 meters in diameter.

With a price tag of several hundreds of millions, the project is comparable to a large municipal undertaking like a new highway overpass. But it is still much more than anything accomplished by a private non-profit in space and so there has been some doubt whether or not B612 could wrangle enough people into backing their idea. Since Chelyabinsk, their telescope is on surer footing.

“There’s been a crush of people contacting us,” said Lu. “Suddenly it’s on everyone’s mind.”

Online donations have increased tenfold, he added. While most of these are fairly small, generally around $100, many richer potential donors who were sitting on the fence have now fully signed on to the company’s plans. Entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, reported a similar effect with investors who were previously hesitant but are now more willing to back in their venture.

Should one of these telescope projects one day spot a doomsday asteroid, there are already many proposals for how to deflect the object. The method most favored by the B612 Foundation is fairly simple – place a modest-size spaceship near the asteroid and have its gravitational pull slowly alter the object’s course, averting catastrophe. The technique is relatively low cost and would certainly work but would require several years or possibly decades of advanced notice.

For a large rock that’s headed right for us fairly quickly, B612 recommends smashing a giant projectile into the asteroid. This kinetic impactor would provide a strong kick to shuffle an asteroid off its current trajectory. Later, a gravity tractor could be used to make any more precise changes necessary.

It is still unknown exactly what the worldwide reaction will be to a known dangerous asteroid. Actual physical research into asteroid mitigation techniques has been pretty much nonexistent.

Most likely, asteroid mitigation efforts will be an international undertaking. Any particular city or country has only a small chance of being hit, though the countries with some of the largest land area, the U.S. and Russia, are also those with the most advanced space programs. It would be in everyone’s best interest to ward off the attack, perhaps providing something akin to a common enemy, suggested Hertzfeld.

image: Trail left behind by Russian meteor on Feb. 15. credit: Uragan. TT/Wikimedia

The Shifting Tides of the New Space Age
credit, Jeffrey Marlow

Jeffrey Marlow: Jeff Marlow is a graduate student in Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology where he studies exotic microbial metabolisms in an attempt to understand the limits of life on Earth and beyond.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with John Logsdon, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, in advance of his participation in a panel discussing the role of science in the coming age of space exploration. Logsdon is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on space policy, and he shared his thoughts on NASA’s shuttle succession plans, the roles of science and exploration in space-based activities, and what he sees as Planetary Resource‘s real end-game. What follows is the first of two installments.

Wired: So what exactly is space policy?

Logsdon: Space policy is the set of principles and decisions that decides what goes on with our activities in space, most clearly manifested in budget allocations. But it’s not only budget allocations – for example, the congressional prohibition against any cooperation with China is a form of space policy. There’s a congressman from Virginia who chairs NASA’s appropriation subcommittee named Frank Wolf, and he’s written it into the NASA bills. He doesn’t like China’s human rights record, but the leverage he has is NASA. Another example is what the Department of Defense has done in adapting the policy of what it would take to qualify to launch national security payloads. Right now there’s an exclusive deal with the United Launch Alliance, but this change opens the window for SpaceX in particular, and also other companies.

Wired: We’re currently in the middle of a transition from the Space Shuttle to…something else. How does this gap in NASA’s human spaceflight capability compare with other moments in the agency’s past?

Logsdon: After the last lunar flight, in December of 1972, there were only two more human flights until the shuttle started in 1981, so it was a nine-year gap. There was an explicit acceptance of a gap in human spaceflight while we developed a new system, and that’s parallel to now, it’s just that the government is not in total control of developing that new system. NASA recently announced that the commercial crew system, which would use private spacecraft to get people to the space station, might be ready to start testing in 2015, so it will theoretically be a shorter gap than before the Shuttle.

Wired: What’s the current manned spaceflight agenda for NASA?

Logsdon: It’s totally confused, and there are lots of components to that. Between now and at least 2020, the destination for humans is the space station. We’re currently buying seats to the space station from the Russians, and Congress in its final days passed a extension to the policy that allows for that arrangement. There’s a bill called the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Non-Proliferation Act, which forbids the US from dealing with these countries, but there’s an exception written in so that NASA can buy seats from Russia. That exception has been extended until 2020. It’s a hedge against the possibility that none of the commercial crew providers will be successful.

In parallel, NASA is developing a heavy lift rocket called the Space Launch System and a crew capsule called Orion without any real consensus on what is going to be done with it. The official policy says that the first launch without people will happen in 2017 and then the next launch with a crew will go into lunar orbit in 2021. That four-year gap that’s almost totally budget driven, in that there’s just not enough money to do a mission in between.

Going into lunar orbit would be a repetition of what we did in 1968, so there’s not much enthusiasm about that. Cooking in the wings is the idea of instead going to the earth moon L2 point, and connected to that is the idea of going out and grabbing a small asteroid and leaving it there, so there’s something there for another crew to explore.

There’s total uncertainty about the reality of what will happen in human spaceflight, post-space station, and also uncertainty about how long the station will operate.

Wired: It seems like one of the primary challenges in deciding long-term space policy is the different time horizons of space programs and political cycles. Just as one administration’s agenda is gaining momentum, they’re out of office and the next President offers new thoughts – there’s just not time to see proposals through.

Logsdon: That’s right, though on the other hand, the shuttle operated for 30 years without too much upheaval. It’s just that this journey now of deciding how best to replace it makes for a particularly tumultuous period. Now that there’s the opportunity for change, this is the time when all of the conflict would come out into the open.

Wired: Where does science fit into NASA’s goals?

Logsdon: The program that NASA carries out is not an integrated program. The science part of the program is separately managed, has its own centers, has a pretty well organized scientific community as both advocate and client, and has in a sense a life of its own separate form human spaceflight.

Recently, I’ve compared the science program as a whole to a python trying to strangle a big pig, and that pig is the James Webb Space Telescope. Getting that completed and successfully launched and operating if proving to be a big challenge, and I think that has cast a shadow over the whole space science enterprise and any ambitious future planning.

Wired: Private space companies are clearly changing the economics of launching payloads to orbit, but the path is less clear when it comes to true exploration. Do you think private spaceflight will play a key role in our exploration of the universe?

Logsdon: I think they will follow, not lead, and that’s how most exploration has worked throughout history. The government funds the pioneering expeditions, and they find gold or spices or fertile land or whatever, and then commerce follows. There’s not much profit motive in that first manned mission to Mars. I’m not sure there’s any profit motivation in sending humans to Mars, period.

Wired: Companies like SpaceX are all about lowering the cost of launch, and companies like Virgin Galactic are interested in space tourism. Recently, the Planetary Resources company proposed a different type of private involvement in space, and that is resource acquisition. What do you make of that approach?

Logsdon: There is no doubt that asteroids are resource rich bodies. There’s plenty of doubt about whether anybody can do anything about it. Planetary Resources says that’s what they’re after, but it’s a bit of a shell game in my opinion. If you listen to them closely, they say their only goal is being able to extract valuable resources from asteroids, and that’s what everybody hooks onto. But then they say, that’s decades away, and what we’re really doing now is planning to launch, hopefully with government sponsorship, little telescopes to find the asteroids. At this first stage, it’s very shrewd marketing of hardware to government, basically.

Wired: When do you think we will see humans on Mars?

Logsdon: Sometime between 2035-2050, or never.

To be continued…

image: An artist’s conception of NASA’s Space Launch System rising from a launchpad. (NASA/MSFC)

Long a staple of science fiction, space mining could soon become a reality. Here is a look at what’s out there and how we might will get it.

These bodies of rock, metals and ice range in size from a few feet across up to 610 miles (975 kilometers) in the case of the largest, Ceres. Asteroids are often classified according to their spectral type, which has to do with the type of light they reflect.

C-type (carbonaceous): 75 percent of asteroids are made of dark materials (example: 253 Mathilde)

S-type (silicon-based, or stony) comprise about 17 percent of the asteroids (example: Eros)

In addition to these major classes, there is also an X-group that includes various types with similar spectra, but likely different compositions, as well as other smaller asteroid classes.

The study of meteorites, space rocks that have fallen to Earth, reveals a variety of useful materials that could be extracted:

• Platinum: precious metal used in electronics and as a catalyst in chemical reactions. Carmakers used $7 billion worth of platinum in 2012

• Palladium: harder than platinum, similar uses

• Water: can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel or life support for humans

The majority of asteroids orbit in a belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter. These objects may be remnants from the early formation of the solar system. Other groups of asteroids, such as the Trojans and Greeks, hang out in stable points near the orbit of Jupiter. Near-Earth asteroids are those that traverse the inner solar system and can pass close to or cross the orbit of the Earth.

Much of the energy required to get anywhere in the solar system is used in just getting off the Earth. Reaching a near-Earth asteroid requires less total energy than landing on the moon. Reaching an asteroid belt destination is easier than landing on Mars.

Planetary Resources revealed in 2012 its intention to extract valuable materials from asteroids. First, the Arkyd-100 space telescope would be located in low Earth orbit to gather spectral data to determine asteroids’ composition and market value. Swarms of low-cost robot spacecraft would crisscross an asteroid to extract its resources. Small ice-rich objects could be captured for towing back to the vicinity of Earth for extraction of their water.

Deep Space Industries announced in 2013 an ambitious scheme ultimately involving robotic manufacturing plants that could 3D print components from asteroid metals. First, tiny Firefly cubesats would be sent into the inner solar system on one-way reconnaissance missions to targeted asteroids. Then, larger Dragonfly spacecraft would be sent to capture samples (or even small asteroids) for return to Earth. Later the Harvestor tug would be developed, capable of towing an entire asteroid back to Earth orbit. Eventually, manufacturing could be done in space; for example, 3D printing of components for a space habitat.

Launching humans to an asteroid has been mentioned by NASA in recent years as a possible goal. New vehicles capable of traveling in deep space would have to be developed. The job is complicated by the very low surface gravity of an asteroid, requiring different equipment than that developed to operate in either the microgravity of Earth orbit or the one-sixth gravity of our moon’s surface.

The new company Planetary Resources, Inc., is backed by a team of billionaire investors and luminaries like filmmaker/explorer James Cameron with a single goal: to mine near-Earth asteroids for precious resources like rare metals and water ice. The project is aimed at tapping into the resources of the solar system while furthering space exploration in an audacious way. See how asteroid mines like those envisioned by Planetary Resources could work in the SPACE.com infographic below

Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Asteroid-Mining Project Aims for Deep-Space Colonies

image: An artist’s concept of a wheel habitat under construction at an asteroid, a vision of space settlement by the asteroid-mining company Deep Space Industries.
CREDIT: Deep Space Industries

A new asteroid-mining company launched Tuesday with the goal of helping humanity expand across the solar system by tapping the vast riches of space rocks.

The new firm, called Deep Space Industries, Inc., announced today (Jan. 22) that it plans to launch a fleet of prospecting spacecraft in 2015, then begin harvesting metals and water from near-Earth asteroids within a decade or so. Such work could make it possible to build and refuel spacecraft far above our planet’s surface, thus helping our species get a foothold in the final frontier.

“Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development,” Deep Space CEO David Gump said in a statement. Deep Space Industries will hold a press conference today in Santa Monica, Calif., at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST/1800 GMT) to unveil more details of its bold mission plan; you can watch the webcast live here at SPACE.com.

“More than 900 new asteroids that pass near Earth are discovered every year,” Gump explained. “They can be like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century — a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.” [Deep Space Industries’ Asteroid-Mining Vision in Photos]

Deep Space is the second company to jump into the asteroid-mining business. The first, the billionaire-backed firm Planetary Resources, had its own unveiling last April.

Prospecting spacecraft and asteroid sample-return
Deep Space will inspect potential mining targets with 55-pound (25 kilograms) spacecraft it calls Firefly, the first of which are targeted for launch in 2015.

Fireflies will conduct asteroid reconnaissance on the cheap. They’ll be made from low-cost “cubesat” components and will hitch a ride to space aboard rockets that also carry large communications satellites, Deep Space officials said.

“We can make amazing machines smaller, cheaper and faster than ever before,” Deep Space chairman Rick Tumlinson said in a statement. “Imagine a production line of Fireflies, cocked and loaded and ready to fly out to examine any object that gets near the Earth.”

The Firefly fleet’s work will pave the way for 70-pound (32 kg) spacecraft called Dragonfly, which will blast off beginning in 2016. These Dragonflies will bring asteroid samples back to Earth during missions that last two to four years. Some samples will help the company determine mining targets, while others will probably be sold to researchers and collectors, officials said.

The public will get to fly along with both probes, whose activities will likely be funded in some measure by corporate sponsorship, Deep Space officials said.

“The public will participate in Firefly and Dragonfly missions via live feeds from Mission Control, online courses in asteroid mining sponsored by corporate marketers and other innovative ways to open the doors wide,” Gump said. “The Google Lunar X Prize, Unilever and Red Bull each are spending tens of millions of dollars on space sponsorships, so the opportunity to sponsor a Firefly expedition into deep space will be enticing.”

Building and refueling spacecraft off Earth
These activities are all precursors to Deep Space’s ultimate goal, which is the harvesting and in-space utilization of asteroid resources.

The company intends to begin extracting metals and other building materials from space rocks within 10 years, officials said. These components will first be used to build communications satellites off-Earth, with the construction of space-based solar power stations coming later. Precious metals such as platinum will also be delivered to Earth for terrestrial use.

Deep Space’s construction activities will be aided by a patent-pending 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, officials said.

“The MicroGravity Foundry is the first 3D printer that creates high-density, high-strength metal components even in zero gravity,” company co-founder and MicroGravity Foundry inventor Stephen Covey said in a statement. “Other metal 3D printers sinter powdered metal, which requires a gravity field and leaves a porous structure, or they use low-melting point metals with less strength.”

Deep Space Industries will also focus on extracting asteroid water, which can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — the chief components of rocket fuel. The company’s mining efforts could thus lead to the establishment of in-space “gas stations” that allow satellites and journeying spacecraft to top up their tanks relatively cheaply and efficiently.

“We will only be visitors in space until we learn how to live off the land there,” Tumlinson said. “This is the Deep Space mission — to find, harvest and process the resources of space to help save our civilization and support the expansion of humanity beyond the Earth — and doing so in a step-by-step manner that leverages off our space legacy to create an amazing and hopeful future for humanity.”

Deep Space Industries’ ambitions are similar to those of Planetary Resources, which also plans to tap asteroid metals and water to help open the solar system up to exploration and exploitation.

Planetary Resources could prove to be a tough competitor. It was founded by private-spaceflight pioneers Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, and its deep-pocketed investors include Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

WATCH: Planetary Resources Unveils Asteroid-Hunting Telescope

scinerds:

NASA Mulls Plan to Drag Asteroid into Moon’s Orbit

Who says NASA has lost interest in the moon? Along with rumours of a hovering lunar base, there are reports that the agency is considering a proposal to capture an asteroid and drag it into the moon’s orbit.

Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion – slightly more than NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover – and could be completed by the 2020s.

For now, NASA’s only official plans for human spaceflight involve sending a crewed capsule, called Orion, around the moon. The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One proposed target, chosen because of its scientific value and favourable launch windows for a rendezvous, is a space rock called 1999 AO10. The mission would take about half a year, exposing astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field and taking them beyond the reach of any possible rescue.

Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans.

NASA Considers Tugging An Asteroid Into Orbit Around The Moon

Rather than sending humans into deep space, why not bring the asteroids to us?
image: Arkyd Series 200 Interceptor, as Envisioned by Planetary Resources Planetary Resources Inc.

NASA’s (and President Obama’s) vision for sending a manned space mission to a distant asteroid by the 2020s doesn’t seem to be gaining much steam, but a conceptual mission under development by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California could bring an asteroid much closer to home in that timeframe. An estimated $2.6 billion could fund a mission that would send a robotic spacecraft out into interplanetary space and drag an asteroid into orbit around the moon where robots and even humans could explore it far more conveniently.

The reasons for doing this are many. For one, a manned mission beyond the moon to a faraway asteroid would likely take six months or more to reach even the closest passing asteroid of interest. During that time out from under the protective umbrella of Earth’s magnetic field, astronauts would be exposed to long periods of cosmic radiation—the effects of which aren’t exactly defined. Moreover, it would be costly, dangerous, and might not yield that much scientific benefit. But an asteroid in orbit around the moon meshes well with some other initiatives NASA has cooking, including placing a fixed space station at a Lagrange point on the far side of the moon from which human inhabitants could tele-robotically explore the moon (and, if available, an asteroid).

The Keck concept calls for an Atlas V rocket to launch a slow-moving, solar/ion powered spacecraft toward a rendezvous with a target asteroid. This wouldn’t be an Earth killer or anything even close—the Keck study calls for something in 20-25 feet wide. The spacecraft would then literally haul the asteroid in a huge bag back to lunar orbit. Total mission duration: six to 10 years.

NASA’s not the first entity to speak seriously of moving asteroids into more favorable orbits for human observation (and consumption). Last year billionaire-backed private space startup Planetary Resources announced an ambitious agenda to explore and mine minerals from asteroids, including potentially moving a target asteroid from deep space into an orbit more accessible to mining robots. The idea is not only to extract minerals for export back to earth, but also to create “orbital gas stations” where water ice on asteroids could be processed into hydrogen and oxygen to refuel rockets in space. That’s an idea that’s also been kicked around NASA over the years where the future of deep space travel is concerned. Pulling a small asteroid into lunar orbit would be a good start.

The Year’s Most Audacious Private Space Exploration Plans

It has been a remarkable and exciting year for commercial spaceflight companies.

Private asteroid mining! Commercial trips to the moon! Mars settlements! We barely had time to catch our breath from the last secret organization announcement when suddenly some other team was cropping up and declaring a bold new adventure in space.

“You had the unveiling of these really audacious business plans that at first blush you would dismiss as impossible,” said journalist and aerospace analyst Jeff Foust, editor and publisher of the space-industry-watching The Space Review. “But when you look at both the technical and financial pedigree of the people backing these systems, you step back and say, ‘Well, maybe there’s something here.’”

Many of these new companies have experts at their helms, founded or run by former NASA engineers and veterans of the spaceflight community. Others showed off their deep entrepreneurial pockets and touted the potential profits to be made in space.

So how did 2012 turn into the year of private space? Perhaps the most important factor was the trailblazing success of SpaceX, a commercial rocket business started by entrepreneur and PayPal founder Elon Musk. This year, the company conducted two launches to the International Space Station using their Falcon 9 vehicle, with the second mission bringing supplies and helping prove that SpaceX was on the path to ferrying astronauts.

The company is already planning their next rocket, the enormous Falcon Heavy, for launch in 2013 and recently won important contracts with the U.S. military to deliver hardware to space. With all these notches on his space belt, Musk is no doubt already eyeing the perfect ridge for his retirement home on Mars.

Contributing influences to 2012’s commercial space focus include an aimless NASA. Though it saw spectacular successes such as the Mars Curiosity rover landing, the agency is still wrestling with frozen budgets and a deeply divided Congress that disagrees on its overarching mission. Alongside NASA’s existential crisis was the aftermath of the second dot-com boom, which created a crop of young, sci-fi-crazy tycoons.

“When you give these Silicon Valley guys a billion dollars,” said astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of Harvard, who tracks rocket launches, “Their first thought is ‘Cool, now I can have my own space program.’”

Just in case you are having trouble telling the Planetary Resources apart from the Golden Spikes, Wired presents a gallery of the year’s most impressive, daring, and wild business plans from commercial companies. We also talked to a small handful of spaceflight experts to get their take on which of the big dreams will pan out and which will burn out.

“I don’t expect them all to succeed, but I don’t expect them all to fail,” said space lawyer Michael Listner, founder of Space Law & Policy Solutions. Taken together, the companies’ ambitions underscore just how much times have changed. “About 10 years ago, if you presented one of these plans, people would have looked at you like you’re crazy. Now people can say, well it’s a little crazy, but considering what’s been done, it might be possible.”

Golden Spike Company
The most recently unveiled audacious space venture is the Golden Spike Company, which wants to take people back to the moon by 2020. For the low, low price of $1.5 billion, Golden Spike will land a two-person crew on the lunar surface and safely return them. Given the expense, the company is targeting governments without large space programs that may be looking for a little international prestige.

Golden Spike has a team with technical chops, including planetary scientist and former NASA science administrator Alan Stern and former NASA flight director Gerry Griffin. The business hopes to make use of low-cost existing rockets as much as possible to cut down on their expenses and estimates the entire scheme could cost as little as $7 billion. All of the experts we asked praised the company’s mission architecture as fairly plausible.

“The technology is there but they still need spacecraft, spacesuits, and to train people,” said space lawyer Michael Listner. “I’d say by the end of the decade is pretty aggressive. During Apollo, we had the resources of a nation behind us and it took years to get our guys there.”

Golden Spike’s largest obstacle will be securing the funding they need to get off the ground.

“They need to really size how big this market is and figure out how to raise the several billion dollars to develop things like a lunar lander,” said journalist Jeff Foust. Currently, much smaller private companies involved in the Google Lunar X-Prize are struggling to raise several million dollars for space missions.

Furthermore, Golden Spike needs at least five or six customers signed on in order to turn a profit. But a still-weak international economy puts this funding model on unsteady ground for the time being. Using national status as the underpinning for such a mission might also not be the best business practice.

“Maybe you can sell a government on being the second country to the moon, but being the sixth, I’m not so sure,” said astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. “If I were that country I might not feel my ego sufficiently boosted.”

Bottom line: Golden Spike has certainly thought their mission architecture through but might want to work a bit more on their business plan.

Planetary Resources, Inc.
Asteroid mining is a staple of science-fiction, transplanting a familiar Earth-based activity to the new frontier of space. Many of the resources we dig up from underground on our planet were in fact laid down during an asteroid impact billions of years ago. So let’s cut out the middleman and simply mine riches from the skies.

Such is the thinking behind Planetary Resources, Inc., which revealed their asteroid mining plans in April. The company hopes to extract water and precious metals, such as platinum, in order to get a return on their investment. Shortly after the unveiling, the internet reached a fever pitch about Planetary Resources, with Jon Stewart even calling in astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson just as a sanity check on the whole endeavor.

Planetary Resources’ biggest strength comes from its financial backing, with founders Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis veterans of both Silicon Valley and space technology. Other rich luminaries behind the company include Google CEO Larry Page, Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, and even filmmaker James Cameron. The company’s goals are very long term, with simple plans to launch telescopes to identify and catalog near-Earth asteroids in the next few years, and the actual mining and resource extraction as much as 20 years away.

“Currently, the biggest hurdle in actually mining these asteroids is that the law hasn’t been settled yet,” said space lawyer Michael Listner.

If Planetary Resources is to succeed, the international community will have to decide that the venture is legal. Currently, space lawyers are split into two camps on whether or not a company can extract and keep resources from celestial objects, and no one yet knows what sort of regulation governments may impose. All this adds some risk to the business plan. But Listner says that at least the company has put the idea out into the public consciousness, and some outcome will be settled in the next decades.

The only other barrier at this point is their telescope design, said astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The initial plan called for small telescopes in Earth orbit to search for the best nearby asteroids but such an instrument can’t look inside Earth’s orbit because it would be staring at the glaring sun. A much better architecture would place the telescope in the orbit of Venus to get a full census. “I think they also need a slightly bigger telescope in order to do spectroscopic surveys and find the mineralogically valuable asteroids,” said McDowell.

As Planetary Resources gets up and running, they will no doubt run into more problems. Having a plan is one thing, but doing anything in space always turns out to be harder than initially thought.

Bottom line: Planetary Resources has deep pockets and given itself ample time but needs to work on its technical and legal plans.

B612 Foundation
Nearly overshadowed by that other private asteroid business, the B612 Foundation’s announcement in June was nonetheless important. The nonprofit company hopes to raise money to launch an infrared telescope that will be ever vigilant for dangerous asteroids hurtling toward Earth. Though NASA is already watching for these potentially civilization destroying rocks, B612 said they would be able to more than double the near-Earth object catalog in their first month of observation.

The company has some good technical backers, including former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart and former shuttle astronaut Ed Lu. As a nonprofit, B612’s approach most closely resembles a philanthropic foundation looking to build a new wing for a hospital. While donors are used to the idea of such charity on Earth, can B612 convince people that the same model works for a space telescope?

“It’s going to be tricky, because they need to find an income or donation source to keep it funded,” said space lawyer Michael Listner. “But I will say if they can get the funding and license to use the technology, they have a fairly good shot.”

Listner added that, should B612 have trouble raising money for their multi-million-dollar telescope, a potential path could be to partner with the U.S. government, which would provide more funding.

Astronomer Jonathan McDowell suggested that B612 and Planetary Resources pool missions, considering that one has a good technical team but a dearth of money, and the other has funding coming out of its ears but a mission architecture that leaves something to be desired. “There’s nice things in each of those approaches, and maybe some combination will emerge and end up being useful,” he said.

Bottom line: B612 has got a plan to save the world, now all they need is someone to fund them.

Mars One
Getting people to Mars has long been a goal of the spaceflight community. While many thought it was the next logical step after the Apollo program, the United States has never been able to commit to the necessary funding for such a mission. But now a private company named Mars One has stepped in with their own audacious plan.

Announced in May, Mars One has an extremely aggressive goal: land a crew of four on the Red Planet by 2023. The company hopes to cut costs with a radical mission. They intend to send people on a one-way trip to set up a colony, with a new set of four settlers arriving every two years after the initial touchdown. Mars One said it intends to pay for the plan by creating “the biggest media spectacle in history” with a reality TV show that will follow the astronauts.

While mentioning that the goal of expanding human civilization is worthy, our experts were not entirely convinced that Mars One’s business model is fully thought through. “It doesn’t strike me as as plausible as the others,” said astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

“I’m not sure there’s enough money out there to fund something as complex and expensive as a human mission to Mars,” said journalist Jeff Foust. “The best I can say is good luck.”

“Going to Mars is 100 times difficult than going to the moon,” said space lawyer Michael Listner. Besides the fact that we don’t currently have the technology to put enough mass for a human mission on the Martian surface, there are many unknowns, including radiation and corrosive dust on Mars and the debilitating effects of long-term space travel, which could deteriorate the astronauts’ bones and eyes. Regulation from Earth governments looking to introduce safety measures could also delay or alter the mission.

Though Mars One estimates their first mission would cost only $6 billion, Listner said the entire plan, including future resupplies and crew, could be on the order of $1 trillion. Funding such a mission through ad sales sounds about as plausible as a Pinky and the Brain plan to take over the world.

“I suspect it wouldn’t be that good for TV,” said Foust. “NASA televises their space activities, and I’m sure almost nobody watches it. It’s mostly tinkering with experiments, replacing an air filter.” Sustaining interest once the novelty wears off could be a major challenge, he added.

Mars One recently converted itself into a nonprofit company, so it will likely have many of the same challenges at something like B612. Though they may be the least likely of the recent private space companies to achieve their goals, “you’ve got to dream big,” said Listner. “And they will certainly inspire a lot of people.”

Bottom line: Mars One has sky-high plans that will most likely struggle to get off the ground.

Falcon Heavy
Though not announced this year, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy has been a hot topic as the company prepares to launch this new rocket in 2013. Once operational, the vehicle would be the most capable existing rocket, able to bring 120,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit for as little as $1,000 per pound. The closest current spacecraft is United Launch Alliance’s Delta rocket, which can take 50,000 pounds up at a cost of $6,000 per pound.

Falcon Heavy has a number of other companies hoping to ride on its success. Both Golden Spike and Mars One plan to use the vehicle in their operation while NASA and the military are also looking forward to its capabilities. The question for SpaceX is just how soon they can get the new rocket ready.

“It’s possible to do a test launch in the second half of 2013, though that date could slip depending on technical issues,” said journalist Jeff Foust. Falcon Heavy will have three times the rocket engines of the current Falcon 9, which add many complications to the technology. But based on their recent successes, things are looking good for SpaceX.

“They’re pretty confident that they’ll go next year,” said space lawyer Michael Listner, “And everything is pointing in that direction.”

Bottom line: If SpaceX can build on their current achievements, they have a decent shot of launching Falcon Heavy in 2013.

The Google Lunar X-Prize
Intended to stimulate new ideas for exploring the moon, the Google Lunar X-Prize was announced in 2007. The goal is for a small private team to land an autonomous rover on the lunar surface, travel about 1,000 feet, and beam back high-definition images and video. The first team to do so will win $20 million, and constellation prizes are offered for other tasks.

The prize’s deadline was originally meant to expire this year but after insufficient progress was made, the foundation extended their target date to the end of 2015. While more than 20 teams are still technically in the running, very few are where they need to be right now to claim the reward and accolades. Though 2015 seems a while away, this year and next are “really a make or break period for the teams left in the competition,” said journalist Jeff Foust.

That’s because rocket launches are planned at least two years in advance. So anyone without a launch manifest by the end of 2013 is out of luck. Only two teams, the Barcelona Moon Team and Astrobotic, have secured a launcher. Furthermore, the technical readiness of most teams doesn’t seem quite up to snuff.

“They need to start building hardware now,” said Foust. “A lunar rover isn’t something you put together over a couple weekends. It needs years to make sure it works properly and get it there in the first place.”

Most teams have struggled to get the millions of dollars in funding necessary for this expensive mission. Furthermore, in 2013 China plans to land a probe on the moon, which automatically drops down the prize money offered to $15 million. If by the end of next year, these problems remain, it’s possible that no one will win the competition.

“I haven’t really seen any entrants for that that fill me with a lot of confidence,” said astronomer Jonathan McDowell. “Maybe it’s a step too far, and the prize money relative to the investment needed is just not enough.”

Bottom line: The Google Lunar X-Prize is struggling and may simply prove to be too ambitious.

Private Space Tourism
We live in the future! You may not have a personal jet pack but, if certain schemes pan out, you could one day afford a few minutes of spaceflight. That at least is the goal of companies like Virgin Galactic, which has allied with Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipTwo, a passenger spaceplane that will take tourists 70 miles above the Earth for short flights.

Initially affordable only for the very rich, such a jaunt will set you back about $200,000 — that is, once Virgin Galactic actually gets their machine flying and ready. Though the business hoped to get off the ground years ago, they have constantly pushed back the date of their first flights. Virgin Galactic now hopes to be ready to carry passengers by the end of 2013.

“I think even [Virgin Galactic’s CEO] Richard Branson is frustrated that things haven’t been flying by now,” said space lawyer Michael Listner. “And I think they’re probably going to get pushed back again. They want to keep that risk level as low as possible.”

The main thing that private space companies fear is some sort of catastrophic accident that results in a death. Such an occurrence would dry up their customer base and swiftly bring increased government regulation. Further delays could put the company in bad relations with Spaceport America, which the state of New Mexico spent nearly $200 million on in hopes of attracting tourist revenue.

Most spaceflight experts are still counting on Virgin Galactic. “Hopefully in the next few months we’ll see powered flight tests by SpaceShipTwo,” said journalist Jeff Foust. “And then gradually they’ll work on getting closer to space.”

Though Virgin Galactic recently flew SpaceShipTwo in its first “powered flight configuration” test, reaching the end-of-2013 mark may not be in the cards. “I’d be mildly surprised if they got it off in 2013, but totally not shocked if it was 2014,” said astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

Should Virgin Galactic somehow fail in its venture, there are plenty of other space tourism companies waiting in the wings. While somewhat behind Virgin, XCOR’s Lynx spaceplane could begin testing in 2013. The company hopes to offer tourist flights to the edge of space for the bargain price of $95,000. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ secretive Blue Origin could also stun everyone by unveiling a new rocket plane in the near future, though this seems less likely. But all the private space companies are worth keeping an eye on.

“People for a long time accepted as a given that SpaceShipTwo would be the first to fly,” said Foust. “That may or may not be a case.”

Bottom line: Virgin Galactic may fly next year, or not. With other companies, we’ll have to wait and see.

we-are-star-stuff:

To combat global warming, scientists in Scotland now suggest an out-of-this-world solution — a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid, which would act like a sunshade for Earth.

The world is warming and the climate is changing. Although many want to prevent these shifts by reducing…

(Source: space.com)

Billionaire-backed Planetary Resources, the company that in April announced ambitious plans to mine space rocks for minerals, will hitch a ride with space tourism company Virgin Galactic.

The new union is a sign that the nascent commercial space-flight industry could soon become self-sustaining. It was prompted by LauncherOne, a low-cost satellite-launching rocket that Virgin founder Richard Branson revealed on 11 July at the Farnborough International Airshow, UK.

Virgin Galactic, headquartered in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is best known for its plans to ferry paying tourists to the edge of space. The idea is to take the tourist-carrying SpaceShipTwo rocket to an altitude of 7 kilometres using aircraft WhiteKnightTwo. SpaceShipTwo will then be dropped so it can fire its engine and climb to an altitude of 100 kilometres – giving passengers a 5 minute spell in microgravity and an out-of-this-world view. An air launch means the rocket itself does not have to push through the densest part of the atmosphere, making the launch extremely fuel efficient.

The idea behind LauncherOne is to use the same process to launch satellites. From 2016, Virgin plans to sling LauncherOne beneath WhiteKnightTwo in place of SpaceShipTwo for satellite launches.

Satellite shake-up

Branson says small satellites with masses up to 225 kilograms will be able to reach orbit for about $10 million – “two to five times less” than a regular satellite launch costs.

The low cost is attractive to Planetary Resources, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which announced its partnership with Virgin at the same air show. It plans to use LauncherOne to send up 10 satellites a year, each weighing about 50 kilograms. These will be capable of spotting asteroids of between 50 and 500 metres across that have a reflectivity suggesting they are potentially rich in minerals.

Planetary Resources co-founder Eric Anderson says Virgin’s satellite launcher is more attractive than that of Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, which also offers air-launched rockets – but for satellites of up to about 1500 kilograms. “They are bigger rockets and cost ten times more than Virgin is planning,” Anderson says.

Because Planetary Resources plans to start launching its satellites in one-and-a-half to two years time, however, it may have to begin without Virgin, later switching. “If Virgin aren’t ready – we’ll launch anyway,” says Anderson.

Asteroid warning

The asteroid-hunting satellites are just a first step in Planetary Resources’ plan to mine asteroids. When the satellites find promising candidates, a second fleet of reconnaissance spacecraft will examine them at close quarters. Eventually, craft yet to be developed will then mine them. In the meantime, the asteroid-hunting satellites will be able to double up as an early warning system for potentially dangerous asteroids, says Anderson.

Alan Stern, a former head of NASA’s space science programme and chief scientist at lunar mining start-up Moon Express, based in Mountain View, California, is impressed by the way the commercial space firms are working together so soon: “This is a sign of a maturing commercial space economy, with business to business deals now proliferating. It is highly promising.”

Planetary Resources aren’t the only ones to have paid Virgin deposits for launches on LauncherOne. So have environmental monitoring start-up GeoOpticsof Pasadena, California and satellite imaging firm SkyBox of Mountain View. What’s more, Surrey Satellite Technology in Guildford, UK, plans to customise microsatellites called CubeSats for cheap launches in the Virgin system, according to founder Martin Sweeting.

The Most Profitable Asteroid Is…

With the recent announcement of the asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources, some of the most-asked questions about this enticing but complex endeavor include, what asteroids do we mine? Which are the easiest asteroids to get to? Could it really be profitable?

While Planetary Resources officials said they hope to identify a few promising targets within a decade, the initial answers to those questions are available now on a new website that estimates the costs and rewards of mining rocks in space. Called Asterank, the website uses available data from multiple scientific sources on asteroid mass and composition to try and compute which asteroids would be the best targets for mining operations.

So, which asteroids are most profitable, valuable, easily accessible and cost effective?

The winners are, according to Asterank:

Most Profitable: 253 Mathilde, a 52.8 km-diameter C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid.
Most Cost Effective: 2000 BM19, a very small O-type asteroid (less than 1 km wide) that makes several close approaches to Earth.
Most Valuable: 253 Mathilde
Most Accessible: 2009 WY7, another small asteroid with regular close approaches of less than 1 AU. This is an S-type asteroid, a silicaceous or “stony” object.

Asterank combines both the economic and scientific features of over 580,000 asteroids in our solar system, looking specifically for platinum-group metals and water. It was created by Ian Webster, a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I’ve always had a strong interest in astronomy and especially space exploration,” Webster said via an email to Universe Today. “The commercialization of space through ventures like asteroid mining really excites me because I believe it’ll open space to the rest of us and improve human quality of life. My day job is at a startup unrelated to space, but my hobbies include building rockets and many side projects like this one. I have a lot of fun applying computer science in different ways and I hope that Asterank will educate and inspire people.”

Webster provides a caveat, however, to the rankings of the top 100 asteroids in each category.

“Scientists know shockingly little about the composition of asteroids,” he writes on the website. “Visit JPL’s Small Body Database and you will notice how sparse information is.”

So, this mean that there aren’t really ‘experts’ in this field, and even those most knowledgeable about asteroids likely don’t have the numbers needed to completely and accurately estimate the true value of an asteroid or the cost of mining it — “which is why Planetary Resources is going to spend years or even decades investing in LEO-telescopes and data-gathering flybys before they ever touch an asteroid,” Webster said.

Webster has used databases, websites, books and other publications to get as much accurate, up-to-date information as possible, but even then, he said everything on the website is a rough estimation.

“The primary purpose of this site is to broadly educate and inspire, rather than provide completely accurate data — which is currently impossible,” he said. “I created the site in response to the announcement of Planetary Resources. “I should point out that nearly all the measurements and hard data come from the scientists at NASA JPL, but I had a lot of fun putting the site together.”

And it is fun to peruse the various categories and see what asteroids make the top of each category.

The ranking takes into account the value of the materials on the asteroids such as metals, volatile compounds, and water; the costs of getting to an asteroid and moving the raw materials: and the comparative savings and potential profit, which at this point are very hypothetical, taking into account processing and moving raw material.

“We really don’t know yet how much it will cost to mine an object millions of miles away,” Webster said.

While this website is a first step, it offers an exciting and enjoyable initial look at the potential commercial viability of space mining.

Check out Asterank.

discoverynews:

From DiscoveryNews’ Ian O’Neill:

In possibly one of the most entertaining Weekly Space Hangouts I’ve participated in, Fraser Cain was joined by Alan Boyle, Emily Lakdawalla, Amy Shira Teitel, Sawyer Rosenstein, Jason Major, Nicole Gugliucci and myself. We chatted about mining asteroids, ravenous black holes, awesome brown dwarfs, commercial spaceflight and tons more.

We’ll be back, same time, same place next week to chat about more space awesomeness! Remember to tune in every Thursday at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) on Google+.

Recently, a group of Google and Microsoft billionaires, film maker James Cameron, directors of the X-Prize Foundation (Peter Diamandis), founder of the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures (Eric Anderson), former astronauts, etc. have banded together to propose a new, game-changing technology: mining the asteroids. Although much of the details of their mission are still under wraps, it is possible to piece together what their grand strategy is. It is also possible to envision how they might succeed, as the group backing the project is made up of exactly the kind of risk takers who have the daring and the financial means to pull it off.

The new venture called Planetary Resources, Inc. has a variety of videos published on their YouTube Channel including the official April 24th press conference (below). Their website however includes further details about theMission, Technology, Team, Opportunities, and News — with a statement on the main page of ”establishing a new paradigm for resource discovery and utilization that will bring the solar system into humanity’s sphere of influence. Our technical principals boast extensive experience in all phases of robotic space missions, from designing and building, to testing and operating. We are visionaries, pioneers, rocket scientists and industry leaders with proven track records on—and off—this planet.”

Basically, they hope to create a vast new source of natural resources by mining the heavens. There are positive and negative aspects of this grand vision. On the positive side, there are valuable minerals that might be found in asteroids, such as platinum-type metals, which may yield a bonanza for future space prospectors. In fact, these visionaries foresee a time when trillions of dollars may flow into the coffers of the entrepreneurs who dare to think in terms of these grand schemes.

On the negative side, however, is a long list of potential problems, starting with cost. It costs $10,000 to put even a pound of anything into near-earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs roughly $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And roughly a million dollars a pound to put you on Mars. So the costs of mining the asteroid belt are truly astronomical.  

Second, there are dangers and technical problems. Our astronauts have never been in deep space for more than a few days on missions to the moon. The asteroid belt is an entirely new frontier, fraught with dangers. We would need new booster rockets, new space stations, a new space infrastructure, etc. etc.

However, it is possible to modify the original dream of science fiction writers to reduce the cost. First, one can use robots instead of human astronauts to cut down on costs and dangers. Second, one can let the asteroids come to you, rather than going to the asteroid belt. As we now know, asteroids the size of battleships regularly whiz by the earth, totally unnoticed until recently. So, one can envision grabbing such a near-earth object, modifying its orbit, so that it orbits the earth, where it can be safely mined. So we never have to go as far as the asteroid belt at all. Third, one can envision that one day, a booming mining industry will supply distant colonies with basic raw materials. In other words, most of the metals and resources will not be used for the earth at all, but for maintaining colonies already in space. This way, we do not need to bring these materials back to earth at all, which would be very costly.

Wisely, this group of visionaries is starting with very modest goals first. They plan to fund private space telescopes, so that private enterprise can safely analyze what is out there in space and then make a decision about sending astronauts to rendezvous with an asteroid. This baby step is far more reasonable than starting a crash program to build booster rockets to mine asteroids now.

President Obama speaks of encouraging our youth with a new “Sputnik moment.” That is very difficult, since the government has cancelled Sputnik, i.e. the manned space program. I am all in favor of new Sputniks to inspire the next generation of scientists, especially when it is funded by other people’s money. Visit the White House Blog where Obama speaks about our generation’s Sputnik moment being now — “In 1957, just before this college opened, the Soviet Union beat us into space by launching a satellite known as Sputnik.  And that was a wake-up call that caused the United States to boost our investment in innovation and education -– particularly in math and science.  And as a result, once we put our minds to it, once we got focused, once we got unified, not only did we surpass the Soviets, we developed new American technologies, industries, and jobs. So 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment.”

But there is one attractive feature to this proposal. It’s all funded by private investors, not tax payers, so the public does not lose a cent. Sadly, the US government will no longer boldly go into space. Its up to private enterprise to now pick up the slack and it appears that is exactly what its doing.

Planetary Resources, Inc. has announced its plan to mine Near Earth Asteroids for their raw resources, ranging from water to precious metals like platinum. Using their Arkyd line of spacecraft, they will head to NEOs for exploration and extraction. One of the founders, Eric Anderson said they will launch their first spacecraft within 24 months, and eventually build ‘gas stations’ in space to enable deep space exploration.

The founders of this company say that resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and could be valued at billions of dollars annually. “The effort will tap into the high concentration of precious metals found on asteroids and provide a sustainable supply to the ever-growing population on Earth,” they said.