Perhaps it will be a platinum rush that finally opens up the final frontier.
On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources Inc. will unveil its plans to mine asteroids that zip close by Earth, both to provide supplies for future interplanetary travelers and to bring back precious metals like platinum.
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Mr. Anderson declined to say exactly how much money the company has raised. “It’s plenty,” Mr. Anderson said. “The collective net worth of our investors is like $50 billion, and they know what they’re getting into.”
The plan is to launch the first spacecraft — a small telescope to find small nearby asteroids — within the next two years. Next, the company would send out a batch of small explorers to visit some of them. Actual mining would begin after that, first targeting water and then platinum.
From meteorites that have landed on Earth, scientists know that some asteroids have concentrations of platinum 20 times that of ore in a platinum mine on Earth. But the concentration of the platinum would still be tiny — perhaps a few hundred atoms per million — and the company would need to develop robotic technology to extract the element from the rocks
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Drawing on nearby asteroids for natural resources is actually a very old idea.
In 1926, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist who worked out many of the basic requirements of rockets and space travel, listed colonization of the asteroid belt as number 12 of 16 steps in his “plan of space exploration.” Other dreamers have come along more recently.
“This is actually the fifth or sixth company that has been invented for purpose of doing it,” said John S. Lewis, a retired University of Arizona professor who wrote a 1997 book, “Mining the Sky” (Basic Books), that described much of what Planetary Resources is looking to do.