James Cameron Getting into Asteroid Mining- Um, Maybe

Well this is interesting. A gaggle of billionaires have decided to get together and start a space exploration company called Planetary Resources. While they aren’t revealing exactly what they are planning on doing with their company until Tuesday, they did reveal that they will "unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity."

Artist's concept, Astronaut performs a tethering maneuver at asteroid.

Artist's concept, Astronaut performs a tethering maneuver at asteroid.


Expanding on that the press release said:
[Planetary Resources] will overlay two critical sectors — space exploration and natural resources — to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources'.
Which sounds like asteroid mining. I mean, it’s a space initiative that promises to redefine ‘natural resources.’ There’s only two real possibilities for that--asteroid mining and space solar power satellites--and one isn’t baked enough to implement until we have space-based resources.

So I’m pretty sure that James Cameron, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, and Ross Perot are about to announce an asteroid mining company.

Did I mention that the project is going to be revealed at Seattle’s Museum of Flight with X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis as the speaker? And that he will be joined by planetary scientist and astronaut Tom Jones and NASA Mars Mission manager Chris Lewicki? Yeah, something big is about to go down.

I don’t think it would be an understatement that April 24th, 2012 could go down in history as a watershed moment for humanity. I mean, aren’t you excited already? Asteroid mining. Think about what goes into that for a second. We’re talking having ready space station building supplies in space. We’re talking needing crew in orbit millions or billions of miles away from us, meaning we’re also talking self sustainability. We’re talking cities in space, here.

Asteroid mining. I was beginning to think that I wouldn’t see it in my lifetime.

SPACE Photo by : NASA