A PIECE OF glorious lunacy? Or inspired visionary thinking? The announcement by a consortium of billionaires that they are investing in a project to mine precious metals from passing asteroids is certainly a revival of the spirit of Cecil Rhodes. “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night,” the arch-imperialist and mining magnate dreamed, “these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annexe the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
“If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation,” co-founder of Planetary Resources Inc, Peter Diamandis argues, “it has been going after resources, whether it’s the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land.”
And, indeed, before dismissing the project as the work of cranks we should take note of Diamandis’s fellow investors, a band with some form on the vision front: there’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, Ross Perot Jnr, and Eric Anderson, who with Diamandis has pioneered space tourism – eight trips with their Space Adventures group at $50 million a head for week-long stays at the International Space Station. James Cameron, film drector and deep-sea explorer, is advising.
The idea is to send robots to passing asteroids to mine them both for supplies for future space travellers – interplanetary service stations for water (some asteroids are - up to 20 per cent water) and fuel – and for precious metals like platinum for return to earth. A 30-metre asteroid can hold as much as $25 billion to $50 billion worth of platinum at today’s prices, Diamandis claims.
Those party-poopers in the Financial Times argue, however, that while gold currently trades at $1,665 a troy ounce, at the current cost of rockets a price of $518 million a troy ounce for space-gold would be needed to break even. Not so says Planetary Resources which insists it has ideas for dramatically reducing the cost of space travel and argues that by nudging small asteroids into close orbit round the Earth it can cut costs further. Unlike landing on the moon or Mars, a robotic mining spacecraft would not need parachutes or a large engine to fly up to and attach itself to a small asteroid. And “there are 1,500 near-Earth asteroids that are easier to reach than the surface of the moon,” Anderson claims.
Children dream of becoming train drivers, others, space miners. And why not? The sky’s the limit ...