All eyes will be on the Museum of Flight in Seattle, USA on Tuesday this week for the official launch of a new start-up mining resources company. Nothing very newsworthy in that you might think, and you would probably be right if it were not for the fact that the new company, called ‘Planetary Resources’ is backed by a group of billionaire entrepreneurs with very large pockets stashed with cash to spend! The backers include Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi, and none other than film director James Cameron of Avatar and Titanic fame, recently returned from his one-man submarine adventure to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
With planet Earth rapidly becoming short of natural resources, the new venture will look to the possibilities of extracting raw material from asteroids in Space. A recent study has identified there being 7,500 suitable rocks out there potentially packed with valuable minerals. For example, just one single asteroid called 16 Psyche is believed to contain 10 million, billion tonnes of nickel-iron, which could supply world demand for this mineral for several million years! The rewards truly could be ‘out of this world’,however, let us not forget that a huge gulf in current technology still exists before space rockets can go chasing asteroids and land on them, before returning home again with storage rooms filled with the precious cargo.
Never say never – technology evolves at an ever increasing rate – but I think the CGI world of Avatar is the closest Mr. Cameron will get in his lifetime to mineral mining on Pandora’s Moon.
With planet Earth rapidly becoming short of natural resources, the new venture will look to the possibilities of extracting raw material from asteroids in Space. A recent study has identified there being 7,500 suitable rocks out there potentially packed with valuable minerals. For example, just one single asteroid called 16 Psyche is believed to contain 10 million, billion tonnes of nickel-iron, which could supply world demand for this mineral for several million years! The rewards truly could be ‘out of this world’,however, let us not forget that a huge gulf in current technology still exists before space rockets can go chasing asteroids and land on them, before returning home again with storage rooms filled with the precious cargo.
Never say never – technology evolves at an ever increasing rate – but I think the CGI world of Avatar is the closest Mr. Cameron will get in his lifetime to mineral mining on Pandora’s Moon.
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