The planet we live in can suffice our necessities. There are enough animals to hunt and plants to cultivate. There’s enough room to fill everybody’s space. We even find rocks to collect for luxurious desires.
But there’s not enough abundance of resources in Earth for us. And we know that there’s more out in the space.
There is a plan to mine precious metals from asteroids. Scientists believe that these entreating minerals, including platinum, iron and gold, came from asteroids showering earth millions of years back. Now they wanted to contact directly the source. According to Astronomer John S. Lewis, “a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of one mile contained more than $20 trillion worth of industrial and precious metals”.
Related: Average Salary of an Astronomer
Planetary Resources Inc. headed the project with high-profile investors and supporters from director James Cameron, Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and the former US Presidential Candidate Ross Perot.
Fossil fuels are expensive economically and environmentally. There’s no major movement to deviate from it and our electricity demands are even more insistent. One proposal is to extract helium-3 from the moon’s soil to power our lights. It is more efficient that hydrocarbons and nuclear plants.
The pioneer of space exploration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA also hopes to extract lunar water. The search continues for other resources discovery from the US government agency.
The question is, who owns the space?
China is set to launch a lunar rover this 2013. The robot explores the surface and extracts nuclear fuel along the way. Russia hopes to revive its Russian robotic space program. They are landing robots to the Moon, Venus and Mercury as early as 2014. The European Space Agency awaits approval to send a robotic space plane that will soar in the orbit. Japan launches a cargo craft to space station. India celebrates the 101st mission to space.
Now everybody’s into it.
Is it a race to space?