Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it

No idea how realistic this is, but I believe they are sincere, and I believe these are the kinds of people who drive mankind and civilization forward, not to mention critical new technologies.

From Discover magazine.

Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space!

Last week, the company issued a somewhat cryptic announcement saying they “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. I predicted this meant they wanted to mine asteroids, and yes, I will toot my own horn: I was right. They’re holding a press conference Tuesday morning to officially announce they’re going asteroid hunting.

The company had a pretty fierce amount of credibility right off the bat, with several ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, and planetary scientists involved, as well as the backing of not one but several billionaires, including a few from Google… not to mention James Cameron. The co-founders of Planetary Resources are Peter Diamandis — he created the highly-successful X-Prize Foundation, to give cash awards to incremental accomplishments that will help achieve technological breakthroughs, including those for space travel — and Eric Anderson, X-Prize board member and Chairman of the Board of the Space Spaceflight Federation.

These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around.

So what’s the deal?

 


Step 1

I spoke with Planetary Resources President and Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki on the phone Monday. He has an excellent pedigree: Lewicki was Flight Director for the NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions, and also Mission Manager for the Mars Phoenix lander surface operations. So when he says he’s confident the company can and will succeed, I’m willing to listen.

Click to continue:

This appears to be a webcast of the launch of this company, or the IPO, not sure.



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About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

One Reply to “Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it”

  1. If it hadn’t been for JFK and NASA we would have been doing this in the 1970s, the original plan for for NASA to develop the technology and turn it over to private enterprise. The US Gov was planning a one step at a time program to put men on the moon permanently in the 1970s, JFK and to have us land on the moon within 10 years of his speech without building the space stations or having a space shuttle to carry the component parts for the moon base. Following these orders NASA took over the US space flight industry, now Obama has finally done something good for the US and the world, his pulling the US Government our of the space flight business has opened the field for private industry.