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The US Geological Survey Is Getting Serious About Space Resources and Mining
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is starting to earnestly evaluate space resources for future mining. Since its establishment in the 1870s, the USGS has focused pretty much solely on Earth. But now it's also investigating what benefits may or may not exist in tapping extraterrestrial water, minerals and metals.
[...] This past June, several USGS experts took part in a Space Resources Roundtable held at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. "The space-resources community will benefit greatly from working together with the USGS to assess the location and value of minerals, energy and water on the moon, Mars and asteroids," said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. [...] It's also worth noting that the new director of the USGS, Jim Reilly, is a geoscientist and former NASA astronaut. During his 13-year NASA career, Reilly flew on three space shuttle missions, conducted five spacewalks and racked up a total of more than 856 hours in orbit.
[...] [Laszlo Kestay, a research geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona,] pointed to the USGS' participation in space-resource workshops. In addition, there's the 2017 "Feasibility Study for the Quantitative Assessment of Mineral Resources in Asteroids" led by Kestay, which found that the water and metal resources of near-Earth asteroids are sufficient to support humanity should it become a fully spacefaring species. "At this point, we have done enough work to feel confident that the methods the USGS uses to assess mineral, energy and water resources on Earth can be used to assess space resources with minimal modification," Kestay said. "We have also done enough preliminary work to identify some areas where humanity's lack of knowledge will result in exceedingly large uncertainties in assessments undertaken today."
Also at Forbes.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by http on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:58PM (7 children)
Jerry Pournell might be a mediocre science fiction writer, but he's passable as a science writer. Back in the 1980s, he wrote a book showing that asteroid mining was 100% do-able with off-the-shelf tech; the only problem being big C capitalism's hesitance to look beyond next year's earning reports (nowadays next quarter, potato potato). A project having a thirty year ROI would therefore probably only be undertaken by soverign states. Collaboration between NASA and USGS seems an obvious path.
While we're at it, where's my jetpack.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday September 06 2018, @06:13PM (1 child)
Jerry Pournelle [jerrypournelle.com] wrote on BYTE magazine for a long time and was usually enjoyable. Another favorite in the 1980's was Stewart Alsop [wikipedia.org] who, AFAIK, was the first to put into writing in the 80's that software development projects are inherently unpredictable. Even big corporations, with lots of resources, can't get it right. And this became even more true in the 1990s. With gobs of money players like Microsoft or Adobe had trouble getting things released on time. There was a joke about when Windows 95 would be released.
I would snicker as I say corporate sovereignty. But that doesn't mean they have any long term vision beyond the next executive bonus.
Yet, SpaceX seemed to come along and invest, take a huge risk, almost fail, and then achieve what appears to be great success. Now if they can only keep it up. And hopefully NASA can adapt the Orion capsule to rid on a Falcon Heavy. :-)
Could SpaceX plan their own mission to the asteroid belt without making it public until they are just about ready to do it, or after they succeed at it? Don't bring back gold. Other rare earth metals can be worth more, and certainly have much greater industrial and practical usefulness.
But it belongs to the belters!
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @09:25PM
I read all of JP's Byte columns (and just about everything else in the magazine), and I thought he was as often as not acting the idiot. He was a Microsoft fluffer, and a poor one. As an SF writer, he was pretty good, if not great (Niven, OTOH, was great.)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @06:19PM (3 children)
some poster already said, that a lot of "new" gold makes gold worthless.
thus "the big mining" hesitance to look to space; keeping things "limited" keeps the value of things (see: "printing money" = inflation?).
my guess is, that a (so far) rare element but with crazy-cool application possibilities will HAVE TO lead to asteroid mining.
thus, the question how far will the rabbit hole go? will the "crazy-cool" applications be hidden even?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday September 06 2018, @06:21PM (2 children)
That argument is like saying: we won't drill for oil in order to keep the supply limited and the value high.
Problem: if it is there, someone else will go get it, or drill for it, etc.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07 2018, @01:29PM (1 child)
I suggest you look up OPEC.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 07 2018, @04:17PM
The O-peckers take advantage of the geography of oil.
The asteroid belt is big and not ruled by a small handful.
Yet.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday September 07 2018, @03:59AM
Rich Pournell is a steelie eyed missile man.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek