Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-claims dept.

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.

Related: Luxembourg Announces Investment in Asteroid Mining
Asteroid Mining Could Begin in 10-20 Years
Chinese Researchers Propose Asteroid Mining Plan, Including a Heat Shield


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @09:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @09:25PM (#731517)

    Jerry Pournelle [jerrypournelle.com] wrote on BYTE magazine for a long time and was usually enjoyable.

    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.)