GASMON wrote:What a load of bollocks.
America cant even send toilet paper to the space station at the moment. Russia's supply ship to same blew up last week.
Mining asteroids ?. More likely mining haemorrhoids !!!!!!!!!!
Gas
Oh man Gas you're wrong
, while Brits do banker stuff with Russia and China, America and Elon Musk really are going to usher in a great age of space development.
And the US does in fact have a launch vehicle, that's Musk's Dragon capsule and falcon rockets which have already made many deliveries of toilet paper and snacks to the ISS.
ULA is almost done with their new launch vehicle as well, including the Orion deep space vehicle.
But yeah, btw -- we could do better -- the glory days of Apollo, the shuttle.
Galactic Gold Rush: Asteroid Mining to Start This SummerAnd the company's Arkyd-3R - currently docked at the ISS - is ready for its first demonstration mission, an initial test that will lay the groundwork for future probes to start mining valuable resources on near earth asteroids (NEAs).Planetary Resources made Galactic Gold Rush: Asteroid Mining to Start This Summers when high profile investors like Google's Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Bechtel Corporation decided to back their ventures. And they also broke innovative financing ground in 2013 when they used Kickstarter to crowdfund their Arkyd-100 telescope, scheduled to launch later this year.
Deep Space Industries (DSI) is another player on the asteroid mining scene, and plans to launch their first scouts in 2016. DSI's "business is based on supplying what commercial customers in Earth orbit need to operate, as well as serving NASA's needs for its Moon and Mars exploration," said CEO Daniel Faber in a press release last year after DSI won two contracts from NASA.
Of particular importance for ventures like DSI is the idea of harvesting materials needed for space exploration in space itself, so as to avoid the enormous costs of having to launch them out of Earth's atmosphere.
"Right now it costs $17 million per ton to get anything up to geosynchronous orbit," David Gump, vice chairman of Deep Space, told the Boston Globe in November.
"If we can beat whatever that price is in 2022, we'll have a big market."Water, in particular, could be a key resources for these asteroid miners, since its component parts - hydrogen and oxygen - are needed for rocket fuel.
"Asteroids hold the resources necessary to enable a sustainable, even indefinite presence in space - for science, commerce and continued prosperity here on Earth," Chris Lewicki, president and "chief asteroid miner" of Planetary Resources, said in a statement about a NASA contract of their own.http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Galactic_Gold_Rush_Asteroid_Mining_to_Start_This_Summer_999.html
I really think SpaceX will be the lynchpin to a lot of this.
Elon Musk is like an old railroad tycoon --
he is building the infrastructure to make the rest of it possible.That's going to be a big deal there, reusable rockets, and already the cheapest launches the world's ever seen -- that's affordable launch cost for the "gold rush" asteroid miners to build on.
P.S. Unless it winds up getting canceled, last I heard about it there is supposed to be a NASA goal of landing astronauts on an asteroid.
Sometimes business moving forward and the public moving forward can converge, and that's what space development is, so that's good for everybody. That's Manifest Destiny and new frontiers stuff, growth for everybody with real brick and mortar industry, not just bankers and paper money / scams / some new smartphone app.