Asteroid Mining May Be a Reality by 2025

Planetary resources plans to mine Asteroids by 2025 according to this article. There is some momentum building in the Space community to begin Mining and setting up a Space infrastructure for business/ commerce. There seems to be initial interest in the Moon but I think that interest will soon shift to Mars as humans spread farther and farther into the solar system.

"We have every expectation that delivering water from asteroids and creating an in-space refueling economy is something that we'll see in the next 10 years — even in the first half of the 2020s," said Chris Lewicki, Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki.

"After that, I think it's going to be how the market develops," Lewicki told Space.com, referring to the timeline for going after asteroid metals.

"If there's one thing that we've seen repeat throughout history, it's, you tend to over-predict what'll happen in the next year, but you tend to vastly under-predict what will happen in the next 10 years," he added. "We're moving very fast, and the world is changing very quickly around us, so I think those things will come to us sooner than we might think."

Mining Asteroids for in-Space fueling of rockets...? Once this starts happenig, the solar system will open up for transportation/ commerce/ transportation. I think this is a very interesting development that has been brewing for decades. Now the pieces seem to be falling into place. What says ATS?

www.space.com...

a reply to: lostbook

Perhaps we should clean up ecological mining mess on earth before we trash the asteroids. ..and i would think the cost of asteroid mining might prove to be cost prohibitive.

We dont even have a base on the moon, seems that would be the first priority.

a reply to: olaru12

I don't see why not having a moon base would be reason not to mine asteroids. Easy access station okay..
But I think itd be more practical to build that type of "base" in actual space to store and transfer materials. Then even the moon's small but significant gravity wouldn't be an inconvenience every time your landing or lifting off. That would lessen the costs of fuel.

a reply to: lostbook

The sooner we can get up there and start mining the quicker we can stop destroying our own planet for minerals.

I'm all for it.

If we are ever going to get off of this rock,
space mining and the possibility of making big money this way will be the only way it ever gets off of the ground in any useful fashion. Mining will lead to a better understanding of space while helping to meet our own needs for minerals.
Personally, I think they should also consider picking a dead planet and using it for a dump.
Maybe launch garbage at the sun.

I think mineing the Astroids is inevitable but 2025 is a little aggressive, unless you know something we don't?

a reply to: lostbook

This is great and we have an even closer resource that we need to exploit, the moon.

I was just looking at the gold records put on the Voyager probes.

Apollo, Viking, Voyager...and even into the 80's with the Space Shuttle. It felt like we were going somewhere with space.

It felt like there was this wonder, excitement, exploration happening. Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" was still in rotation. Science Fiction was at an all time high with Star Wars and Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica...

And now? Meh. We have what amounts to a double wide in low Earth orbit -- and we have to hitch hike with the Russians to get there.

What happened? What the hell?

I'm starting to think there's a reason behind the screeching halt that was put on the space program. I know some might blame the Challenger explosion -- but we've suffered losses during the race to the moon with Apollo 1.

Call me a paranoid conspiracy nut -- but I think there's more going on. There's a real reason we're not already living on the Moon and have sent people to Mars. I have a robot that cleans my floors and an automatic litter box. I talk to my smart phone that's infinitely more powerful than the computers used to get man to the Moon.

And all we have is some ghetto looking space station in LEO where they grow lettuce and take photos of Earth for their Twitter accounts.

a reply to: MystikMushroom

I disagree with this article where it says that we shouldn't mine helium 3 on the moon because it is a limited resource like fossil fuel.

Really Space.com, really?

Is Moon Mining Economically Feasible?

"It doesn't make sense, the whole helium-3 argument," Crawford said. Strip-mining the lunar surface over hundreds of square kilometers would produce lots of helium-3, he said, but the substance is a limited resource. "It's a fossil fuel reserve. Like mining all the coal or mining all the oil, once you've mined it … it's gone," Crawford said. The investment required and infrastructure necessary to help solve the world's future energy needs via moon-extracted helium-3 is enormous and might better be used to develop genuinely renewable energy sources on Earth, he added.

The thing is, the problem with mining He3 is that the concentrations are very low so it would be most efficient to combine it with other extraction techniques for other minerals and gases as well, not that it is finite in nature.

And why the hell is it up to him what potential lunar mining prospectors might do, should they instead be forced to research cow fart engines?

No wonder we haven't done anything.

originally posted by: olaru12
a reply to: lostbook

Perhaps we should clean up ecological mining mess on earth before we trash the asteroids

We dont even have a base on the moon, seems that would be the first priority.

Asteroids have no ecology, environmentalism applied to asteroid mining is silly. But I agree with a base on the moon.

a reply to: lostbook

That would be old news of expected ventures. I may have others, but in five seconds I just pulled down two books on mining asteroids. One is entitled Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis, 1996, and the other one is Islands in Space by Dandridge M. Cole and Donald W. Cox 1964, the early, definitive book on planetoids as the objects were called by some back then.

Such endeavors are horribly impractical with our present abilities of chemical-fueled rockets and zero off-world facilities to provide any support. In truth, such talk are mere pipe dreams unless you dream really big or have knowledge that fleshes out the big picture with realistic details. On that note, I'll suggest that we may be closing in on that ability if not having already done so with the magical triangles.

Such work, along with any other activity in space be it for exploration, military superiority or economic means can be encompassed by the triangles that we have witnessed for over twenty years. Compared to the technology that we are told that we have today, the triangles make child's play out of impossible tasks, mining asteroids, Moon bases and even trips to Mars...and nicely explain why we don't have a genuine, usable "space plane" today or any decent plan to go anywhere in space.

originally posted by: Darkblade71
a reply to: lostbook

Maybe launch garbage at the sun.

I've brought up the idea of launching garbage at the sun with friends before and all I got back was "too expensive". Maybe it is and maybe it is time some of these billionaires start coughing up some funds in the general interest of humanity...oh wait I just thought about what I said HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh never mind

Space mining could lead to meteors as weapons too...

We better get on it before the Russians do.

a reply to: MystikMushroom


I have that impression as well, its as if we are allowed to send out probes to see out into the cosmos to gain an understanding, but to actually branch outside of our own orbit is not possible for some reason. I`m open to any possibilities from lack of funds in the space program to the various ideas and theories that have been discussed here on ATS.

Maybe the tech that has been/could be developed is to revealing to other nations to use openly? Maybe we are not allowed to get "out there" as nations but as a single race? Speculation is seems endless but maybe one day soon it wont be speculation anymore.

originally posted by: Darkblade71
a reply to: lostbook

The sooner we can get up there and start mining the quicker we can stop destroying our own planet for minerals.

I'm all for it.

If we are ever going to get off of this rock,
space mining and the possibility of making big money this way will be the only way it ever gets off of the ground in any useful fashion. Mining will lead to a better understanding of space while helping to meet our own needs for minerals.
Personally, I think they should also consider picking a dead planet and using it for a dump.
Maybe launch garbage at the sun.

Super agree with everything you said. Why not mine asteroids? There are millions out there, we can quit destroying our own planet.

A giant trash compactor sending tons of earth's garbage to be incinerated by the sun.....super great idea.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this feeling that the 1st trillionaire would probably come about as a result of some astroid mining venture. Can’t remember, but I must have read that somewhere years ago, and it made sense to me then, so I’ve held to that belief ever since. I figured it would be accomplished through some commercial space capitalist venture, and not NASA. But, who knows? The next 10 years sounds possible (not surprising) to me, but then I’m just Joe Blow, so how would I know? At any rate, whether we like it or not, I think it’s inevitable. After all, money talks, and if there’s money to be made, then we will do it.

I wish we could avoid it, but I think mining the moon will also happen. I don’t think we need to rape the moon the way we have this planet in order to satisfy our energy requirements. There are other avenues to explore first. Bases for other things, great. Mining for energy, no. But, humans being humans, I doubt we’ll be able to resist the tempation to trash another world. It’s just part of our OCD DNA, it seems.

Then next, eventually, we can go to Mars and trash the hell out of it, too. Whoopee!!

I’ve always been a fan of the Space Program, and have always felt NASA was grossly underfunded. We’ve obviously chosen to sink trillions into fighting groundless, unjustified wars over exploring the universe that gave us life. But let’s face it, developing a viable space program will one day be our only means of escaping a planet we’ve rendered incapable of sustaining life. There are also a lot of technological spinoffs from the program that came about as a result of the research done by NASA and the educational institutions involved in the program. Things most folks take for granted. For anyone interested, here’s a list of just a few.

Since changing human nature isn’t likely, I guess we take the bad with the good. I really do wish we could adjust our priorities, though, and once again experience the magic the whole world felt during the Space Race to the moon (even though it was just a well-disguised political venture). We could do so many good things if we just had the will.

Nice thread, lostbook...

a reply to: StratosFear

I get the feeling we got our hands "slapped" or something before we really got going with our space program.

a reply to: MystikMushroom
I think we did, too. It was because the program was looked upon as taking away from our efforts in Vietnam, for one thing.

Priorities...

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: StratosFear

I get the feeling we got our hands "slapped" or something before we really got going with our space program.

Would you find it difficult to believe that there is possibly a secret space program which has a higher funding than what the public see?

We will eventually make it to Jupiter.
That will be one hell of bonanza in the hydrogen market.

Dear United States of America. Stop f***ing the world over and spending billions on the so-called "defence", and you'll be setting up Moon and Mars bases and mining those asteroids in no time (with friendly contribution from Russia, China and India).