A new venture backed by director James Cameron and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt seeks to accomplish something straight out of science fiction—the mining of asteroids for raw materials like iron and nickel.
Planetary Resources Inc.'s plans will be formally announced at an event in Seattle on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Backers of the new company say its goal is to "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and to "help ensure humanity's prosperity."
In addition to Cameron and Page, Google's chief executive, and Schmidt, the search giant's executive chairman, other backers of Planetary Resources include former Microsoft executive and veteran astronaut Charles Simonyi, Google director Ram Shriram, and Ross Perot Jr., the son of IT magnate and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, the Journal reported Friday.
The company's co-chairmen are commercial spaceflight advocates Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson. Chris Lewicki, who was NASA's Mars mission manager, is president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources.
A Project in its Infancy
The idea of mining asteroids has been around for a long time. The appeal of such an operation, as depicted in science fiction but also discussed seriously in scientific circles, is not just as a means to supplement Earth's own natural resources but also as a way to develop a means of acquiring materials needed for further solar system exploration that's cheaper and more efficient than carrying that material into space on rockets from Earth.
Asteroids are also a potential, well, goldmine for scientists seeking to discover more about the origins of our solar system. The rocky objects that orbit the Sun in a loose belt mainly located between Mars and Jupiter contain material left over from the cloud of gas and dust that cohered some 4.5 billion years ago to form the solar system we enjoy today—original material from the solar nebula that scientists believe contains important clues about the solar system's birth.
Diamandis, who several years ago founded the Ansari X-Prize competition to develop privately funded initiatives for taking people into space, has in the past predicted a "land rush" to mine asteroids if the means of doing so was developed.
Those methods are in fact already being developed. NASA last year unveiled plans to deploy an unmanned spacecraft, the OSIRIS-Rex, which they hope will arrive at a near-Earth asteroid designated 1999 RQ36 in 2020. The vessel will be equipped with a robotic arm built to pluck samples from the asteroid.
Of course, grabbing a few rocks from an asteroid is a far cry from mining it. And humans have yet to actually land a spacecraft on a planetary body as small as an asteroid,take off again with materials from the surface, and return to Earth.
The closest attempt so far was the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa mission, which landed a probe on the small near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2005 and returned to Earth in 2010. The Hayabusa spacecraft's Minerva mini-lander failed to deploy and the probe's own sample collection apparatus also failed during the mission.
Though the sample canister from JAXA's returning capsule did contain about 100 microscopic particles, scientists are unsure if they originated on the asteroid's surface or were passively collected in space.
The Billionaire Explorers Club
The Planetary Resources venture is the latest in a rash of such initiatives spearheaded by well-heeled and adventurous private citizens like Cameron and the pair of Google billionaires, often with ties to the high-tech industry.
The Avatar director last month completed a record solo dive in his own Deepsea Challenger sub to the deepest known point on Earth, the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep. Cameron has also invested in various space exploration initiatives since NASA, the U.S. space agency, announced a few years ago that it would be transitioning towards spaceflight solutions funded by the private sector.
Google was an early backer of the Ansari X-Prize, made more urgent since the official end of NASA's space shuttle program last year.
Other celebrity investors in the growing commercial space exploration industry include Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, who like Cameron also has a keen interest in deep-sea exploration, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who runs his own Blue Origin space venture and is also funding an attempt to salvage the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rockets that took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon four decades ago.
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