AMERICANS WILL PRODUCE MINERALS IN SPACE
Company for mining operations in space, in particular - on asteroids, was established in the United States.
Planetary Resources - the name given to a fantastic initiative, which, however, is considered feasible Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, a two-time space tourist and former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi, the head of NASA missions to Mars Chris Lewicki and dozens of other famous persons .
Among them we should mention and one of the founders of the private developers competitions spacecraft Ansari X-Prize Peter Diamantis. As well as the famous director James Cameron, whose participation in the project is interesting because of its recent blockbuster #39;Avatar#39; just yet built on the idea of mining on another planet. Let us hope that in reality the result of future expeditions for resources will not be as disastrous as in the film.
In the first phase of the new company#39;s experts, hardened work in the space program NASA, limited to the study of near-Earth objects for the development of the concept of extraction of uranium, gold, iron, nickel and other valuable items and transport them to Earth.
Project participants do not dispute the long-known fact that the original such expeditions are insanely expensive and not simply unprofitable, and did not even pay for itself. But only at first - a few decades, things will change.
Theoretical studies have allowed NASA to calculate the shipping cost to lunar orbit useful asteroid with a diameter of 7 meters. To date, it would cost $ 2.6 billion unprofitable experts concluded. But after a decade of transportation cost can be reduced by hundreds of times.
More - more.
In addition, the benefits of the project depends not only on the material resources - research in this direction will move forward all the space program - and only existing and planned.
