Asteroid Mining
| In a recent Google Solve for X talk, Planetary Resources founders, Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson took the opportunity to describe the company's vision and plans. |
Using the technical principals and extensive experience in all phases of robotic space missions, from designing and building, to testing and operating the newly-formed company is working towards its mission of mining asteroids.
In a recent Google Solve for X talk, Planetary Resources founders, Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson took the opportunity to describe the company's vision and plans.
Diamandis showed a demonstration of the tremendous number of near-earth asteroids available to be mined. As the image below shows, the opportunity is very large.
When describing the LL Chondrite asteroid, the company projects the value of the platinum available from the space rock between $300 billion to 5.4 trillion US dollars.Tongue-in cheek, Diamandis states that that much platinum on earth would depress the market, so Planetary Resources' financing plan will be "to place put options on the market, announce the mission, finance it and go."
In the eyes of Planetary Resources, the tremendous investment required in asteroid mining is mirrored by the tremendous profits that may come from the endeavor. Diamandis states that the phases for asteroid mining are the same as they are for mining projects on earth: detect, prospect, claim, mine and deliver.
Anderson wants Planetary Resources to be able to build hundreds and thousands of spacecraft per year to meet the goals of the company. Anderson further wants to make asteroid mining an information technology, so that the industry can become exponential.
Interestingly, the name of the Arkyd probes that Planetary Resources is building is named after Arkyd Industires, a fictional company from Star Wars that makes the Imperial probe droids. As asteroid mining is, in fact, the realization of a science fiction concept emerging into reality, this seems wholly appropriate.
SOURCE Solve for X
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