Planetary Resources, Inc has announced a spectacular plan to mine near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals.
The newly formed company has the financial backing of industry-launching visionaries including Google CEO Larry Page and Ross Perot, Jr, chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group.
"The pursuit of resources drove the discovery of America and opened the West,” said Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google and a Planetary Resources investor. “The same drivers still hold true for opening the space frontier. Expanding the resource base for humanity is important for our future."
Through the development of cost-effective exploration technologies, the company is poised to initiate prospecting missions targeting resource-rich asteroids that are easily accessible. Of the approximately 9,000 known NEAs, there are more than 1,500 that are energetically as easy to reach as the Moon.
Planetary Resources believes that resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and grow to be valued at tens of billions of dollars annually.
"Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space,” said Peter H. Diamandis, MD, co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, Inc. “As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications."
Additionally, water-rich NEAs will serve as "stepping stones" for deep space exploration, providing space-sourced fuel and water to orbiting depots. Accessing water resources in space will revolutionize exploration and make space travel dramatically more economical.
"Water is perhaps the most valuable resource in space,” said Eric Anderson, also co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources. “Accessing a water-rich asteroid will greatly enable the large-scale exploration of the solar system. In addition to supporting life, water will also be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, for breathable air and rocket propellant."
"The promise of Planetary Resources is to apply commercial innovation to space exploration,” said Tom Jones, PhD, veteran NASA astronaut, planetary scientist and Planetary Resources advisor. “They are developing cost-effective, production-line spacecraft that will visit near-Earth asteroids in rapid succession, increasing our scientific knowledge of these bodies and enabling the economic development of the resources they contain."
Another Planetary Resources investor, K Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo, and Google board of directors founding member, said: "I see the same potential in Planetary Resources as I did in the early days of Google."
