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Science | Citizenship

Billionaires unveil plan to mine platinum in space

Film director James Cameron and Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin have joined other super-rich investors in backing a bold new venture: to hunt for precious metals among the stars. Selling at around $50 for a single gram, platinum is among the most precious minerals on the planet. Now, a bold group of space visionaries intend to go off the planet in the hope of finding more. At a press conference in Seattle yesterday, engineers and scientists from Planetary Resources Inc laid out plans to unlock the riches of the solar system – through one of the most ambitious programmes of space exploration the world has ever seen. Using ‘swarms’ of cheap, powerful space vehicles, the team will seek out rocky asteroids that float within easy range (i.e. within a few hundred thousand miles) of the Earth’s orbit. Using a technique called spectroscopy, scientists will be able to guess at the composition of these asteroids. The first thing these robotic prospectors will be looking for is water. With power from the sun, advanced spacecraft could separate water molecules (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen – which can then be used for rocket fuel. The water from one small asteroid would produce as much fuel as was used in every Space Shuttle mission ever flown. Successful water harvesting would provide a limitless source of fuel, without the need to carry heavy loads up from the Earth’s surface. The cost of bringing payloads into orbit can be as high as $5,000 per kilogram. Given such a fuel source, the next phase of asteroid harvesting could begin. Platinum and other precious metals can be found in asteroids at concentrations twenty times higher than in the best Earth mines. An average sized rock (around the size of a football field) could hold platinum worth not millions but billions of dollars. But the thing that has space enthusiasts really excited is the idea of using asteroids to supply raw materials for more space construction. Carbon – which is plentiful – could be used to create food for future space settlers. And metals like iron could be used to build a new generation of space-constructed machines – larger and more powerful than anything we can get into orbit today. Sci-fi dreams Many of the scientists working at Planetary Resources have been dreaming about this since childhood. They remember how science fiction writers used to describe a bright interstellar future, in which asteroid mines lead to moon bases; moon bases to orbital dockyards, where huge ships are built to carry space colonists to the outer planets, the moons of Jupiter and finally the distant stars. Could that future be coming round at last? But not everyone shares this enthusiasm. The sad truth, say the cynics, is that apart from all the precious metal, outer space just isn’t a very exciting place to be. Like Antarctica, or the Sahara Desert, we can get there if we try, but once we arrive there’s nothing much to do except take pictures and crack rocks. KeywordsSpace Shuttle - The fourth human spaceflight programme carried out by NASA between 1981 and 2011. Each mission could take up to eight astronauts into space.

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