Asteroids Could Be Mined For Their Fuel, Metals And Other Minerals By Robots Within Several Years

With all of the recent talk about asteroids lately, the recent talk indicates that the day when outer space asteroids will be able to be mined by robots may not be that far off.

Eric C. Anderson, chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, a private space exploration company, told The Atlantic this week that it might be possible to reproduce cheap robots within several years to mine asteroids.  

Furthermore, Anderson added, within 30 to 60 years, about a generation's time, there would be what he dubbed "irreversible migration" of humans from Earth to permanent space colonies.

So, where do asteroids come into play?

As Anderson notes, asteroids near Earth contain many resources that would be useful for people who would aim to live on Mars. Such resources contained within the space rocks include water, rocket fuel, and certain strategic metals.

In order to make asteroid mining viable, however, Anderson says that there is a need to make spacecraft travel cheaper both in terms of launching and operations. Anderson says his company has already found a way to do that.

"For example, our prospecting mission to a set of targeted asteroids will use the Arkyd line of spacecraft," he said. "The first of that series, the Arkyd-100, would have cost $100 million, minimum, in the traditional aerospace way of business and operation. But with the engineering talent we have, and by using commercially available parts and allowing ourselves to take appropriate risks, we've been able to bring that cost down to $4 or $5 million dollars."

"In 10 years or so, what we'd really like to do is get robotic exploration of space in line with Moore's Law [the tech-world maxim that the price for computing power falls by half every 18 months]," he continued. "Remember, asteroid mining doesn't involve people. We want to transition space exploration from a linear technology into an exponential one, and create an industry that can flourish off of exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."

According to Anderson, Space Adventures is set to launch their first space missions-which will focus on asteroid reconnaissance-within the next two to three years, during which they will launch several spacecrafts, weighing about 30 pounds, that will send back imagery and map the gravity fields as well as use remote sensing and spectroscopy to detail what materials are in the asteroids.

" It will be possible to know more about an ore body that's 10 million miles away from us in space than it would be to know about an ore body 10 miles below the Earth's surface," he said, adding, "We're really not talking about if; we're talking about when."

These days, more companies are coming forward with an expressed interest in wanting to mine asteroids for valuable minerals, metals and other resources. Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York, told CBS News recently that private capitalists are looking closely at the possibility of mining asteroids in space for metals.

"Private capitalists are saying, 'If NASA won't fund this thing, why not private enterprise?' If they get a piece of the action, that's going to be on the table as well, whether or not entrepreneurs can see a gold rush in outer space."

The only problem, however, is that the money for such an endeavor isn't available right now.

"Everyone is passing the tin cup right now asking for funds," Kaku said.