Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy
by John Lewis · 22 Jul 2014 · 183pp · 54,731 words
. Asteroid Resources Economic Drivers: Ores in NEAs Solar Power Sites of Demand Economic Value of Asteroidal Resources IX. Asteroid Mining and Processing “Ore Bodies” on Asteroids Landing on an Asteroid Operating on an Asteroid Mining Mineral Beneficiation Processing Into Feedstocks Fabrication of Useful Products Matching Sources and Demand Sites X. The Long View Logistics
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of Asteroid Mining – and Beyond Appendix A Detailed Taxonomy of Meteorites Appendix B - Meteorite Minerals of Resource Interest About the Author Footnotes Preface By Rick N. Tumlinson The
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say we are going to harvest the resources of space. If not, get ready for a bit of both work and mind blowing possibility. In Asteroid Mining 101 Dr. Lewis moves from a survey of possibilities to the specific concepts and information one needs to be able to turn a dead rock
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least understand us, and what is happening as we change tomorrow. Good luck, and welcome to the revolution! Rick N. Tumlinson I. Introduction The emerging asteroid mining industry has extremely ambitious intentions. It is within the realm of possibility that their work may usher in a change in global economics as profound
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as the Industrial Revolution. As may be expected, press reports dealing with asteroid mining have been numerous, ranging in scope from short and breezy to broad and serious, and in quality from accurate to impressionistic to simply uninformed. There
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, not a sinkhole for our tax dollars. Of these commercial endeavors, mining asteroids seems farthest away, yet paradoxically has the longest history. The very phrase “asteroid mining” reminds aerospace technologists of Tsiolkovsky, science fiction readers of the asteroid miners of E. E. “Doc” Smith and Frederick Pohl, and almost everyone of terrestrial
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to remove vast masses of uninteresting overburden, and of ore veins that must be found and followed deep within hard rock, are largely irrelevant to asteroid mining. Undifferentiated asteroids consist of a fine-grained mixture of all the materials that went to make Earth’s core, mantle, and crust. All those “precious
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’s crust and the depletion of easily accessible ores, projecting a dismal and inescapable future for us all. This book is the story of why asteroid mining is so timely. We will survey the nature of asteroids and of the meteorites that tell us of their detailed composition and history. We will
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for mass extinctions on Earth. None are currently known to be on an impact trajectory, but most PHAs have yet to be discovered. A vibrant asteroid mining industry will help illuminate the deep dark and give us better warning of the still-unseen apocalyptic rocks headed our way. Scouting Missions Reveal the
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deep space operation. One solution is to package several LEO-style CubeSats into a small carrier spacecraft, enabling wider involvement in the new age of asteroid mining and prospecting. A carrier can be loaded with a dozen or so CubeSats – from one unit to three units each – to give them a ride
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Moon too quickly for the lunar gravity have any appreciable effect. Factoring in lunar assists makes finding the best targets a complex challenge. For profitable asteroid mining, shorter transit times will get return on investment faster but they come with two penalties: cutting sailing times requires more propellant, and it also forces
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velocity near Earth was very high: rendezvous would have required a huge amount of fuel, and was clearly not an available option. VII. Belt Asteroids Asteroid mining will start with the NEAs, since reaching them requires less energy than venturing out to the belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, the belt is
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, etc.) and other finished products to GEO at a price less than $10,000 per kilogram of displaced Earth-launched material would be competitive. IX. Asteroid Mining and Processing The conduct of mining operations on an asteroid differs profoundly from standard mining practice on Earth. The terrestrial example concentrates on finding an
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heliocentric orbit, subject to the long-term effects of the Poynting-Robertson force, and eventually spiral into the Sun. It would require a remarkably intensive asteroid mining program to even begin to compete with the natural sources of dust provided by asteroid collisions and cometary activity.) Obviously processes involving internal combustion engines
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group known. This fact encourages us to seek out exploitation targets that are not only nearby, but also made of the right stuff. Logistics of Asteroid Mining – and Beyond Several studies of the logistics of retrieval of asteroidal material for use in space and on Earth have been published, out of which
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. The second is the fabrication of aerobrakes to permit aerocapture of returning asteroid payloads into the Earth-Moon system. Table X.2 Logistics of Sustained Asteroid Mining Use of space-derived propellants is essential Direct use of water as propellant is highly desirable: Solar Thermal Propulsion Spectral characterization must be required before
Accelerando
by Stross, Charles · 22 Jan 2005 · 489pp · 148,885 words
a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out
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after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien
The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin · 30 Apr 2019 · 452pp · 126,310 words
ideas have been advanced for potential cash exports from Mars. For example, Mars might serve as a source of food and other useful goods for asteroid-mining outposts that themselves export precious metals to Earth. Or, since the water on Mars has six times the deuterium concentration as Earth's, that potentially
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transport goods cheaply to Earth; the moon; the asteroid belt; and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. High-technology goods needed to support asteroid mining may have to come from Earth for some time. But since food, clothing, and other necessities can be produced on Mars with much greater ease
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competitors into the business. These would expand the quantity of imports until precious metal prices fell to the point where the rate of profit from asteroid mining would be no more than the average of comparable high-risk enterprises throughout the economy. At that point, prices would stabilize, turning
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asteroid mining into normal business, with further metal price drops caused mainly by technological improvements—which the existence of the business would itself drive. So the net
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, habitats, and even free flying cities for multitudes of new branches of human civilization that will develop in space. CLAIMING ASTEROIDS The commercial potential of asteroid mining is so enormous that several start-ups have already been formed with the goal of pursuing the opportunity for profit. Among the leaders are Planetary
Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System
by Natalie Starkey · 8 Mar 2018 · 284pp · 89,477 words
will form the basis for any future exploration of comets and asteroids, whether that be for purely scientific study or for commercial gain, such as asteroid mining. However, despite the 4.6 billion years of history contained within the comets and asteroids, we shouldn’t only look to the past, because these
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a new era of space exploration. The reason? There is the potential for great wealth to be made in space. The much-touted plans for asteroid mining that not long ago might have seemed like science fiction are starting to become reality and that is thanks, in part, to the commercialisation of
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cost-effective spacecraft will be able to perform reconnaissance, detailed analysis and mining activities on separate missions. Planetary Resources, another company with a focus on asteroid mining, was set up in Washington state, USA, backed in part by high-profile names such as filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page
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natural resources. This technology could be used in agriculture, environmental monitoring and by energy industries. Although this may seem like a side-step away from asteroid mining, these techniques and spacecraft will eventually be used in the exploration and prospecting phases of space mining. In the meantime, such endeavours will be a
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so-called ‘rare earth elements’, which are all metals and thus are sometimes referred to as the ‘rare earth metals’, are a key focus for asteroid mining. They are metals that you might not have heard of before, except in your school chemistry lessons, such as cerium, dysprosium, neodymium and yttrium, to
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also result in hugely devastating environmental effects. It is a similar situation for the platinum group elements (PGEs), another group that is of interest for asteroid mining and hard to obtain on Earth. The PGEs are a set of six metals that sit in the middle of the periodic table: ruthenium, rhodium
Icehenge
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 29 May 1994 · 334pp · 103,508 words
from Royal Dutch to the center for development of life-support systems, then shifted again to active duty on the miners. The records for the asteroid mining projects were incomplete, because of damage to offices and archives in the Unrest; I found no account of Rust Eagle, or of Emma after 2248
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the Archives to type in the codes. One of the many confidential files for that period was the Subcommittee on Mining’s records on missing asteroid mining ships. Five asteroid miners had been lost in the years 2150 to 2248. Wreckage of the first had been found, but not of the last
Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 23 Oct 1993 · 746pp · 239,969 words
said. His jaw muscles were bunching and relaxing, in a rhythm that reminded her suddenly of Frank Chalmers. “The prisoners were all moved out into asteroid mining. This was the training site for all their secret police. The ones who would never give up. The tortures.” He turned that lizard gaze on
The mote in God's eye
by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle · 30 Jan 2011 · 729pp · 195,181 words
Engineer would give a year's salary to take that electromagnetic fusion system apart. So would the Imperial Traders' Association; that thing's perfect for asteroid mining." "I'd vote against that," Whitbread said with his eyes closed. "If this were a democracy. Sir." "It isn't, and the Admiral's inclined
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Moties the same way that monkeys are related to humanity." "That is interesting, Captain. And I suppose these theories explain why there are monkeys on asteroid mining ship? And why this miner brought two monkeys aboard your war vessel? I have not noticed that we carry monkeys, Captain Blaine." "No, sir." "The
Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson · 19 May 2015 · 945pp · 292,893 words
by a swarm of telescope-wielding satellites sent out by Arjuna Expeditions, a Seattle-based company funded by tech billionaires for the express purpose of asteroid mining. It had been identified as dangerous, with a 0.01 percent probability of striking the Earth within the next hundred years, and so another swarm
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nose, if you thought of it as a vaguely bird-shaped object flying around the world—a home was prepared for Amalthea and for the asteroid mining research project that was planned to grow up around it. Meanwhile, at the aft end, a torus—a donut-shaped habitat about forty meters in
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wide range of capabilities and we all admire your attitude so much.” Sparky hadn’t said a word to anyone else about their attitude. “Obviously, asteroid mining—which you’ve devoted so much of your career to—is a project with a long-term payoff. But we are in short-term mode
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of those who believed that all space exploration should be conducted by robots. Dinah had sat in many a conference where her colleagues in the asteroid mining industry had argued passionately that rockets, which were so expensive, should only be used to transport vitamins. Bulk materials such as metals and water should
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place to dock it? Permission?!” These were largely rhetorical questions. Sean had made seven billion dollars from an Internet startup before throwing his energies into asteroid mining. Along the way he’d sunk a billion or two into other private space startups. “He’s coming up alone,” Larz said, “in a Drop
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bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition
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but would fail if obliged to push a wheelbarrow with a boulder in it. The boulder, of course, was Amalthea, and the wheelbarrow was the asteroid mining complex that had been constructed around it. If this analogy were the one closest to the truth, then the wheelbarrow would have to be abandoned
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Python script that made it easy to finish the job. “I came here thinking I was going to have a drink and a chat about asteroid mining,” he said. “Oh, stop grumbling—this is way more interesting!” Dinah said. The message read: TWO ALIVE. THRUSTING AT FULL POWER. SEND SITREP. “There were
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felt responsible, but he wasn’t, in any normal sense of that word. “So here’s what happened,” Dinah went on. “Sean Probst started an asteroid mining company that sent up a bunch of cubesats and gathered a lot of data about near-Earth asteroids, which he kept secret. He took the
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. Which seemed inadvisable since he was now under the direct coverage of a bucky with a camera in it. The ancient Teklan-Neoander fights of asteroid mining lore might have ended with throat cutting, but not this one. Other things happened in the bog that she did not see. Langobard emerged with
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to me that he and other members of the company had been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone was producing science fiction in which the asteroid mining company was, for once, the good guys.) Marco Kaltofen helped me flesh out the technical details of Ymir’s “steampunk” propulsion system and read over
Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey · 12 Apr 2015 · 370pp · 97,138 words
Bulk Density of the OSIRIS-REx Target Asteroid (101955) Bennu” by S. R. Chesley et al. 2014. Icarus, vol. 235, pp. 5–22. 25. “Profitable Asteroid Mining” by M. Busch 2004. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 57, pp. 301–5. 9: Our Next Home 1. The working group’s deliberations
Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler · 11 May 2015 · 294pp · 80,084 words
1 Building a Better Mosquito: THE WORLD’S FIRST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CREATURE 1 2 3 4 The Great Galactic Gold Rush: THE BIRTH OF THE ASTEROID MINING INDUSTRY 1 2 3 PART THREE: THE FUTURE UNCERTAIN The Psychedelic Renaissance: THE RADICAL WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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. After all, if private spaceships were possible, what about all the other sci-fi mainstays? What about bionics? Robotics? Flying cars? Artificial life? Life extension? Asteroid mining? What about those more ephemeral topics: the future of human evolution, the possibilities of downloadable consciousness? I made a long list — and that list defined
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on-world paradigm shifts, like the birth of the world’s first genetically engineered insect, to off-world paradigm shifts, like the birth of the asteroid mining industry. Finally, in The Future Uncertain, we’ll examine the gray areas, those explosive collisions between science and culture — for example, the use of steroids
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a whole new mythic category: The very first man-made creature to venture into the wild. The Great Galactic Gold Rush THE BIRTH OF THE ASTEROID MINING INDUSTRY The first time I met XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis — the story that opens this book — he told me about the possibilities of
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asteroid mining, arguing that the very first trillionaire on Earth was going to be the person who figured out how to mine the sky. It was, without
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question, one of the zaniest things anyone had said to me. For a science writer, asteroid mining sat somewhere between “cold fusion” and “cloak of invisibility” on the list of things not likely to happen anytime soon. But Peter also argued that
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without asteroid mining — that is, without an economic driver powering space exploration — our species would never really get off our planet. In this, it was hard to disagree
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. Thus, in the aftermath of that conversation, asteroid mining became one of those technologies I decided to track. The story you’re about to read is the result of that effort. It marks the
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first time asteroid mining appeared not in the pages of science fiction (or in a magazine dedicated to future forward ideas), but in a mainstream publication with a general
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floor. And one of the easiest ways for an article to get cut is for the subject matter to seem too outlandish. The fact that asteroid mining made it through this editorial process tells you much about the state of the industry, which is to say that the economic engine that will
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attention to in 2008. That year, in “The Ethics of Exploration,” a speech given at the Manreza Symposium in Hungary, Brother Guy got serious about asteroid mining, which, as it sounds, is the act of using rocket ships to chase down giant, floating space rocks, land on their surface, then mine them
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that a Vatican astronomer was speaking about this topic was odd enough, but Brother Guy’s concerns that day were less about the possibility of asteroid mining ever occurring and more about the ethical consequences that would result. “On the one hand,” he said, “it’s great. You’ve taken all of
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strangest part — all of this could happen much sooner than you might expect. In the fifty years since Vostok 1, the first ever manned spaceflight, asteroid mining has gone from a perennial pipedream of the Star Trek Forever crowd to a serious enough proposition that a Vatican astronomer felt the need to
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that flew Stephen Hawking into zero-G and sent billionaire Dennis Tito to the International Space Station), announced Planetary Resources Inc. (PRI), a newly formed asteroid mining company. This time, it was Comedy Central host Jon Stewart who summed things up nicely: “Space pioneers going to mine motherfucking asteroids for precious materials
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Paul Simak’s short story “Asteroids of Gold” — wherein the brothers Vernon and Vince Drake earn their keep as space miners. By the early 1940s, asteroid mining had become a sci-fi mainstay. Concurrently, a Libertarian ethos began to infuse these tales. Miners, usually known as “rock rats,” were seen as frontiersmen
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, asteroids as the new Wild West. This theme progressed until the 1970s and 1980s, wherein asteroid mining came to be seen as an anti-environmental, hard-right fairy tale: Don’t worry about using up all the resources here on Earth because
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of the space community, mostly, this is where things still stand, but inside the community, in the past few decades, a tectonic shift has occurred: Asteroid mining has gone from science fiction to science fact. What really bridged that gap was a trilogy of recent space missions. The first of those was
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to take samples of comet dust, then turned around, traveled another billion miles, and brought those samples back to Earth in 2006. Since any successful asteroid mining mission is going to require not only getting to an asteroid but landing on it, digging in, and then coming back home, by far the
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Earth — which makes Itokawa rich in exactly the kinds of minerals we want to mine. “That scrape of the surface confirmed we’re capable of asteroid mining,” says Brother Guy. “That’s one of the main differences between drilling for minerals here on Earth and on asteroids. The Earth has been chemically
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discovered no species-ending impacts in our near future, but there have been other gains as well. “All of this mapping can be used for asteroid mining,” says Asphaug. “Sure, we’re trying to save the world from a catastrophic event, but along the way we’ve drawn up a pretty good
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how to make those dreams into reality.” XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis agrees, but also feels the discovery of deep-sea oil deposits were equally critical. “Asteroid mining is about working robotically in a very far away, very harsh, and extreme environment. Well, the first deep oil deposit was found by Shell in
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place multibillion dollars bets [a typical deep-sea platform runs between five and fifty billion] on high-risk, robotically-run, resource extraction missions — which is asteroid mining to a tee.” “You need to examine the facts,” says Eric Anderson, “No laws of physics need to be reconfigured to mine an asteroid. There
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, Planetary Resources has raised over $1.5 million to help launch the ARKYD 100 space telescope, which is specifically designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroid mining prospects. There’s also President Obama’s announcement that he wants to land astronauts on an asteroid by 2025. Teams at Johnson Space Center in
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surveys, and infrastructure development. Major exploitation of the West’s mineral riches began in 1848 and helped power American industrialization over the succeeding century. With asteroid mining we also may face a period of several decades where the world’s space agencies will support asteroid, lunar, and Martian resource exploration while key
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infrastructure is improved. Profitable commercial development of extraterrestrial resources may begin midcentury and fundamentally shape Earth’s economy before this century is out.” The reason asteroid mining will reshape the global economy comes down to the numbers. In his Manreza lecture, Brother Guy examined the value of a typical S-class asteroid
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on water. There’s no cost. Just warm up a chunk and off you go.” Nor is this where possibilities end. As far out as asteroid mining or Mars’s colonies might still seem, there’s much more in the works. University of Arizona emeritus professor John Lewis, in his now classic
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of transportation back to Earth!” So how far are we from launch? Eric Anderson thinks we’re five to ten years away from our first asteroid mining mission, and a great many people in the private space sector agree. NASA believes things will go the other way round: First we’ll have
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artificial intelligence, 27–28, 223. See also mind uploading artificial limbs. See prosthetics Ashcroft, John, 210 Asimov, Isaac, 27 Asphaug, Erik, 147 aspirational genome, 131 asteroid mining, 141–52 compared to exploration of North America, 149 economics of, 149–50 mapping for, 147–48 for platinum-group metals, 150 science fiction on
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Cierva, Juan de la, 102 The City and the Stars (Clarke), 27 Clarke, Arthur C., 27 Clean Air Act, 84 climate change, 111–14, 119 asteroid mining and, 145–46 insect-borne illnesses and, 134 Clinton, Bill, 84, 118, 207 Clinton, Hillary, 224, 230 cloning legislation against, 215–16 stem cells and
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Jacob, Francis, 53 Jacobs-Lorena, Marcelo, 138–39 Jacobson, Cecil, 258 Jaeger, William, 257 James, Anthony, 137, 138 James, William, 168 Janiger, Oscar, 169 Japan asteroid mining missions by, 146–47 nuclear power in, 117, 122–23 Jekot, Walter, 195, 196, 197 Jennings, Ken, 223 Jeopardy (TV show), 223 Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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–37 Rutan, Burt, 151 Salk, Jonas, 55 Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, 168 Saskatchewan Study, 169 Satava, Richard, 15 Schmidt, Eric, 145 Schwartz, Peter, 11 science fiction on asteroid mining, 145, 147–48 on mind uploading, 27–28 terraforming in, 87 Sears, Derek, 150 Seattle Study, 39–40 self, boundaries of, 46–47 Selfridge, Tom
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–27, 28, 30–31 sound barrier, xii, 101 Southern Baptist Church, 260 Space Adventures Ltd., 145 SpaceShipOne, 129 SpaceShipTwo, xiii, 129 space travel, 129–30 asteroid mining and, 141–52 ethics of, 143–47 off-world colonies and, 150–51 XPRIZE competition for, xi–xiii, 129 Special Theory of Relativity, 109 SPECT
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 3 Feb 2015 · 368pp · 96,825 words
news would look and sound in 2012?” What Stewart was boom-booming about was Planetary Resources, Inc.,2 the asteroid-mining company I cofounded with Eric Anderson in 2009 and announced in 2012. Clearly, asteroid mining is a crazy science-fiction idea, bold on every level. To start this kind of company with any
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resources has always been the main reason for attempting the difficult and dangerous.” This was when Eric and I started having a serious discussion about asteroid mining. We weren’t the first folks to have this discussion. The idea of catching up to giant floating rocks, mining them for precious metals and
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to 1895, when first proposed by the father of the Russian space program, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky.8 Between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, asteroid mining became a science-fiction mainstay, but it started to become science fact in the 1990s, when a trio of space missions (NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker
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the space community. Our team was an assortment of the best and the brightest. But because we were proposing to do something as bold as asteroid mining, credible wasn’t enough. For this reason, we kept the company secret for nearly three years, spending that period pushing ourselves further toward the line
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of the world’s space agencies are ISU alumni. And while we haven’t yet built our orbital extension, we’re definitely betting that once asteroid mining becomes the norm, our space-based campus won’t be far behind. Peter’s Laws—Mindset Matters During the earliest days of ISU, I shared
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a vision for tomorrow, pull yourself toward it. I wanted a future that included private commercial space flight, so I launched the XPRIZE. I saw asteroid mining as a viable reality, so I cofounded Planetary Resources. #10: WHEN FACED WITHOUT A CHALLENGE—MAKE ONE! We humans are hardwired for challenge. This is
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lots. Here’s a Goddam Museum.” Case Study 3: The ARKYD Space Telescope—Access for Everyone When Eric Anderson, Chris Lewicki, and I launched our asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, we knew we needed a powerful community behind us. When you’re doing something as radical as
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asteroid mining, having a group of passionate supporters is downright necessary. The question was how we could actively and authentically engage the public in our mission to
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been able to tilt our heads upward and gaze in wonder. And sometime in the next ten years we are going to launch our first asteroid mining mission. No doubt about it, we are a species built for bold. But without bold leadership to help us set the course, our history also
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, 111, 117, 119, 120, 122 Space Adventures Limited, 96, 291n space exploration, 81, 96, 97–100, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 139, 230, 244 asteroid mining in, 95–96, 97–99, 107, 109, 179, 221, 276 classifying of galaxies and, 219–21, 228 commercial tourism projects in, 96–97, 109, 115
How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books)
by Stephen Petranek · 6 Jul 2015 · 70pp · 22,172 words
it makes much more sense to mine those metals from Mars. Both Mars and the miniplanet Ceres would make ideal bases from which to launch asteroid mining operations, with expendable cargo ships sent into low-cost Hohmann transfer orbits to end up months later on Earth (or on Mars itself, which will
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 16 Oct 2017 · 398pp · 105,032 words
1. INTRODUCTION: Soonish. Emphasis on the Ish SECTION 1 The Universe, Soonish 2. CHEAP ACCESS TO SPACE: The Final Frontier Is Too Damn Expensive 3. ASTEROID MINING: Rummaging Through the Solar System’s Junkyard SECTION 2 Stuff, Soonish 4. FUSION POWER: It Powers the Sun, and That’s Nice, but Can It
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about Dr. Bull since the early nineties. In all likelihood, we’ll never know for certain who cut short his strange and tragic career. 3. Asteroid Mining Rummaging Through the Solar System’s Junkyard The Earth was once a whole lot hotter. Long story short, that’s why you can’t have
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large, the really fun stuff is hard to get. And the more we dig up, the harder it gets to find more. This is where asteroid mining starts to look interesting. Asteroids are basically the junk that goes into making a planet, but they never permanently coalesced into giant space balls. This
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great, but remember, buying an Airbus A380 costs about $400 million, so we’re not entirely outside the realm of possibility. One way to get asteroid mining to be a thing is to make some profit back home. For example, if you can mine platinum in space, you can sell it for
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better. A typical big asteroid has an escape velocity of about half a mile per hour. This means that if you succeed in creating an asteroid mining base, you can pitch refined asteroid contents back to Earth at very low cost. That said, from our research and interviews, it seems unlikely that
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lode, in contrast, each is likely to rush to sell off its platinum before its rivals do. Given the high fixed cost of space travel, asteroid mining is very likely to start with few firms, giving first movers a great opportunity to profit from whatever resources they find. Over time, however, success
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breeds imitation, so later generations of asteroid miners should beware.” So, with all this difficulty, why are we talking about asteroid mining? Well, there’s something bigger at stake here. It might not be worth it to ship a giant cargo of iron 280 million miles just
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figure out how to manufacture things in space, then the cost of space travel goes down dramatically. Gigantic space colonies become a feasible option. And asteroid mining could help us get around once we’re already in space. Water and carbon collected from the asteroids can be turned into rocket fuel, which
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. Sweetened Edible Formulations. U.S. Patent Application US 05/838,211, filed September 30, 1977.4262032A. Google Patents. google.com/patents/US4262032. Lewis, John S. Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy. Mountain View, Calif.: Deep Space Industries, 2014. Liang, P., Xu, Y., Zhang, X., Ding, C., Huang, R., Zhang
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, 211 art, 183 artemisinin, 198–200 artificial intelligence, 136, 139–40 artificial organs, see bioprinting artspeak, 138 Artsutanov, Yuri, 35 Asian elephants, 223 Asians, 196n asteroid mining, 52–69, 320n benefits of, 68–69 environmental degradation in, 66–67 finances of, 54–56 law and order in, 65–66 problems facing, 58
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would, of course, diminish this issue. * One solution could be to just make the panels in space. Dr. Elvis (whom you’ll remember from the asteroid mining chapter) pointed out that lots of the stuff needed to make solar panels can be found in asteroids, so you could gather up the materials
The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton · 5 Nov 2016 · 321pp · 89,109 words
becomes the twenty-first century of creation of the East India Corporation by Britain (Fig. 6.3). Fig. 6.3Concepts for capturing materials associated with asteroid mining (Image courtesy of NASA.) Commercial space activities seem likely to continue to grow apace. Space commerce may indeed ultimately grow to become a trillion dollar
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words
like this one, will be as familiar as a Boeing 737. After watching the landing streamed on Twitter, Blumenthal – an early stage investor in an asteroid mining company – shares it with a WhatsApp group of like-minded individuals. Among them are a highly paid NBA coach and a Hollywood director. To the
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it won’t for another decade at least. That’s because this small group of people will be at the front of the queue when asteroid mining becomes the fastest-growing industry in history. It won’t last, of course, but not much does these days. Leia Leia keys in the code
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intends to deploy in its manned missions to Mars in the 2020s. All of these events share a certain sense of the future. Renewable energy, asteroid mining, rockets which can be used multiple times and even fly to Mars, industry leaders openly discussing the implications of AI, DIY enthusiasts immersing themselves in
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realm of freedom would remain out of reach. Except the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore – because we’ll mine the sky instead. Asteroid Mining In 2017 Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, unveiled the company’s next step in conquering the final frontier. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, he
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space. The United States is far from acting uniquely in this respect. By January 2017 Luxembourg had already begun to create the legal frameworks for asteroid mining companies to base themselves in the Duchy, an offer quickly taken up by Planetary Resources – a company looking to establish itself as a key player
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like a crumb in a supermarket. With the right technology mineral scarcity too would become a thing of the past. The necessary advances to make asteroid mining a reality are steadily emerging. Japan’s unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft successfully landed on the 25143 Itokawa asteroid in 2005, returning to Earth with samples of
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2014 the Japanese Space Agency launched a successor mission, Hayabusa 2, with the asteroid 162173 Ryugu – widely viewed as the most cost-effective option for asteroid mining – its intended destination. Hayabusa 2 landed in June 2018 and is expected to return to Earth with samples some time in 2020. Japan isn’t
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the mid-2020s. That, combined with the rise of regular, ultra-cheap launches, and increasingly sophisticated landers and robotics, will shape the opening rounds of asteroid mining. When combined with improvements in precision robotics – see the rapid development of the Atlas robot – an outline for the necessary technologies begins to emerge. Once
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new rare earth mine, which MIT presently puts at around $1 billion. All of which means that once the full architecture is in place for asteroid mining, perhaps as soon as 2030, the marginal cost of each new mine will fall for every asteroid that is exploited. This will create a feedback
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loop of ever-improving infrastructure and rising incentives to extract minerals beyond our home planet. That isn’t to say asteroid mining doesn’t have significant challenges to overcome before becoming a viable industry. Robots with the requisite levels of sensory-motor coordination are likely decades away
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of these problems can be surmounted – although as with all emerging industries how it will unfold is impossible to predict. But given the terrestrial challenges asteroid mining could address, primarily resource scarcity, as well as the new horizons it will undoubtedly open up, its rise over the coming century appears inevitable. Abundance
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-first century, under conditions of abundance capitalism pursues a form of rationing in order to ensure profits. Given the potentially limitless wealth made possible by asteroid mining, that same logic would be applied by private enterprise in the sector and their allies in politics. As with information, and soon renewable energy too
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June 2014. Withnall, Adam. ‘Britain Has Only 100 Harvests Left in Its Farm Soil as Scientists Warn of Growing “Agricultural Crisis”’. Independent, 20 October 2014. Asteroid Mining Ludacer, Rob and Jessica Orwig. ‘SpaceX Is about to Launch Its Monster Mars Rocket for the First Time – Here’s How It Stacks Up Against
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. ‘Hayabusa-2 Mission Target Asteroid 162173 Ryugu (1999 JU3): Searching for the Object’s Spin-Axis Orientation’. Astronomy & Astrophysics, March 2017. Planetaryresources.com Wall, Mike. ‘Asteroid Mining May Be a Reality by 2025’. Space.com, 11 August 2015. Yongliao, Zou. ‘China’s Deep-Space Exploration to 2030’. Chinese Journal of Space Science
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, 84 Arkwright, Richard, 208 Arkyd, 132 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 33 artificial intelligence (AI), 90 asteroid 16 Psyche, 134 asteroid belt, 131 asteroid mining, 119–20, 133–4 Atlas robot, 82–3, 132 automation actual, 88–92 growth of, 239 in medicine, 91 autonomy autonomous vehicles, 83–6 of
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renewables, 106 ‘Reopening the American Frontier: Exploring How the Outer Space Treaty Will Impact American Commerce and Settlement in Space’, 129 Resolution Foundation, 58 resources asteroid mining, 119–20 globalism and, 197 post-scarcity in, 117–37 private space industry, 120–1 space, 119–37 Ricardo, David, 69, 233 rice production, 161
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–14 solar power/energy about, 101–5, 107 Global South and, 106–11 in Saudi Arabia, 220–1 Solow, Robert, 233 Sondergaard, Peter, 87 space asteroid mining, 133–4 falling costs of, 122–4 mineral wealth in, 134–7 Moon Express, 125–6 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), 130–1 Outer Space Treaty
Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words
since the moon missions of the late 1960s and early ’70s. But this complex new frontier of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, space tourism, Mars cyclers, and asteroid mining is as different as could be from the Apollo era. In Space 2.0, ace science writer Rod Pyle—an advisor to NASA and the
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accurate, yet packed with information. It’s a primer on rocketry and other space-related industries, national and international space programs, key facilities, planetary defense, asteroid mining, bases in space and more. Space 2.0 is a beginner’s must-read for anyone contemplating an investment in the space industry or a
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new companies, and sometimes the first in subsequent rounds of funding. One example Anderson cited was Planetary Resources, a company founded in 2009 to develop asteroid mining via robotic spacecraft. Space Angels has invested in the company at each funding opportunity. “We are a major supporter of their team and what they
Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life
by Donald Goldsmith · 9 Sep 2018 · 265pp · 76,875 words
, osmium, palladium, platinum, tungsten, ruthenium, rhenium, and even rhodium, all of which now have important applications in modern technological life. In considering the economics of asteroid mining, the most favored candidates naturally belong to the class of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs)—those whose orbits bring them closest to Earth. The larger NEAs
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, announced its plans to create Prospector-X, a probe designed to test the technologies required to achieve automated asteroid mining at a comparatively low cost.12 Since Prospector-X will only orbit the Earth, asteroid mining can hardly lie in DSI’s immediate future, but in the longer term, no technological obstacle seems to
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the legislation carefully cites the United States’ international obligations, which contain no explicit prohibition of the commercial use or extraction of space resources. After serious asteroid-mining operations have begun, legal arguments may increase over what activities may or may not conform to the Outer Space Treaty.15 The most important issues
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of the SPACE act is available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2262. 12. Alex Létourneau, “Asteroid Mining Becoming More of a Reality,” Forbes, January 25, 2013. 13. Mariella Moon, “Luxembourg’s Asteroid Mining Law Takes Effect August 1st [2017],” available at https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/30/luxembourg
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-asteroid-mining-law-august-1/. 14. Title IV, Section (402) of the SPACE Act, available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress
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. 15. Kenneth Chang, “If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There?,” New York Times, November 26, 2017. 16. Sagi Kfir, “Is Asteroid Mining Legal? The Truth Behind Title IV of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015,” available at http://deepspaceindustries.com/is
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-asteroid-mining-legal/. 17. Peter Holley, “Stephen Hawking Just Gave Humanity a Due Date for Finding Another Planet,” Washington Post, November 17, 2016. 18. Sara Fecht, “Stephen
The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton · 1 May 2019 · 319pp · 100,984 words
itself, for those who look up at its face and know that it is that world in reflection, not space in general, that they want, asteroid mining carries the threat of lunar marginalization, even irrelevance. It is not the only such threat. To many for whom an interest in, even devotion to
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
by Christopher Paolini · 14 Sep 2020 · 1,171pp · 309,640 words
exploration and economic development within the Solar System (Sol). First humans land on Mars. Moon base built, as well as several space stations throughout Sol. Asteroid mining starts. 2054–2104: With the space elevator up, colonization of the Solar System accelerates. Hutterite Expansion begins. First floating city on Venus established. Permanent (although
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 10 Sep 2018 · 745pp · 207,187 words
missions to other asteroids. If SP1 goes above that price point, the rest of us will just go out and mine our own asteroids. Unquestionably, asteroid mining will one day be a trillion-dollar industry, even if the vast increase in supply depresses the high prices at which rare earths are currently
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traded. As the price of highly useful goods drops, the number of affordable applications tends to grow. In the shorter run, however, since asteroid mining won’t start tomorrow—although startups are multiplying, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, for instance, is proposing a fleet of solar-wind-powered nanosatellites to
The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees · 18 Apr 2022 · 192pp · 63,813 words
programs, ARM was cancelled in 2017, leaving this project on hold for the time being.9 In the same year that NASA created ARM, private asteroid mining took a step forward in planning with the formation of Deep Space Industries (DSI), a privately held corporation aiming to create a robotic probe to
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test the technology required for asteroid mining.10 Headquartered in Luxembourg, which seems eager to become the center of the asteroid mining industry, DSI planned to develop its own automated vehicle to leave near-Earth orbit to visit near-Earth asteroids
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a good run of publicity until its acquisition in 2019 by Bradford Industries, which announced that it would concentrate on space propulsion systems rather than asteroid mining. A few months earlier, Planetary Resources, a United States company founded in 2009 to create a trillion-dollar business in
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asteroid mining, became part of ConsenSys, which focuses primarily on bringing blockchain technology into space, presumably to avoid all governmental interference.11 During the previous decade, Planetary
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additional funding led to the company’s sale to ConsenSys. GOLD RUSH 2049? Although NASA and the companies just described have abandoned their plans for asteroid mining and asteroid retrieval, we may expect that future decades will see similar and more expansive plans to extract value from the primordial rock piles of
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-says-space-ventures-will-spawn-first-trillionaire-n352271. 8. Ted Cruz, quoted in Vishal Thakur, “Will Asteroid Mining Mint the First Trillionaire?,” Science ABC, last updated August 6, 2021, https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/universe/will-asteroid-mining-mint-the-first-trillionaire.html. 9. On ARM’s history, see “Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission: ARRM
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 6 Nov 2023 · 490pp · 132,502 words
the book landed in stores, they were routine. What would humanity do with these new powers? One clue came from research we’d done on asteroid mining, the attempt to harvest valuable matter from the asteroid belt or near-Earth objects. Our analysis was that harvesting asteroids for commodities to be used
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space resources without limit. And at least Luxembourg seemed to agree, passing a similar law and dumping a ton of money into two US-based asteroid mining companies. Space access was getting easier, resources in space were plentiful, countries were starting to give the green light for developers to go nuts, and
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shroud the world in darkness. Despite its distance from Earth, Mars does have some positional value as a launch spot. We’re skeptical of the asteroid-mining business, but if one day humanity is capable of processing asteroids at a profit, Mars is near the main belt asteroids, and its 40 percent
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’ worth of platinum-group metals is around a few dozen. We talked to Dr. Martin Elvis,[*] whose name is Elvis, and who is also an asteroid-mining expert, and he said he expected the number to go higher, but that the ultimate goal would have to be mining the asteroids in the
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a space station, to provide things like drinking water will take far less energy than shipping it from Earth. There could one day be significant asteroid-mining operations, but it’s hard to see why you’d ever want a large population living there. Indeed, asteroid-settlement proposals are rare, with the
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of Planetary Resources, Inc., told us that the vagueness of the law was a serious barrier to investment and contributed to the fall of his asteroid mining company. Legal scholars we talked to had even bigger concerns—that the law is unprepared for modern developments, and that any kind of race to
Children of Ruin
by Adrian Tchaikovsky · 13 May 2019 · 471pp · 147,210 words
their gravity well if they hadn’t already had a lifeline to space. As it is, the water that fills the Requisitioner came from tardigrade asteroid mining, jettisoned from the outer solar system towards the catch points near Damascus to be cleaned up and repurposed as living space. The energy required to
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think of them as wars – just a continuation of wrestling for dominance by other means – but Senkovi would have. Skirmishes over the products of the asteroid mining, just like the one Salome and Rebekah were triumphant in, were escalating all over the system. Lot’s collective fought as much as any, justifying
Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya · 12 Jan 2018 · 571pp · 124,448 words
the government. This is evident in the emerging space tourism market, commercial launch systems that service the government and private sectors, resource recovery plans via asteroid mining and sample return from the Moon, and privately financed space-based science . Without a doubt, governments are still the largest customers. This will change as
The Quantum Magician
by Derek Künsken · 1 Oct 2018 · 430pp · 107,765 words
Bel was doing. She understood the facts individually, but not in relation to each other. Bel had leased several used wormhole-capable cargo ships, three asteroid mines and a shipping concern on the Port Stubbs side of the wormhole. His AIs had been gathering equipment too—powerful computers, industrial robotics factories, bioreactors
Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World
by Oliver Morton · 15 Feb 2003 · 409pp · 129,423 words
wrote the first book on the topic, New Earths. *However, there is another, nontechnical issue here that might throw Zubrin’s ideas off track. If asteroid mining is advanced enough to produce fleets of orbiting mirrors for a terraforming project, it might be a serious competitor to any mining on Mars and
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian · 7 Oct 2024 · 336pp · 104,899 words
backing. But spacefaring technology has advanced to the point that civilians can take part, and the fledgling “NewSpace” industry—an umbrella term for commercial spaceflight, asteroid mining, and other private ventures—has found eager supporters in the investor class. Twenty-first-century space entrepreneurs speak of a new “gold rush” and compare
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a solution in the trove of untapped water, minerals, and metals in outer space. In 2017, Goldman Sachs sent a note to clients claiming that asteroid mining “could be more realistic than perceived,” thanks to the falling cost of launching rockets and the vast quantities of platinum sitting on space rocks, just
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and about his dream of finding life on other planets. Schmit sensed Worden would hit it off with Schneider, so he introduced them. At first, asteroid mining struck Schneider as crazy. “I listened to him and wondered what this guy might have smoked this morning; it sounded like complete science fiction,” Schneider
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seabed in its territorial waters for nickel and manganese—a practice some international lawyers have condemned for its far-reaching consequences, but that, much like asteroid mining, seems to be technically permissible, at least for now.) One state really is all it takes for space resources to enter the terrestrial market. Five
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, not yet—but they would be promoting space education, sending delegates to other space agencies, and solidifying Luxembourg’s role in this nascent economy. If asteroid mining does, in fact, take off, Luxembourg will be what Schneider’s friends in Silicon Valley might call an early adopter. It’s a gamble, of
The Rare Metals War
by Guillaume Pitron · 15 Feb 2020 · 249pp · 66,492 words
they needed to pursue their space mining ambitions. Among these businesses are Space Resources Australia, its US counterpart, Platinoid Mines Corporation, and its British counterpart, Asteroid Mining Corporation, which has announced the launch of its first asteroid-exploration probe for 2023.33 For the time being, commercial space exploitation is utopian at
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like Luxembourg, which is already securing its position.36 In 2016, its finance minister, Etienne Schneider, announced the Asteroid Mining Plan — the first European space initiative to promote a favourable legal framework for asteroid mining. In 2019, he signed an agreement with the US to share intelligence on space. There is even the provision
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, 2015. H.R.2262 — US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, 114th Congress (2015–2016). Refer to websites of Space Resources Australia, Platinoid Mines Corporation and Asteroid Mining Corporation. NewSpace entrepreneurs include Elon Musk of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, or Greg Wyler, the director of One Web Interviews with
Between the Strokes of Night
by Charles Sheffield · 28 Apr 2013 · 351pp · 111,121 words
the United Nations, the story had not ended there. Looking at the panorama of development above her, Judith Niles was forced to marvel. Wherry’s asteroid mining operations had provided the base metals to create and then expand Salter Station. But at the same time, as no more than a by-product
A Half-Built Garden
by Ruthanna Emrys · 25 Jul 2022 · 431pp · 127,720 words
we want this for the same reason our ancestral companies did.” Viola frowned and shifted Brice from one hip to the other. “Your ancestral companies.” “Asteroid mining. Private launch vehicles. Lunar hotels. We barely got started before the networks cut off our power and the nations cut off our funding, but for
Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr · 14 Jun 2017 · 431pp · 129,071 words
Space Industries, Daniel Faber, a tall, athletic, charismatic genius from Tasmania. Sat on a stool at the breakfast counter, I enquired after his path into asteroid mining. ‘I went to the University of New South Wales and eventually got bored of hang-gliding, windsurfing and building solar cars,’ he told me. ‘I
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things that could pay for the first permanent job in orbit.’ There were three items on his list: space-based solar power, space tourism and asteroid mining. ‘Solar power needs resources in space otherwise it’s not economic and I couldn’t see myself as a tour operator. So here we are
The Ringworld engineers
by Larry Niven · 12 Nov 1985 · 388pp · 102,994 words
the change to do that for a hominid. And the Hindmost says Prill’s supply was stolen.” Chmeee was nodding. “I remember. One of your asteroid mining craft boarded the abandoned Pak spacecraft. The oldest man in the crew smelled tree-of-life and went mad. He ate beyond the capacity of
Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser · 21 Oct 2019 · 391pp · 123,597 words
help them set up a party as a venue for them to do so. If I came to Davos, I could help, Chester said. The asteroid mining company would pay us handsomely. It was more money earned in one day than I could have made at SCL that whole month. I knew
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words
go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself. For me, [take asteroid mining as an example]. I don’t have a lot of asteroid mining competition out there, or prospecting. Or take human longevity, trying to add 40 years in healthy lifespan with HLI. There
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scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. In other words: He fuels real-world mad scientists tackling things like asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, life extension, and more. He is currently the founder and CEO of Kernel, which is developing the world’s first neuroprosthesis [brain-implantable
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler · 6 May 2013 · 445pp · 105,255 words
loomed large in the human imagination, the Moon, while I advocated using the more attractive resources offered by the less charismatic asteroids; the concept of asteroid mining at first gained little traction, yet missions to asteroids have become part of NASA’s plans, now slated for 2025, before any return to the
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applications of atomically precise manufacturing and, 259, 261–262, 268–269, 284 Armstrong, Neil, 112 Arrhenius equation, 292 Assemblers, 329 Assembly methods, molecular, 190–193 Asteroid mining, 15n Astronautics, 133 Atomically precise fabrication, 177–193 biological examples of, 80–82 biomolecular engineering as, 182–184 chemical synthesis as, 82–84, 179–181
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by Laura Shin · 22 Feb 2022 · 506pp · 151,753 words
ConsenSys’s annual burn rate was more than $100 million—and in 2018 it would only bring in $21 million.9 It would acquire an asteroid-mining company called Planetary Resources. Joe released a statement saying, “Bringing deep space capabilities into the ConsenSys ecosystem reflects our belief in the potential for Ethereum
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550, but it did announce another round of layoffs—14 percent of its staff. In May, it would open-source the intellectual property of its asteroid-mining acquisition and auction off its physical assets.14 In August 2020, it acquired JPMorgan’s enterprise blockchain platform, and The Block reported it was set
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-mess-how-long-will-he-prop-it-up/?sh=1bc648dd2f0a. 10. Nikhilesh De, “Ethereum Studio ConsenSys Just Bought an Asteroid Mining Company,” CoinDesk, November 1, 2018, https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-studio-consensys-acquires-asteroid-mining-space-startup. 11. David Canellis, “What we know about the ConsenSys layoffs, as told by a ‘fired’ employee
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby · 22 Nov 2013 · 165pp · 45,397 words
, invisibility cloaks and holes in time, for example-and commercial exceptions such as Google's X Lab, which is currently working on space elevators and asteroid mining, it feels today as if the era of big ideas and fantastic dreams has passed. Much of today's dreaming around technology is shaped by
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being considered once again, it is anything but romantic. The messy human details-ethical, psychological, and physical-are right in the foreground. Planetary Resources Inc., Asteroid Mining, 2012. Swarms of lowcost robotic spacecraft will enable extraction of resources from near-earth asteroids. Joseph Popper, The One-Way Ticket, 2012. Film still. SOCIAL
Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman · 2 Mar 2021 · 332pp · 100,245 words
Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon,” NASA, August 1993. Today well-funded start-ups: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, “How the Asteroid-Mining Bubble Burst,” MIT Technology Review, June 26, 2019. On mining the moon, see Mike Wall, “Trump Signs Executive Order to Support Moon Mining, Tap Asteroid
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
by Ryan North · 17 Sep 2018 · 643pp · 131,673 words
sites capped before recycling became prevalent would have a higher concentration of aluminum—thanks to discarded aluminum cans—than actual aluminum mines) 2009 CE (first asteroid mining company founded) PREREQUISITES candles (for seeing underground), metal tools (for mining rocks and percussion mining), animal husbandry (for domestic birds like canaries) HOW TO INVENT
Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee · 16 May 2023 · 302pp · 112,390 words
like food scarcity, aging populations, and climate change. And in Fully Automated Luxury Communism, British author Aaron Bastani argues that technologies like cheap solar energy, asteroid mining, and CRISPR gene-editing will lead us into a world of post-scarcity universal health and leisure. For me, one of the most interesting aspects
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that once bound husbands and wives to each other for life. The idea of no-fault divorce once seemed as utopian as the concept of asteroid mining. Recent global realities have begun to shake people. Our innate tendency toward inertia and the lazy comforts of the status quo no longer feel viable
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein · 23 Apr 2018 · 282pp · 81,873 words
the stars and felt wonder, Diamandis saw spoils ripe for plunder. “The Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources,” he said. His asteroid mining venture, Planetary Resources, was an effort to gain first-mover advantage on exploiting the mineral wealth of places beyond earth. “In the same way that
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
by Paul Kingsnorth · 23 Sep 2025 · 388pp · 110,920 words
and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what
Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar · 2 Nov 2021
underwrites further evolution of technology. Fusion power is everywhere, and in miniaturised form. The Mars settlement leads in terraforming the Red Planet, even as an asteroid mining station on Ceres helps establish a settlement on Titan. So-called fifth wave technologies begin to emerge: antimatter engines, light sails, ramjet fusion engines and
A Closed and Common Orbit
by Becky Chambers · 19 Oct 2016 · 374pp · 109,513 words
?’ Sidra had already crafted a new response file on her way inside. She deployed it, savouring the moment. ‘Well, I’m the captain of an asteroid mining ship.’ ‘Oh, stars,’ Tak muttered. Sidra continued brightly. ‘I’ve been thinking of replacing my crew’s suits.’ The kit’s toes curled within their
With a Little Help
by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton and Russell Galen · 7 Dec 2010 · 549pp · 116,200 words
daily lives. There would be aliens, obviously. Probably there would be some sort of intergalactic governing body, maybe a war involving a trade federation, some asteroid mines. At the very least, a mission to Mars. But it doesn't seem to be shaping up that way. 28 There's always something that
The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman · 1 Jan 2013 · 514pp · 152,903 words
at Davos and TED, but to imagine that either Spengler or Jaspers have something interesting or original to tell us about cloning, e-books, or asteroid mining is foolish. “A new era requires a new vocabulary,” the Khannas proclaim—only to embrace the terminology that was already in place by the end
Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King · 5 May 2016 · 385pp · 111,113 words
by the end of the decade. In 30 years, the biggest companies will be based around personalised AIs, new energy and infrastructure, and even possibly Asteroid mining for rare metals powering technology. Mobile and digital money will be significant players, too. The moniker citizen of the world will become a more viable
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje · 14 Aug 2020 · 375pp · 105,586 words
in a quest for global power. Doubtless it’s for this reason that the capitalist urge today has become extra-planetary, with its dreams of asteroid mining and space colonisation.14 Cultivating a historical memory of how violent and ultimately dysfunctional the first historical episode of capital formation proved may help to
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 18 Mar 2025 · 227pp · 84,566 words
worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now—artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and gene editing—at the center of a post-work, post-scarcity vision.11 “What if everything could change?” he
The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg · 14 Jun 2023 · 295pp · 87,204 words
project. As a space enthusiast, I would regret that. But what was it all about, really? We did not get any moon bases and no asteroid mining, no solar power in space, no space tourism and no journey towards Mars and into outer space. Precisely because it was all about political symbolism
Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
by Joanna Walsh · 22 Sep 2025 · 255pp · 80,203 words
offers decentralised, cross-border finance with the disturbing potential to act and extract across local, even global, legislative borders. (Consensys also owns Planetary Resources, an asteroid-mining company.) One reason copyright has never worked online is that the net is not a scarcity economy. Unlike the agricultural commons whose tragedy, according to
Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav · 3 Nov 2020 · 175pp · 45,815 words
. This term flourished for five years as a meme before Bastani’s book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene editing, asteroid mining, and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared.14 It provided a much-needed counterweight to left-wing