Planetary Resources; grab your pickaxe and look to the sky!

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Oh man oh god oh man oh god OH MAN! It is time for some motherfuckin amazing news!

So in Seattle, Wa. This week a conference took place and a company was bankrolled by some forward thinking billionaires with the goal and dream in mind to expand our resource availability and eventual expansion into space.

Among those names being Peter H. Diamandis (X-prize foundation), David Vaskevitch (former CTO Microsoft), and then some. Even James Cameron is lending his clout to this company.

Enter Planetary Resources.

and now an article on the matter:

Space exploration needs a kick in the pants, and it will get one Tuesday when a group of high-tech billionaires announces plans to mine asteroids, says a scientific adviser to the enterprise.

And there's money to be made, too, adds John S. Lewis, a retired University of Arizona professor of space science who now lives in Anacortes.

"We're talking resources with market values in the trillions," said Lewis, author of "Mining the Sky." "It's not at all surprising that it's billionaires who are steppingup to the plate. They think big and they know a big investment is required to make money."

Two of Lewis' former students are among the driving forces behind the project, and he will join them at Seattle's Museum of Flight on Tuesday for the unveiling of a new company called Planetary Resources.

Former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi, one of several investors,will also be there.

Money men who won't make an appearance include "Titanic" and "Avatar" filmmaker James Cameron, Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.

For decades, Lewis has been a self-described "voice in the wilderness," calling for anew industry to mine the abundant resources of space.

"There's alot of work that has to be done before we start cutting metal," he said. "But these are things that we've been thinking about for a long time."

Books running to a thousand pages or more have been written on processing minerals in space, he said.

Many space veterans are skeptical, and even Lewis admits to significant hurdles,such as finding customers for materials mined in space.

Asteroids are rich in nickel,platinum and other valuable minerals, but because it is so expensive to shuttle things down to the Earth's surface, it will only make economic sense if the resources can be used in space.

One possibility would be to mine materials and use them in space to build solar arrays, which could beam electricity to Earth via microwave relay.

Asteroids are also rich in water, which can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. That opens the possibility of shipping the water from the asteroid to a space station orbiting the Earth — a"downhill" trip that requires much less energy than penetrating the planet's atmosphere — where it could be processed into fuel for satellites and other space vehicles.

Seattle Times: Billionaires bankroll new space company for asteroid mining.

Not gonna deny the fact that it'll be a big expense, but where there's risk there's rewards. And fortune favors the bold. They have a clear goal in mind and intend to follow through with it and I for one want to be in the thick of it. Soon as I get my degree and certs out of the way I won't give up until I'm in league with these guys.