A new gold rush is on! Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (along with filmmaker James Cameron) are backing a plan to mine gold and other precious metals from asteroids.
They’ve formed a company called Planetary Resources, which will start out by developing low-cost robotic spacecraft that can survey nearby asteroids. NASA will probably be one of their first customers.
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When US astronauts planted an American flag on the moon, it made other countries nervous because it seemed as if our country might be "claiming" it. Now space lawyers say that the international legal system must be improved and expanded before any products that are space-mined from asteroids are brought back to Earth to sell.
If plans to use robots to mine asteroid succeed, it would create its fair share of confusion about mining rights in space–from who owns what to how business interests beyond Earth’s orbit would be specifically protected.
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NASA may return to space after all–but not to explore, to MINE the valuable minerals that are on asteroids, in a NEW TYPE of "Gold Rush." And we may use robots to do the dirty work.
Space scientists think that robots will be the astronauts of the future. They’ll explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and even clean up space debris in the process. In the April 24th edition of the New York Times, Kenneth Chang writes: "Perhaps it will be a platinum rush that finally opens up the final frontier."
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The are a lot of strange sounds around lately (NOTE: subscribers can still listen to these special reports). Two unusually powerful explosions occurred in Siberia on February 9th and 12th–were they caused by the same thing as the Tunguska explosion of 1908? The explosions were so huge that the residents of nearby cities felt powerful tremors and many of them ran out into the street in a panic.read more