This article from MIT's Technology Review discusses the discovery of twelve nearby asteroids that could be captured using current rocket technology and then nudged into Earth orbits so that they could be mined. It seems that it is possible to do this by changing their velocity by less than 500 meters per second.Planetary Resources, a company funded by high profile investors including Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and space entrepreneur Richard Branson, plan to do just this. The resulting cache of minerals and other materials taken from these heavenly bodies could be the difference between humanity reaching the stars or languishing on a planet whose resources are quickly being depleted.
Doing this would also remove the possibility that these asteroids would eventually strike the earth.
Who says that (some) billionaires don't know how to make good use of their wealth?
No comments:
Post a Comment