Great Escape
We Need to Be Able to Escape Planet Earth
Why the space age depends on mining
There are untold riches’ worth of valuable metals in space. Consider the near-Earth asteroid 1986 DA, discovered 32 years ago. Radar observations indicated that this rock, two kilometers wide, contained 10 trillion kilograms of iron, 1 trillion kilograms of nickel, 100 million kilograms of platinum, and 10 million kilograms of gold. It should be no surprise that people are trying to figure out how to tap into space resources.
It might be more surprising that, for the most part, they plan to leave all that metal alone, at least for the time being. What they seek first is something we have literal oceans of here on Earth: water. Water can support human life in space, and it can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which, when burned together, make a nice rocket fuel. Experts foresee gas stations in the sky for servicing satellites or taking people much farther out. Water has been called the commodity of space.
Many in the aerospace industry are building sleek rockets. Elon Musk founded SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin. But the space age will also require some very terrestrial engineering skills. You have to dig up all that water. And so Serkan Saydam, a mining engineer and professor at the University of New…
