WASHINGTON, D.C. – Members of Congress spoke to space industry leaders on Capitol Hill last week to show their support for the private sector, but both sides expressed frustrations as well. At the sixth annual Future Space conference, U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Space, spoke highly of private partnerships in space. He referred to the promise of asteroid mining twice during his talk, which is good news for Planetary Resources, a space startup based in Redmond, Wash. But Babin also told the gathering of more than 100 space industry professionals that the federal government should be cautious about backing private ventures. U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., also said he’s interested in space mining and gave a shout-out to the Evergreen State’s aerospace community. “We are quickly gaining a reputation as the Silicon Valley of space,” he said. Kilmer was more effusive than Babin about public-private partnerships, but he voiced his own frustrations – about governmental gridlock rather than the private sector.
Editorial Comment: It will be years until we see actual mining of asteroids take place I suspect. But then again I could be wrong. It would be worthwhile to mine asteroids provided it was mining for a energy source.
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Former NASA space station manager makes plans for commercial outpost---GREEK WIRE
Former space station manager Mike Suffredini says he’s working on a plan to send up a commercial space module that could be attached to the International Space Station – and then detached to become the foundation for a private-sector outpost in orbit.
“We intend to work on a low-Earth-orbit platform to follow the International Space Station,” Suffredini said today at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2016 conference in Seattle.
Representatives of the new venture, called Axiom Space, are in contact with NASA about the idea, but Suffredini stressed that he’s staying at arm’s length to comply with the space agency’s conflict-of-interest requirements.
Planetary Resources strikes $28 million pact with Luxembourg for asteroid mining----Greek Wire
Planetary Resources says it has finalized a $28 million (€25 million) agreement with Luxembourg to ramp up its asteroid mining campaign.
The deal calls for the tiny European nation’s government and one of its top banking institutions, the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement, to provide €12 million ($13.5 million) in direct capital investment and €13 million ($14.5 million) in grants, Planetary Resources announced today.
George Schmit, an advisory board member of Luxembourg’s SpaceResources.lu initiative, is joining the company’s board of directors. Planetary Resources, which is based in Redmond, Wash., will also establish a European headquarters in Luxembourg.
New NASA Mission to Help Us Learn How to Mine Asteroids
NASA BLOG ENTERY DATED AUGUST OF 2013
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
Asteroids could one day be a vast new source of scarce material if the financial and technological obstacles can be overcome. Asteroids are lumps of metals, rock and dust, sometimes laced with ices and tar, which are the cosmic "leftovers" from the solar system's formation about 4.5 billion years ago. There are hundreds of thousands of them, ranging in size from a few yards to hundreds of miles across. Small asteroids are much more numerous than large ones, but even a little, house-sized asteroid should contain metals possibly worth millions of dollars.
OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Search Tests Instruments, Science Team
NASA BLOG POST DATED MARCh 2017
During an almost two-week search, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission team activated the spacecraft’s MapCam imager and scanned part of the surrounding space for elusive Earth-Trojan asteroids — objects that scientists believe may exist in one of the stable regions that co-orbits the sun with Earth. Although no Earth-Trojans were discovered, the spacecraft’s camera operated flawlessly and demonstrated that it could image objects two magnitudes dimmer than originally expected.
The spacecraft, currently on its outbound journey to the asteroid Bennu, flew through the center of Earth’s fourth Lagrangian area — a stable region 60 degrees in front of Earth in its orbit where scientists believe asteroids may be trapped, such as asteroid 2010 TK7 discovered by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite in 2010. Though no new asteroids were discovered in the region that was scanned, the spacecraft’s cameras MapCam and PolyCam successfully acquired and imaged Jupiter and several of its moons, as well as Main Belt asteroids.
“The Earth-Trojan Asteroid Search was a significant success for the OSIRIS-REx mission,” said OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “In this first practical exercise of the mission’s science operations, the mission team learned so much about this spacecraft’s capabilities and flight operations that we are now ahead of the game for when we get to Bennu.”
The Earth Trojan survey was designed primarily as an exercise for the mission team to rehearse the hazard search the spacecraft will perform as it approaches its target asteroid Bennu. This search will allow the mission team to avoid any natural satellites that may exist around the asteroid as the spacecraft prepares to collect a sample to return to Earth in 2023 for scientific study.
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