Because bottled water from Fiji, Iceland, and Houston isn’t exotic enough anymore.
We just need energy to desalinate and transport it.
Live a new life on the off-world colonies.
yeah, it’s a piece of cake. just ask Bruce Willis
It makes perfect sense to anyone with the slightest understanding of costs involved in space flight.
If you’ve got water in space, you have hydrogen and oxygen that don’t need to be hefted to orbit at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound.
Newt was dissed for men mining on the moon. Now everyone is fascinated by the prospect of robots mining asteroids.
This is all going to collapse when they find a spotted owl on an asteroid.
Actually, it’s even crazier than it sounds.
Technologically it looks somehow doable today, at enormous expense that is unlikely to be repaid until many years into the future - possibly too many to for investors to hope for a return in their lifetime.
There's one glaring problem I'm sure they are still trying to calculate the full ramifications of. Asteroids (the most valuable quite large) are moving through space at a horrific rate, presenting a rather difficult obstacle - that of the fuel-power needed to overcome mass plus speed.
The solution can only lie in long-term minimal corrections in direction, and use of gravitational power to assist - with perhaps some deep-space refueling made possible. I'd love to hear or read how they expect to be able to pull it all off in a reasonable time period - i.e., within how many years.
It is that facility (and others?) placed where, when, and how productive it (they) will be able to be that the whole enterprise must rely on.
Twenty years into the future? At least, I would imagine - and with a world bankrupt and on the verge of world war again, it begins to look like 'pie in the sky.'
A cover story for what?
I smell the CIA and another Glomar Challenger stunt.
As long as they are not circling Uranus, you’ll be ok.
Based on what we know now there is nothing on the asteroids that isn’t also on Earth in pretty good quantities.
I suppose hoopla is necessary o get anything done but the cold hard fact is that space exploration is basic research - you shouldn’t expect an economic return but may be worth it for it’s own sake.