A glimpse at the future of commercial space mining, as the SPACE Act passes House of Representatives

The Next Web News ^ | May 21, 2015 | Bryan Clark

[sparklite2]

Is any mineral worth the cost of bringing it back from another planet???

[Fungi]

The enviro Nazis are telling we us we can't go after what is on earth, now you want to go where and find what? Ever think about the cost? Wait till the enviro Nazis get on a spacecraft and demonstrate in front of a mine on Jupiter! “I have made the earth livable”—God.

[Wyrd bið ful aræd]

It can’t even happen yet and they’re already trying to regulate it.

[9thLife]

[DBrow]

“Is any mineral worth the cost of bringing it back from another planet???”

If you had 50 tonnes of platinum mined from an asteroid, yes. Gravity will be a big help in Baumgartnering it down to the marketplace.

[upchuck]

Imagine where we’d (not) be if the bureauRATS had started regulating the Internet in the mid 1990s.

[RKBA Democrat]

Revel in the idea? Cringe is more like it.

[cripplecreek]

Probably not but mining planets would likely be for local use.

The real advantage is in mining asteroids. They can be moved into more favorable orbits and mined at leisure. The advance of 3-D printing could go toward manufacturing in space both for further space exploration and products for here on earth.

[Empireoftheatom48]

How do you get it down in Dragon Capsules, you would have to have a lot of em!

[SampleMan]

Jurisdiction?

[Organic Panic]

...the need for legislation is necessary...

Pretty much sums up the USA.

[Sawdring]

RightWhale would be in his glory of he was around to post about this.

[DBrow]

Getting down from Earth orbit is tough because you must shed all that orbital velocity. If you started getting to Earth not from orbit, but from a freefall state, you don’t need to go from 7 miles per second to zero, at which point you can simply fall, like Baumgartner did.

So once you get your chunk of metal, you can fashion a simple wing structure out of slag and fly that down like a glider, you can crash it because it’s just asteroid slag with a core of heavy metal. If it buries itself 10 meters deep at your landing site, no problem, it’s a lump of platinum or palladium or gold.

[Sawdring]

Just wait until they bring enough rocks down to earth and the Natural Mass Movement protestors start chaining themselves to launch vehicles.

[2ndDivisionVet]

[sadness]

[kjam22]

But I watched a youtube video this morning that said space travel is not possible because of radiation. And that even the Space Station is just a prop in the bottom of a big swimming pool. And that NASA’s real purpose was to develop the Blue Beam Projet.... So now I’m torn on what to believe!

[Sawdring]

Sounds like your part of the Psy-ops program Jim Beam.🚨

[Vince Ferrer]

Interesting, but this assumes that the US has jurisdiction of everything in the solar system. Other countries would probably disagree with that.

[kjam22]

Nope... not Jim Beam... Blue Beam. Yep, Blue Beam Project is a secret government program to display holograms in the sky. All sorts of stuff, so they can manipulate the populace. :) You can see most any crazy thing on Youtube.