space gold rush
The media hype surrounding the ambitious plans for space exploration subsided for a while as the visionaries faced realities and technological limitations. However, recently it has started to rise again. Moon Express unveiled intriguing plans to conquer the moon and its riches.
According to them by 2020, a mining base should be built, with which the Silver Globe abounds. The first step to bring these plans to life is to send the MX-1E probe to our satellite by the end of this year. His task will be to land on the surface of the moon and go through it a certain distance. Responsible company Moon Express aims to win a prize Google Lunar X Award, worth $30 million. 2017 companies are participating in the competition. The condition for participation in the competition is to overcome the distance of 500 m before the end of the year XNUMX and take and send high-quality photos and videos to Earth.
The primary landing site being considered for the Moon Express mission is Mount Malapert, a five-kilometer peak in Aitken regionwhich most of the time remains flooded with sunlight and provides a direct view of the Earth and the lunar region 24 hours a day. Shackleton Crater.
This is just the beginning, because in the second phase, the robots of the next probe will be sent to the moon, MX-2 - for them to build research base around the South Pole. The base will be used to search for raw materials. A search for water will also be carried out, which will allow the installation and maintenance of manned stations. There are also plans to provide samples taken from the surface of the Moon - as early as 2020 using another probe, labeled as MX-9 (1)
1. Departure of a ship with samples of lunar soil from the surface of the Moon - visualization of the Moon Express mission
Lunar cargo delivered to Earth in this way does not necessarily contain gold or the legendary helium-3, which is said to be extremely efficient. The designers note that any samples brought back from the moon would cost a fortune. Sold in 1993, 0,2 grams of moonstone cost nearly $0,5 million. There are other business ideas - for example, services for the delivery of urns with the ashes of the dead to the moon for a fairly high fee. Moon Express co-founder Naveen Jain makes no secret of the fact that his company's goal is to "expand the economic zone of the Earth to the Moon, which is the eighth largest and unexplored continent.".
When platinum asteroids fly...
About four years ago, representatives of two dozen American private companies more or less simultaneously started talking about projects to create and send robots that could not only fly to asteroids or the Moon, but also collect large amounts of material from the surface and deliver them to Earth. Earth. NASA has also begun planning a mission to capture the asteroid and place it in orbit around the moon.
Perhaps the most famous were the announcements of the consortium planetary resources, backed by Avatar director James Cameron, as well as Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and a few other celebrities. The goal was to be mining of metals and valuable minerals close to earth asteroids (2). The company, founded by forward-thinking entrepreneurs, was supposed to start mining in 2022. This date does not seem realistic at this time.
Shortly after a wave of space mining initiatives, in late 2015, President Barack Obama signed into law a law regulating the extraction of wealth from asteroids. The new law recognizes the right of US citizens to own resources mined from space rocks. It's also kind of a guide for Planetary Resources and other entities looking to get rich in space. Full name of the new law: "Law on the competitiveness of commercial space launches". According to the politicians who support him, this will revive entrepreneurship and even industry. Until now, there have been no clear rules encouraging companies to invest in mining in space.
It is not known whether the 2015 flight near the Earth had an impact, i.e. 2,4 million km, on the decision of the President of the United States, asteroidy 2011 UW158, which is mostly platinum and therefore worth trillions of dollars. This object has an elongated shape, about 600 m long, 300 m wide and was not considered by astronomers as a potential threat to the Earth. He was not and is not, because he will return to the vicinity of the Earth - attention! - already in 2018, and maybe even then all those tempted by huge wealth will want to conduct space reconnaissance up close.
Would it be possible to bring a handful of space dust?
It is not yet known how the Moon Express will go with the delivery of material from the Moon. It is known that a piece of asteroid should be delivered to us in six years by NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe, launched last year by an Atlas V rocket. If all goes according to plan, the return capsule of the American research vessel in 2023 will bring rock samples from Bennu planetoids.
3. Visualization of the OSIRIS-REx mission
The ship will arrive at the asteroid in August 2018. Over the next two years, it will orbit it, scrutinizing Bennu with scientific instruments, allowing earth operators to choose the best sampling site. Then, in July 2020, OSIRIS-REx (3) will gradually approach the asteroid. After observing, without landing on it, thanks to the arrow, it will collect from the surface from 60 to 2000 grams of samples.
The mission, of course, has a scientific purpose. We are talking about examining Bennu itself, which is one of the objects potentially dangerous for the Earth. Scientists will be viewing samples in laboratories, which is likely to greatly expand their knowledge. But the lessons learned could also go a long way for asteroid planes.
