Luxembourg plans to mine asteroids for minerals

PanARMENIAN.Net - Luxembourg is officially going to go into space to mine minerals from asteroids.

According to a Business Insider report, Luxemburger Wort, one of the country’s newspapers, said that Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy Etienne Schneider told journalists that the government will work with one of the world’s largest satellite operators SES — which he helped set up a decade ago — and two U.S. companies to help make it happen.

Apparently, the two U.S. private companies are Planetary Resources, which was founded by Google founder Larry Page, and Deep Space Industries, which is trying to develop the ability to send tourists into space. But it has taken over two years to get these private companies on board as Luxembourg’s Schneider first started working on the project in secret after visiting NASA’s research center in August 2013.

In November last year, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.

The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 says that any materials American individuals or companies find on an asteroid or the moon is theirs to keep and do with as they please.

While the Space Act breaks with the concept that space should be shared by everyone on Earth for scientific research and exploration, it establishes the rights of investors to profit from their efforts, at least under U.S. law.

But although the technology seems to be there and ready to be used for space mining, the cost of the project means it is obvious why the Luxembourg government wanted rich, private investors, Business Insider says.

For example, it is estimated to cost NASA $1 billion just to bring back 60 grams of asteroid mineral from the OSIRIS-REx mission.

Asteroids might not look like much on the outside but actually they’re packed full of rare and precious materials. Underneath the surface of some asteroids is a treasure trove of a type of mineral, called platinum, that is rare on Earth but extremely lucrative — 1,000 cubic centimeters of platinum is worth close to $1 million.

For example, one of these platinum-loaded asteroids will be flew by Earth on July 19, 2015.

NASA says that the materials frozen in asteroids could “be used in developing the space structures and in generating the rocket fuel that will be required to explore and colonize our solar system in the twenty-first century.”