Turning now to non-space-shuttle-related space news, did you hear the big announcement a couple weeks ago that a start-up called Planetary Resources seriously intends to attempt mining near-Earth asteroids for useful materials within the next few years? It sounds far-fetched, I know. Asteroid mining has been the stuff of science fiction for decades — I remember reading about grizzled space-suited prospectors in the novels of Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven when I was young — and there are plenty of skeptics out there rolling their eyes at what looks to them like either a scam or a set-up for inevitable disappointment. But there are supporters, too, and plenty of them, from what I can tell. (Planetary Resources reported on its Twitter feed that it has received over 2,000 resumes since the announcement.) No less a space authority than the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, thinks the company can pull it off, based on what he’s seen of their proposals so far. And so do I, for whatever my interested layperson’s opinion is worth.

The company’s plan, while unquestionably ambitious, sounds feasible and logical. Like the Apollo program, it comprises a series of incremental steps, each building on the previous one to expand the scale and scope of the overall operation. The first step involves placing a number of small, inexpensive telescopes in orbit to search for suitable targets. (This is supposed to happen by the end of next year.) Next, robot probes, adapted from the telescopes to help save on R&D expenses, would be dispatched to the target objects to get a closer look and do a little prospecting. Then comes the critical step: beginning to exploit the asteroids that are found to have the proper compositions. While much of the press coverage has focused on the so-called platinum-group metals that are believed to be abundant in asteroids, Planetary Resources actually appears to be more interested in finding “volatiles,” non-metallic materials with low boiling points that also happen to be critical supplies for spacecraft… materials such as water. Again, scientists believe water ought to be present in at least some asteroids, bound up in minerals or even in good old-fashioned ice. PR wants to extract that water so it can be stored in space-going supply depots and made available — for a price, of course — to passing spacecraft for use as fuel or, in the case of manned missions, to replenish the crew’s supplies. In theory, at least, this would be much more practical and cheaper than lifting that heavy stuff out of Earth’s gravity well on board a rocket. A crew on the way to Mars would need to bring only a small store of water to get them started, and then rendezvous with one (or more) of these depots to “top off” their tanks while they’re en route to their destination.

But what about those precious metals? Planetary Resources fully intends to exploit those as well, but the company’s plans are a bit less developed on this point (i.e., nobody is quite sure how to do it yet). One solution would be to send an automated operation out to the asteroid to dig up, process, and return the ores to Earth. Another idea is to move the asteroid closer to us, into orbit around the Earth or more likely the Moon. I’m sure the idea of changing a near-Earth asteroid’s course to bring it even closer to us would make some people nervous — what a great idea for a James Bond villain who wants to destroy civilization! — but consider the other side of that equation: if we can learn to move them closer, we can also learn to move the dangerous ones away from us.

Now, all of this promises to be very expensive — everything involving space is — and the skeptics are basing their negative arguments on that, saying, essentially, that there’s no way for Planetary Resources’ investors to make a profit. They say that no matter how difficult mineral extraction may be here on Earth, it’s always going to be cheaper than doing it out there. But here’s the thing: we don’t really know that for sure. Once we figure out the technology and techniques, asteroid mining may not be as difficult as it presently sounds. Or the amount of exotic materials returning to Earth may be enough — or even more than enough — to fully justify the expense and difficulty. Consider the environmental benefits of no longer having to rip apart mountains here at home to find what we need. Finally — and this is the really exciting part, to me, because for a change someone is thinking of the future of our species instead of their stock portfolio — Planetary Resources claims its investors aren’t interested in making a profit so much as building an infrastructure for a permanent human presence out there, among the stars. This is about exploration. This is about getting off this rock, or at least trying to protect it a little better. This is about “space… the final frontier.” In other words, this is all of my youthful idealism about space travel coming back around in the vision of a bunch of rich guys (filmmaker and deep-sea adventurer James Cameron among them, hence the title of this blog entry) who think we ought to be doing Big Things, or at least attempting to do them. I love everything about this. I really hope they pull it off.

A few other items of interest:

• SpaceX hopes to launch its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station this coming Saturday, May 19. If all goes well, the Dragon will become the first commercial spaceship — designed, built, owned and operated by a private company — to call at the ISS. The Dragon is supposed to undergo a series of manuevers before attempting to dock with the station, in order to prove its operational readiness. Then, if successful, it will close with the ISS, where station astronauts will capture it using their robotic manipulator arm (similar to the one that was carried by the shuttles) and bring it into a docking port. The capsule is carrying a load of cargo for the station, including food, water, and fresh clothing, which the astronauts will swap out for items they’re sending back to Earth. After two weeks at the station, the capsule will detach and return for a splashdown and recovery in the Pacific. If you’re interested, SpaceX has a detail-packed press kit available for download, and the LA Times put up a pretty nifty infographic that illustrates the Dragon and its operations (including its size relative to the shuttle orbiter, always an interesting comparison).
• Speaking of SpaceX, there was an announcement last week that the company is going to partner with Bigelow Aerospace, the company that’s been experimenting with inflatable space habitats for several years, to provide a Dragon-based taxi service to and from a Bigelow-constructed space station of some kind, likely a hotel for wealthy joyriders.

• And lastly, I ran across a pretty interesting piece the other day about yet another commercial spacecraft currently being developed, Sierra Nevada Corporation‘s Dream Chaser, which the company hopes to begin flight-testing this summer with a eye toward an orbital demonstration by 2016. Unlike all the other new spaceship designs we’ve heard about since the shuttle’s retirement was announced, Dream Chaser is not an Apollo-style capsule. Rather, it’s in a category of strange aircraft known as “lifting bodies,” which resemble ordinary airplanes but with very stubby little wings, almost no wings at all in fact; they rely on the shape of their fuselages to provide them with lift. NASA has experimented with them off and on for decades (my fellow children of the 1970s may remember that Steve Austin became the Six Million Dollar Man after crashing one of them) and incorporated lessons learned from them into the shuttle orbiter design. Dream Chaser is designed to be launched on top of a rocket, thus avoiding the dangerous debris shower that doomed shuttle Columbia, but glide back through the atmosphere and land on a runway the way the shuttles did. I have to say I personally am thrilled that somebody is still looking into a shuttle-type approach. I’m pretty excited about SpaceX and Dragon — that’s a fantastic story of the little guys triumphing, assuming the demo flight on Saturday works out — but it seems to me that a true spacecraft ought to be flyable, and not just come plummeting out of the sky into the ocean or some deserted patch of land somewhere. I’ll be watching Sierra Nevada closely…

Oh, yeah, extra credit to the first Loyal Reader who can identify what we’re looking at in the image up there at the top of the entry…