Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2018

ASTRONAUTICS 5 The colonization of near-space and beyond by mankind will require large quantities of raw materials from which to build habitats that will allow us to live without depending on Mother Earth. Asteroids can provide much of the necessary resources, and the mining industry is already looking towards that new frontier. However, the difficulties that must be overcome to turn asteroids into mines are considerable. A major player in the upheaval of the Earth’s ecosystem is undoubtedly the mining industry. The extraction and processing of underground resources in- evitably involves pollution of the natural en- vironment and, if the deposits are shallow, by Michele Ferrara revised by Damian G. Allis NASA Solar System Ambassador JULY-AUGUST 2018 the scars left by man’s work can last for mil- lions of years. Even by minimizing the im- pact of those activities, a basic problem re- mains: mineral resources sooner or later will run out or become cost-prohibitive to ob- tain, and their availability and distribution I n the back- ground, a hypo- thetical mining plant in action on the surface of a rocky body of the Solar System. Factor-Tech Magazine