Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2018

JULY-AUGUST 2018 on the Earth’s surface seem insufficient to meet our needs in the long run, especially if we consider the demographic increase ex- pected in the coming decades - a real social time bomb. The mining industry of the future will, there- fore, have to make the necessary choice of extending its activities beyond the Earth. The resources closest to our planet are on the Moon, but the gravity of our satellite is a severe obstacle to the short-term exploita- tion of that wealth. A reasonable alternative is represented by asteroids with orbits simi- lar to that of the Earth, the so-called Near- Earth Asteroids (NEAs), which are usually very small and therefore easy to approach. It is precisely on the NEAs that, for some years now, the attention of asteroid special- ists and mining engineers has seriously fo- cused. The idea of exploiting those small rocky bodies for their supply of raw materi- als that are scarce on Earth, or that are not convenient to transport from Earth, is decades old and was born at the same time as the idea of building colonies in space. However, the first attempt to concretely O n this page and the fol- lowing one, we see some fanciful creations of in- dustrial plants dedicated to the extraction of raw materials from the surfaces of four hypothetical NEAs. One day we may see scenarios of this kind, but not in the immedi- ate future. Christopher Barnatt