Written By: Finn O’Connor
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report released in late March has once again spurred discussion on how we can reconcile humanity’s massive consumption with the relative continuation of our way of life (1). One solution that has long been discussed is the possibility of harnessing resources outside the terrestrial ecosystem to bolster our scarce supply. The most attractive place to start this process is with asteroids; mineral-rich rocks that orbit our sun. Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries cropped up in recent years intending to harvest asteroids for their resources and transport them back to Earth. However, they have barely begun the exploratory stage, where probes are sent to assess the composition of target asteroids (2). Continue reading…
