The Final Capitalist Frontier

[CVX]

The Final Capitalist Frontier
By Mark Baard - Wired News

Space scientists and entrepreneurs are envisioning much more than tourists taking pictures, and planting flags and footprints, as they plan humanity's off-world future.

They also want to mine the solar system for its abundant natural resources to make space travel self-sustaining, and to generate profits for corporations back on Earth.

The Cold War between the United States and the USSR drove engineers to work around the clock during the glory days of NASA's Apollo missions. "But now the spark is global competition," said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

"We could draw on unlimited materials and energy for sustainable space exploration," said Spudis. "We will find new worlds, new markets and new growth."

Spudis, who served on the President's Commission on Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy, was speaking at SpaceVision2004, a space-exploration conference hosted by MIT last week, where scientists and engineers shared their dream of building self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars in the coming decades.

The conference's attendees predicted that tomorrow's interplanetary explorers will be packing lightly for their extended stays on other worlds.

Robots and humans will uncover and exploit in situ all of the ice and hydrogen they need to support their activities on the moon and Mars, the attendees said. And, as they have on Earth, asteroid impact sites (and the asteroids themselves) should yield rich deposits of copper, nickel and other metals for trade.

Space pioneers could ship those mineral products back to Earth for a good profit, said a conference organizer.

More at: http://wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65729,00.html

[koan]

Great! So when we run out of planet to rape we can move on to the next! We rule. (I hope those aliens show up soon and kick our butts.)

[A Karenina]

Horrible news, true enough. But those pictures! My god, they are so beautiful! I've been hanging out at the NASA site to see the pictures of Saturn as they come in. Amazing stuff!