Now Moon Mars and Asteroids will be mined. Get ready for space travell

An international group of scientists, mining and aerospace engineers, policy makers, and other specialists met in Golden, Colorado to discuss the use of space resources. Space Resources Roundtable II was held at the Colorado School of Mines, and was sponsored by the School of Mines, NASA, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Participants discussed lunar, martian, and asteroidal resources, along with economic and legal aspects of using extraterrestrial resources. This report focuses on lunar resources. Manufacture of useful materials on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids requires extensive use of what we know about those places through studies of lunar samples and meteorites from asteroids and Mars. It is applied cosmochemistry.



Matter from:-Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology

People are eventually going to be working and living in space. Construction and operation of lunar solar power stations may make that happen. Or perhaps it will happen to support a thriving space tourism business. Whatever drives it, there will be a need to use the resources available in space. It is too expensive to drag all the needed ingredients up from the Earth. The resources are available on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. Participants in the Space Resources Roundtable agree that we need to explore extraterrestrial bodies for resources and to learn how to extract those resources from them. Experts in the mineralogy and chemical composition of extraterrestrial materials will play important roles in the search and mining of space resources. Like Earth explorers through the ages, we must live off the land and a new breed of scientist, the applied cosmochemist, will be there to see it happen.