Space, Inc.

What if the key to protecting our planet … was leaving it? Well, in part, at least. As worries about climate change mount, and the race to obtain resources from space heats up, some experts and über-rich CEOs are seriously considering moving our industry off-planet. That means using robots to build satellites and space stations by mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets. A plot ripped from science fiction? Most definitely. But much of the technology to build this off-Earth infrastructure already exists.This contingency plan — known as in situ resource utilization — is not only necessary to reduce global warming, but could even be key to our continued growth as a species, according to Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida. Before that, Metzger spent 30 years at NASA where he cofounded Swamp Works, a lab that develops tech for space mining and interplanetary living.“The solar system can support a billion times greater industry than we have on Earth,” Metzger says. “When you go to vastly larger scales of civilization, beyond the scale that a planet can support, then the types of things that civilization can do are incomprehensible to us … We would be able to promote healthy societies all over the world at the same time that we would be reducing the environmental burden on the Earth.”Unless there are breakthroughs in quantum computing, Earth won’t be able to produce enough energy to power the world’s computers by 2040, according to a 2015 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association. The raw materials for solar panels and wind turbines could also dry up as our supplies of rare earth metals dwindles.Meanwhile, asteroids and other cosmic bodies are ready sources of metals and other precious resources, and often contain the ingredients of rocket fuel. And moving industry to space would mean moving those emissions off-world as well. For many forward-looking entrepreneurs and scientists, space industry is beginning to look like an inevitability.When Angel Abbud-Madrid joined the Colorado School of Mines as a professor in 1999, the school began hosting an annual “ space resources roundtable ,” a get-together for space professionals, economists, policy analysts, and members of the mining and metals industry to discuss the value of space mining. After all, the supplies of precious metals contained in asteroids , such as platinum, cobalt and ruthenium, are nearly endless.If it were possible to bring some of these valuable materials down to Earth, would it be profitable?“We concluded that was not the case,” says Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at Mines. It’s still cheaper to mine for gold and iridium on Earth. But about seven years ago, something changed. Companies like Shackleton Energy and Deep Space Industries began coming to these roundtables to discuss asteroid mining.“It was a little bit strange to hear,” Abbud-Madrid recalls. “And then we start seeing more companies coming in: South Korea, Japan, India, Russia started getting into this activity about three or four years ago. Luxembourg, a tiny country in Europe, invested heavily in space resources .”Last fall, the U.S. Geological Survey also started taking the idea of space mining seriously. The sea change came from the spaceflight industry. The cost of going to space has dropped dramatically and the industry began giving the idea of mining resources to build infrastructure in space, rather than bringing them back to Earth, more thought.