Planetary Resources (PR) was founded in 2012. The original mission of PR was to find and mine near-Earth asteroids for valuable resources. As I mentioned in a recent post, both water and platinum group metals are thought to exist in large quantities on asteroids. Larry Page, Eric Smidt, Ross Perot Jr. and Charles Simonyi all contributed a portion of their billions of dollars to the start up.
Moon Express is a private company that was formed in the U.S. in 2010 to compete for the Lunar X Prize and eventually mine the Moon for natural resources with economic value. Last month, Moon Express was awarded a Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract by NASA. The company is now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payload to the Moon for NASA.
The International Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states that no country can claim to have ownership of extraterrestrial territory. The treaty also said that any materials returned from space were the common property of humanity and would need to be shared with other nations.
Recently I wrote about the shortage of plutonium-238 which is used to provide power to U.S. satellites on deep space missions. Today, I am going to write about a different use of nuclear isotopes for space exploration.
Potential contamination carried by space vehicles is a major concern to the public and private space industry. Satellites and space craft components are manufactured in clear rooms to prevent the possibility of biological contamination of astronomical bodies. However, recently a new type of contamination was discovered.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media lately with respect to whether we should create a colony on the Moon first or send missions to explore and colonize Mars first. We have billionaires such as Elon Musk who are dedicated to getting human beings to Mars. National space programs have sent a lot of robot probes to Mars with a U.S. probe landing just a few days ago.
NASA is considering selling seats on the launch vehicles that will be used to ferry passengers to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA would like to have additional sources of funding beyond that provided by the U.S. government for government missions.
Until recently, the Chinese space program was government run. China opened up its space exploration and exploitation to private companies in 2014. In the last few years, private companies have entered the arena in China and are pushing hard to catch up to the private space industry that is thriving in the United States. Now there are eighty commercial Chinese space-technology startups.
There are many threats to human existence on Earth. There are inactive super volcanoes that could erupt and kill billions of people. Climate change is not as dramatic but does pose an existential threat. Comets or asteroids impacts could devastate the surface of the planet and wipe out the entire ecosystem.
I have blogged before about the effects of space travel on human health. There are a variety of negative effects on different organs in the human body caused by either zero gravity or space radiation. Today I am going to report on a study of the brains of Russian cosmonauts following their time spent in orbit around the Earth.
