A is for Asteroid Mining #AtoZChallenge

Folks, we live in very exciting times! Private industry and governments will certainly expand our economy into space where a treasure trove of raw materials wait to be mined. 

Why? Because we are going to set up colonies on the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and even minor planets like Ceres and possibly certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn. And we’ll need construction material to build the colonies. 

Asteroids consist of oxygen and silicon which are the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust. Asteroids also contain metals: up to 80% iron and the rest a mixture of nickel, iridium, palladium, platinum, gold, magnesium and other precious metals. 

Soon, we will be able to capture asteroids and bring them into an orbit around Earth or crashed into the moon or Mars for easy mining.

Companies are also factoring in how to mine asteroids cleanly. We’ve done a pretty good job of trashing the Earth mining raw materials. Fortunately, this generation of deep space explorers want to make sure we don’t trash our solar system as we will certainly begin mining asteroids, comets and minor planets like Ceres. 

Question Do you have any concerns about capturing an asteroid and bringing it into orbit near Earth?

Here are a couple fun article to further expound on mining asteroids: 

Asteroid Mining Sounds Hard, Right? You Don’t Know the Half of It 

NASA is dreaming about creating a trillion-dollar industry from asteroid mining for precious metals