The Canadian Minerals and Metals Plan (CMMP) team spoke with Dr. Michele Faragalli, Manager of Space Exploration and Advanced Technologies at Mission Control Space Services Inc. in Ottawa about the complex reality of space mining.
By the end of the 2020s, an outer space gold rush could be well underway. Fleets of space vehicles, some with humans on board and others operated remotely or by artificial intelligence (AI), could be leaving Earth in search of metals, minerals and more. But, if we compare space exploration today to the Yukon gold rush in the late 1880s, the busiest workers right now are not the space miners, but the engineers, providing fuel, maps and tools to the first robot prospectors.
“The first step won’t be looking for titanium, or nickel or other metals in an asteroid; the first step is going to be mining water and ice, splitting the oxygen and hydrogen to make fuel and creating fuel depots on terrestrial satellites for the spacecraft that we will be using to explore,” says Dr. Faragalli. READ MORE
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