I support this, and you should to

Asteroid Mining, that is. Theoretically Planetary Resources Inc will be announced on Tuesday. From Gizmodo it appears that an impressive group of entrepreneurs and business professionals have formed a company with the goal of mining asteroids. This is a tremendous adventure, previously one only held in the realm of government b/c of the sheer scope of resources and skills needed to pull it off, but because we now spend more money on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in the USA than NASA(or any other engineering endeavors) it's up to industry. But that's a different rant.

So why do I support this? Here's why, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about it

Bingham-Cooper Mine

• Many minerals, such as gold, tungsten, platinum, palladium came to earth from asteroids
• Asteroids contain many minerals and elements that are scarce, or hard to get to on earth.
• Instead of strip mining an entire mountain, creating pits in the earth, as shown to the right, we can use an entire asteroid.
• Technology will need to advance in many realms in order to harvest an asteroid. Everything from power generation, rocket travel, vacuum machinery will need to take enormous strides
• Energy, specifically high power density technologies will advance, generating higher power density devices that will have wide ranging benefits on earth. It isn't practical to use gasoline as your fuel source with a launch cost of ~$3,000-$6,000/lb
• Reduced pollution from the energy intensive methods of mining and resource recovery on earth. Rare Earths aren't rare by definition, just making their recovery economical is. Both the cost of recovery per pound and energy usage per pound is very high making them both incredibly useful, and incredibly bad for the environment. 

I can go on for hours, but this is a brilliant idea, and a much better use of money than Apples decision to pay back its investors with a stock buyback and dividend. Also since it is not government run, there will be efficiencies gained due to lowered overhead and the ability to hire the best and brightest at market rates, which the Government cannot do b/c Congress gets in the way. Go Planetary Resources...