 "Nasa looks at asteroids to mine for metals")
Space stations are old hacks for Nasa; now, the agency is looking at exploring asteroids and exploiting their metal deposits.
Rupak Biswas, a Kolkata native and current director of exploration technology at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) Ames Research Centre, made this revelation during his keynote address at TiEcon 2016. Asteroids are small rocky bodies, some no larger than a stone and others almost as big as a small plant, are found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
According to experts, exploring them makes good business sense as they are depositories of metals, such as iron and copper, whose extraction on Earth will drastically deplete the supply within the next 100 years.
Executives from billion-dollar companies, along with investors, are looking at space as a new frontier for business.
Google co-founder and current chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet, Larry Page, started Planetary Resources in 2010. It was then called Arkyd Astronautics. Other founders included Ram Shriram, one of the earliest investors in Google, former Google CEO and current Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, and Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, among others. The most famous is Space X, started by PayPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk.
A legal framework has also been created for space explorations. According to the Space Act, 2015, US citizens are allowed to engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of "space resources", including water and minerals. But biological forms, that is alien beings, if found cannot be exploited.
