Sun. Oct 6th, 2024

By Donna Westfall – February 16, 2018 –

When our oldest grandson told us he wanted to mine asteroids for a living, I thought he was kidding. Turns out he wasn’t kidding.  As a stepping stone to his career aspirations, he joined the Navy and is currently on a nuclear sub.

At this mornings Town Hall Meeting held at Fisherman’s Restaurant starting at 6 am, we were talking about  the Forida school shooting and how inured people have become since the Kent State schooting in 1970, 4 people killed, that left the county in a state of shock, there have been so many more.

With that, we leap-frogged to “Remember when Astronaut Alan Shepard in  1961 made the first manned flight and millions of people got up early to watch it on TV?  Today the space station, a miracle of modern science, has rockets going to and fro and we’re ignorant of most of what’s going on.”

From there, I mentioned our grandson. As resources become scarce on earth, and the cost of spaceflight comes down, mining asteroids becomes more likely. I didn’t know this morning all the minerals that could be mined; here’s a list:

gold

iridium

silver

osmium

palladium

platinum

rhenium

rhodium

ruthenium

tungsten

iron

cobalt

manganese

molybdenum

nickel

aluminium

titanium

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *