Far below the Nevada desert, past ancient mine shafts and rock-strewn caverns, there could be a fortune waiting to be made by one small company. A fortune in silver. A mine that inspired the silver rush in the 1880s, that was tapped once more in the 1960s, could again prove a boon to miners using …
Andy Weir who wrote the Martian has now written about a future lunar city in his new book Artemis. Weir started with a basic question: Why would anybody go to the trouble of building a town on the moon in the first place. To him it had only one workable answer: tourism Weir assumes that …
Since the 1990s, the Colorado School of Mines has been a leading institution for the study of space resources and in situ resource utilization (ISRU). It has also become a destination for space scientists and engineers, government agencies, aerospace companies, entrepreneurs, the mining and minerals industry, financial and legal experts, and policy makers to discuss …
Spacefab is currently building ther Waypoint space telescope with a 21 centimeter mirror. It is launching as a co-payload on a SpaceX rocket in 2019. This commercial telescope will have an image intensified ultraviolet and visible camera, and a 48 megapixel camera for visible and near-infrared imaging for astronomical and Earth observation purposes, available for …
Peninsula Energy has started the process to amend the license and permits for its Lance in-situ leach (ISL) uranium project in Wyoming, after laboratory tests showed that using an acidic rather than alkaline mining solution could potentially transform the project’s operating performance and costs. Peninsula Energy website is here. Tests using mildly acidic solutions have …
Japan has successfully tapped into a deposit of mineral resources from a deep-water seabed off the coast of Okinawa, the economy ministry said, the largest such extraction of its type. It is the first time metals have been mined from the seabed in such quantities using ship-based extraction technology, according to the Economy, Trade and …
Space Startup Moon Express plans several robotic lunar missions over the next three years. The missions are initial lander and tiny rover missions, a polar mission to confirm water and then a sample return mission. They plan to scale up the sample return to mine for lunar ice to provide low cost rocket fuel and …
Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. In October 2015, Moon Express announced that it had signed the worlds’ first multi-mission launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 lunar missions between 2017 and 2020. Moon Express sees …
The two fundamental prerequisites for large-scale economic use of space resources are: 1. in-space manufacture of propellants from nonterrestrial bodies, and 2. in-space manufacture of heat shields for low-cost capture of materials into Earth orbit. The former has been the subject of recent NIAC investigations. The latter would expand by a factor of 30 to …
The U.S. Navy has 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. That’s below the number mandated by Federal law, but the Navy was granted a waiver while it waited for the Gerald R. Ford to enter the fleet. The Ford has seen repeated delays. The Navy expects Ford to enter the fleet this Spring, but hasn’t yet set …
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) says that 10nm is on schedule, countering news media reports that the yields of TSMC and Samsung at the industry’s most advanced technology node are lagging expectations. TSMC’s 10nm process is “totally on track” and will contribute to sales revenue for the first time in the first quarter of 2017, …