Space mining is no longer science fiction. By the 2020s, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries—for-profit space-mining companies cooperating with NASA—will be sending out swarms of tiny satellites to assess the composition of hurtling hunks of cosmic debris, identify the most lucrative ones, and harvest them. They've already developed prototype spacecraft to do the job. Some people—like Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Sara Seager, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, and science writer Phil Plait—argue that, to continue advancing as a space-faring species, we need to embrace this commercial space mining industry, and perhaps even facilitate it, too. But should we?
This question concerns me, as both an astrophysicist and a space enthusiast. Before becoming a science communicator, I worked for 15 years researching the evolution of galaxies, the properties of dark matter, and the expansion of the universe. From that perspective, the distance from us to the asteroid belt is actually rather small, so the question of whether to mine it, and in what way, hits close to home. The Space Act of 2015, a U.S. law passed last fall, authorizes the president "to facilitate the commercial exploration and utilization of space resources to…
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