NASA Funded Project Could Mine Asteroids For Water With Sunlight

MarkWhittington writes: One of the more precious resources that asteroid miners are going after is water, something that is in abundance on Earth and, oddly enough, in space as well but not as easily be acquired. Iron, nickel and platinum group metals will certainly be valuable, but future space travelers will need water, not only for drinking, bathing, and agriculture but for rocket fuel. A story in Space.com reports on a new asteroid mining technique being funded by NASA that would use sunlight, concentrated by mirrors, to extract water out of excavated asteroids. The process is called "optical mining."

Comments

Troy Rising

[ma11achy]

Someone's been reading John Ringo :)

Either way, it's terrible leaving all that energy go to waste. Let's start bootstrapping ourselves up the Kardashev scale.