How to Mine an Asteroid

and I'm Joe McCormick. That's a reference to something that happened off Mike Anyway, today, we wanted to talk about mining really, you know, the future of mining mining, so pick axes and uh I had to bring access back to axes, shovels and lasers and seven dwarves follow snow white around. No, we're actually talking maybe lasers. We're talking about space mining at mining mining asteroids to be perfectly

uh specific. And the reason why we were talking about this as well, I mean we've actually brought it up on several episodes of Forward Thinking. Yeah, we referenced it in the podcast. In the video about water we talked we talked about a little bit with colonization as well, and some more other space exploration. Yeah, and so it came up often enough that we were like, well, let's just dive in through the whole thing, right, And and the reason why we would even look at mining asteroids

in the first place, with a couple of reasons. Right. There's one is that if we're going to really focus on space exploration beyond just going to the Moon, I sualy just going to the Moon, like that's no big deal, But beyond beyond our immediate surroundings, Uh, it behooves us to look at the potential for using other sources of uh thing, everything from fuel to water to two materials to actually build stuff, whether it's as space station or

a space colony or even another spacecraft. Uh. It helps if we can get that material somewhere other than just from Earth, because moving stuff from Earth to space is not easy. It's it's not really economical. I mean it costs what ten dollars a pound to to put stuff in space. Yeah, that's the old NASA estimate is that across the lifespan of the space program, it costs generally about ten dollars a pound to take stuff up into low or low Earth orbit, which is slightly more expensive

than the tuna I like to buy the loceral grocery store. Uh, it's pretty crazy. Now, keep in mind that it's entirely possible that this uh asteroid mining operation won't turn out to be economical. We've got to say that all of this is tentative, right, Sure, it's just based on estimates and ideas of what might work. Nobody has been able

to do it yet, right. And and the possibility also of of saving the environment a little bit of grief from from you know, not having to drill into our own Earth for these kind of resources is hypothetically groovy. And there's also the possibility that certain elements that are extremely rare on Earth could be slightly less rare when you take the take into account all the asteroids out there. So there's there's a chance that we could end up getting material that we would actually use back here on

Earth from asteroids. Yeah, in both of the ways that this could be economically feasible, it's based on sort of the locality of economics that uh so, we could go out to asteroids to get stuff that's extremely rare on Earth, so rare that it's incredibly valuable. And these would be, for example, platinum group metals very useful in lots of different applications beyond just that looks shiny and pretty, so extremely valuable here because of local rarity. But it's of course,

on the scale of the universe, not meaningfully scarce at all. Think, I think everything on the scale the universe tends fairly plentiful by our standards. And then, of course the other half of that is that there are things that might not be all that valuable here on Earth, but they're tremendously valuable in space, but too people who are currently

in space u in trying to do stuff there. So it goes both ways, but in each case the reason it would make sense economically is because of local scarcity and total scarcity. Right For example, one of the first things that a lot of companies that are well, the two major companies that have announced that they are seriously looking into asteroid mining as an actual business. Um, the thing that both of them are really focusing on early

on is water. Which water is not something that we would necessarily want to or need to bring back to Earth. The the problem with water on Earth, like fresh drinking what on Earth is again a locality issue, not a quantity issue as of right now. Um, some of it, well, not just locality, but also what state it is in, whether it's solid or not. Yeah, So if you're living in say a very parched desert region. The problem is getting local clean water. And that's actually the same problem

that astronauts face spaces like a desert. Yeah. Yeah, you don't really come by exactly if you look up at the International Space Station that they have to just meticulously recycle every molecule of water, and they still can't do it perfectly. Right, They've got it. They've got it up to like success rate or recovery rate I think. But but even even that, even is over a long haul is eventually you run out when it's something that humans need, you know, and and this is this is something so

like there they are trained to be super efficient with water. Um, imagine if you were trying to start a colony, or you know, even worse, like trying to manufacture something in space. I mean, in these cases we use tons of water, right, We're not even aware of how much water we just waste it? Would you know, drive these I S S astronauts crazy? Well. And on top of that, water itself is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, which are two

in radiants for rocket fuel. If you want to create a propellant of some sort, then you could actually manufacture propellant gathered from water. That you're getting out of asteroids. That's great, because the more propellant you need, the heavier your rocket's going to be when you're launching it from Earth.

The heavier it's going to be, the more rocket you know, it becomes a cycle where you have to start doing these complicated calculations to figure out exactly how big your your rocket needs to be in order to get everything you want to get up into space and to its

final destination. Right. But if you can come across water in space, you can separate water into its constituent elements, which are hydrogen and oxygen, which are the ingredients you need to make rocket propellant, right, and then you you're able to to at least change your considerations when you're actually at ground level. I mean, also you're talking about the ability to do manufacturing and and construction out in space. These are all things that are going to be invaluable

in the future. But then there's also the elements that are getting increasingly rare on Earth that we are relying upon in lots of manufacturing, things like gold and platinum that we could in theory run out of a usable supply within a few decades. So it's it's important stuff. Yeah, we're actually um so, I think a lot of people don't even know, Like what do you really use platinum for. Well, one one of the big things I know now is

the auto industry. Sure, it's huge there because of catalytic converters. It's also very popular in fuel cells. It's used in fuel cell membranes. It's part of a catalyst. You when you get platinum down to the nanoparticle size, it has this uh catalyst effect on the the reactions that you get in fuel cells where you have hydrogen on one side oxygen on the other. The membrane allows hydrogen ions to pass through, but not the electrons. The electrons go

and do work through a circuit. Then they recombine with the hydrogen and oxygen on the other side. They output you get as electricity, heat, and water. So the important part there is that membrane and the platinum isn't uh you know, without the catalyst there, this reaction really doesn't take place on an efficient level to make a fuel

cell useful at all. So that's another important use of platinum. Yeah, platinum is platinum and platinum group metals are actually generally really useful as an oxidization catalyst in like the production of chemicals on an industrial level. So UM, you can use like platinum or platinum rhodium alloy catalysts UH to catalyze up an oxidation of ammonia and that creates nitric oxide UM and use nitric oxide to make fertilizer or

explosives or nitric acid that would use in other things. Right, and quite a bit of the these materials that we're talking about actually the reason why they're on Earth and

the first places because of ancient asteroid collisions. We're talking about back when the Earth was cooling, partially because the Earth and the asteroids that UH collided with the Earth are all pretty much made up of the same stuff, and so a lot of the these deposits came from originally, if you go back a couple of few billion years, came from asteroid impacts. So you know, it's not a big leap to say let's go back out there and

look for more. UM. Well, I don't know. I would say it is a big leap, but it's not an unreasonable I think it's not a big leap, uh intellectually, when you're talking about the practicality, Yes, getting getting it done is hard. Yes, the idea of this is where we should look makes sense. The idea of this is how we're going to do it. That's a that's a different conversation. Yeah. So one of the questions we'd want

to ask is how much is out there? And part of the problem right now is we don't really know. We we sort of have have to guess. And the only way we would really end up knowing for sure is to follow through with some of these survey missions to get up close on these asteroids and and do some more serious analysis. But because there's a there's a lot of asteroids out there, both in the Main Belt

and um, the near Near Earth asteroids. Yeah. Yeah, And and I think it's the near Earth asteroids that people are really focused on right now because the Main Belt is far pretty um. But so there are some estimates out there that people have put forward, like, uh, one of the people from Deep Space Industries, which is one of the companies we're going to talk about, Uh, they estimated that remember that asteroid that flew by Earth back in February, that was d A fourteen. Yeah, that was

the one that coincided with the meteorite that struck Russia. Right, Yeah, that's right. The two, by the way, totally not connected to each other. Just want to get completely know as far as the government has told us, you can go to stuff they don't want you to know and peddle

that around. Okay, So, but so this thing is very small, just about a hundred and fifty feet wide and tiny, tiny, and the grand scheme of things, yes, yeah, um, but what they estimated is that well, I mean, something like this could feasibly yield about sixty five billion in recoverable water and a hundred and thirty billion These are dollars, hundred thirty sixty five billion dollars and a hundred thirty

billion dollars in recoverable medals. And that's huge, um. They So if we want to look a little bit bigger, Peter Diamandis, who's one of the people involved in planetary resources, has said that basically a single five hundred meter platinum rich asteroid, uh could be more platinum than we have ever mined in all of human history. Yeah. Now, of course that presumes that there is such an asteroid that

is identifiable and reachable by us. But you know, when you've got like nine thousand year Earth asteroids and maybe a thousand more discovered every single year, and you've got some odds of at least finding stuff that will be useful. The question is whether you know how expensive is it going to be to get there, to then get the material, and then to do whatever it is you plan on doing with it. Was selling it off to whomever is

it doesn't make economic sense? Yea. So we know there's there's probably good stuff out there and we would probably be really useful for us, How would we actually get it? What?

What's the mission outline that these people have proposed, Well, let me let me talk about Planetary Resources specifically for that, because they they've kind of laid out their plan probably a little more in depth than uh than the deep space industries as far as I can tell, and I've I've read about deep space industries approach as well, but it it's it's a little more vaguely defined at least the information I found. So here's what plan Interior Resources say.

First of all, that their mission is to apply commercial innovative techniques to explore space, So they're looking at this is beyond just asteroid mining. That's part of their mission, but They also want, according to their mission, to expand our scientific knowledge about our solar system and to uh

to really find a profitable way of doing that. Their backers include Google's founders or a couple of Google's founders, um and then they they for the first plan is to develop a low cost robotic spacecraft that's designed to explore asteroids. And the first launchest plan for and the name of that is the ARCID one hundred. This is technically a space telescope and it's meant to be used in low earth orbit. Uh. Do you guys know where the name comes from. It's a from it's a Star

Wars reference. It's from Arcade Industries, which is a droid manufacturer. Yes, that's correct. I did not know that yet. It's there. Which droids do they make? Uh? They only make the droids that break down in the series. Are not necessarily that. No, I'm just kidding. I honestly, I couldn't tell you I knew that much. And beyond that, you know, you're getting a little too deep into the Star Wars lore for me to be able to follow along. Uh. The so

that's the telescope. The purpose of the telescope, of course, is to not only explore our solar system, to to look into our solar system in greater detail, but also to identify potential asteroids for us to look into further. But it's not designed to actually get to the asteroid and look at it, right, And it's actually not extremely well suited to looking for asteroids, according to Phil Plate

of Bad Astronomy. At any rate, it's it's it's a twenty or eight inch telescope and um on a pretty tiny little body about the size of a human head, if that's if that's a good reference for for satellite size. It does, however, way more than a human head. I mean not that I've you know, done comparisons or anything. Don't look in my bag. Um at any rate, Yeah, it would be it would be better suited for forgetting shots of say, uh bright nebula or galaxies or something

like that, something like that. A little bit further planets Earth Earth. There's gonna be a lot of pictures of Earth. It's going to be difficult to to really hone it in on something as as close by and quick moving as an asteroid. And yeah, uh it does raise some questions. They're their next phase in their plan is to design the Archid two hundred, also known as the intercept or.

That's actually what they call it. And uh, in this case, what they do is they take that basic ARCID one design and they would tweak it a bit and then including adding propulsion to it and some more instrumentation design specifically to perform fly by observations of nearby asteroids, so these would actually travel out to near Earth asteroids and

get a closer look. Uh. And maybe that we end up identifying the asteroids using other instrumentation and then just aim the Archid two D so that it's on an intercept path, not that you know they detected and then moved to it. Um. Yeah, it sounds like along the and I know we're not done yet, but it sounds like along the timeline. What's sort of going on is that there's a slow narrowing down of candidates. Yes, like you'd use the first series telescope to to scope out

a wide range of possible candidates. You'd basically say what's coming near here and what's going to be the easiest to intercept, and then and then once you be able to get closer and look with a more powerful or a or a closer view, you would actually start to say, okay, which are the ones that have the things we need. You might even argue that the first step is not

even to find candidates at all. It's really to develop the basic technology for the space telescope in a privatized way, and then once we are able to have the propulsion element added in. Because one of the things that Planetary Resources talks about is that while it's working on one stage of this, it's in research and development for the

other stages. So the build out time for the first stage gives them more research and development time for stages two and three and so on, right, and furthermore to just drive excitement and uh and sponsorship hopefully for the further levels. You know. It's it's the one was a kickstarter funded mission. It was a one million dollar kickstarter that that ended up earning um uh one point five million something a little bit both that and um I know a guy who backed that. Yeah, yeah, well it

seems I remember reading about it. It's pretty cool, the crowd funded telescope because they would they had like a sort of educational initiative where if your group donated, I think you could you could get time to aim the telescope yourself. Yeah, they had they had two cute things. They had one which is which is a little video screen on the outside of the satellite um with a with a camera that would take a picture of any

image that you gave them. It could be grumpy cat and with the Earth in the background as like a little planetary selfie for for motivation. But then then and then also they sold time or would donate time from the main telescope cameras to point at whatever your research or classroom wanted to look at. Right, so you could actually if you wanted to, you could uh contributed at a certain level and then on your behalf that are your time would actually go to a school or scientific

research facility. It wasn't wasn't necessarily you that got to dictated, although if you donated at a higher level you could. Um there were one thousand, nine eight backers who uh who put in at the amount for the five minutes of time for students or for science, which I calculated at being nine thousand, eight hundred nine minutes or a hundred sixty five hours or about seven days worth of

holeoscope time total. I mean that's added up. You wouldn't actually go for seven They wouldn't say all right for the first seven days just doing this, it would actually be spaced out over it's it's initial days, I would imagine. But anyway, that that's the ar Kid one hundred, the two hundred very similar to it's got the propulsion and allows it to fly to an asteroid and get a

closer look. Then you have the arc at three hundred, which you know, the two was the interceptor, the three was the Rendezvous Prospector, so it just really just kind of combines two Western tropes into one. Anyway, so you got the Rendezvous Prospector, which was an augmented interceptor, so it would also have deep space laser communication software and hardware on it to allow it to communicate back on Earth, and was designed to travel to asteroids that are further

away from Earth. Because the interceptors mainly focusing at asteroids that are passing between Earth and the Moon, the Rendezvous Prospector can go further out and it would actually enter the orbit of an asteroid to collect that on them, including the asteroids density, shape, composition, size, rotation, that kind of thing, and you would actually have multiple devices focus on the same asteroid in order to distribute mission risk, so if one failed, you'd still have others that we're

looking at this asteroid because if you're talking about a potential mining opportunity, you want to have as you know, you want to try and guarantee success as much as you can. And then finally, the last phase is to develop means of harvesting and delivering the resources on asteroids

to space based and terrestrial customers. Now, this is the most vaguely defined of their steps because we frankly don't know how we would do it yet, right, And and the their point is that during the time where they're developing these other phases that they've already laid out, they will be working on what would be the best approach

at doing this, how would we do it? And again they would initially focus on water rich asteroids to get both water and its component elements for propulsion, but there will be no firm plans on how recovery would take place other than the teams are researching it right now. Part of it seems like kind of a smart business model to start with water, because as you mind water, you'd also be I would imagine sort of developing your customer base because the more water you can produce in space,

the easier it is for people to sustain activity in space. Um, so you can get more people up there who need more of what you're creating. It's also a great I mean, I would imagine I don't know, I honestly don't know what would be the quote unquote easiest resource to mine on an asteroid, but I would imagine water would be

way up there in terms of processing, right, I would think. Yeah. So, I mean that's one of the big questions is Okay, So imagine you get to an asteroid and we can talk more in a minute about where this would happen and stuff like that, because that's a big question too. But what wherever the asteroid is. Imagine you're there and you want to mind it. So you dig up some rocks and these rocks have some significant platinum content. How

do you get it out? Yeah? You might have to use some sort of either a chemical approach to try and leach it out, or you know, there's some discussion about using lasers to to vaporize any material that is not whatever it is you're going for that kind of stuff. Yeah, whatever it is you're talking about what sounds like a fairly hardware intensive kind of process where you need lots of stuff. They're doing its job, um and all of our experience, but I'm not saying it can't be done.

Of course, all of our experience with the so far is on Earth, where you can you know, you can just like burn or and smelt it off and doing this in microgravity, um, and without without an air supply to make combustion happen. I definitely never mind I was gonna make an air supply joke. I'm going to just walk away from that. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Okay,

it was right on the cusp. Uh. No. I wanted to talk a little bit about the other big company, the Deep Space Industries approach um and what they think they are going to, how they're how they're approaching this the same task, right they've got they've got they've got three steps instead of that four. But it's basically running along the same the same projected not timeline, but but

just scope of of projects. Um, you've got. They're they're thinking about sending um uh, prospecting probes out around these these are calling fireflies. Um, you can't take taking some of our our beloved brown coats. Yeah, I'm sure, yeah, that that might have a little tiny bit of something to do with it. It could be an extreme coincidence. Maybe they haven't seen television in the past twenty years.

These are these are small, small little things, UM that would be launched a piggyback with with commercial satellites there there by cutting down on cost um and and are really reconnaissance missions again, just just going out with telescopes and looking for the kinds of things that they might later start to to UM reach out to with sample

return missions called dragonflies. UM. They don't have a projective timeline for this, but they're thinking about the third step in so I guess that would be somewhere between twenty I had read at one point, according to one article, that the optimistic approach was that dragonflies would be launching a year after they had started launching fireflies. So that

would be uh. It seems really really optimistic to have something that could uh intercept and asteroid, take a sample and come back reliably, but not outside the realm of possibility. It's just very It's a an accelerated timeline to be fair. UM. The Planetary Resources also plans on launching the first arcade. So the timelines here are very similar. Those dragonflies would also be pretty small. They're they're using cubes at cube satellites.

These are little one leader cube satellite texts that are it's it' kind of the raspberry pie of of satellite and I and I kind of adore this entire concept, um and uh. And then the third step again in

would hYP hypothetically be the harvesters um. So all of this I feel like it's ranging deeply into halo terms when when I read the term micro gravity foundry was really right, right, So so this is once once they've got these harvesters out there working on their asteroids, They've they've got plans for propellant refineries and micro gravity foundries,

um and uh. They're thinking about trying to use new new spins on three D printing to turn any any materials that they get into usable parts parts right right, and they they've got some apparently patent pending technologies that

help metal based three D printing happen better. Yeah. I read something about that where it was like, so there's some idea where you just have a machine where it's got a hopper or something and you just throw rocks that have like nickel content into them and they smash them up and somehow process that into the what do you call the material those three D printer prints in. I don't know essentially what what would be ink at

the metal point smelt, I guess, yeah. And so that that just be one whole direct line process of taking the ore and turning it into a product at the end of three Interesting. I wonder how that works in microgravity. I mean, that's the adds a whole new level of complexity to the three D printing process, most of which end up printing, you know, base taking relying upon Earth's gravity, on the fact that everything falls at what is at

nine point eight per second towards per second? Yeah, um, I would think maybe if they're printing in metals, they might be able to use magnets to some extent. Depends on if it's a fairest material. But yeah, yeah, you know, it's interesting. I don't know. I honestly don't know the answer to that, because I don't think anyone's built a

three D printer microgravity foundry yet. They have not. They, as I said, are working on the patent process, and I think I feel like deep space industries is a little bit more um overtly economically minded than than planetary there um. They're they're funding current operations by you know, the normal sponsorship investment kind of stuff, but they're playing planning on selling fuel that they get from the water from asteroids to satellites and space stations and other commercial propositions.

So they're just going to the interplanetary space gas station. Yeah, okay, I mean it's a growth industry. There's a wide open space there. Yeah. No, I mean, I may I make jokes, but these are things that are going to be necessary. We need to have a space infrastructure, including a fuel infrastructure, if we want this future of space exploration colonization to become a reality. It's funny how quick some people are, at least some people that I've read, just to ah,

this is impossible. You know. Yeah, there's some some grouchy people talking about you know, I think there were plenty of people who said it was impossible to land someone on the Moon and get them back to Earth safely. I'm sure there were plenty of people who said that. The thing is that I I love seeing an engineer when you tell an engineer that something is impossible, because that just solidifies the determination to prove you wrong. Um. Human ingenuity has proven time and time again that that

the impossible is just it's really possible. You just need the right amount of time and energy and money to go into it for it to become that way. Yeah. Telling a good engineer that, uh, something like this is impossible, it's like putting a you know, plate of something up on a high counter and thinking that dog will never find a way. Yes, or furthermore, my enterprising children, or furthermore, yeah, right, I can leave this unattended for five minutes, nothing will

go wrong. Yeah, it's I I I certainly wouldn't say it's impossible. I think that the timelines we've discussed are very optimistic. I'm not even saying that that's impossible, but I will be pleasantly surprised if they are able to meet those timelines, both companies planetary resources and deep space industries, and uh either way, I mean, if they do that, it's a huge boon for science. Even if they fail,

I think it's a huge huge win for science. Well yeah, I mean, if anything else, it's is showing again that these sort of endeavors really increase the excitement around science. There is some danger, at least some people have said that there could be some danger that if these projects fail it could end up setting people back a bit because people be like I supported this thing, and I

was all, I'm not going to invest in another one. Yeah, although at least with in these cases it's all unmanned probes um and I think that that is really the best possible idea right now for space exploration and asteroid exploration and mining operation. And right we don't. Well, we'll talk about some manned mining operations fictional ones anyway, in

our next podcast. Yes we will. Well, that is one thing that I hate to hurt people's feelings because I'm sure when you say asteroid mining, what they're imagining is people at space suits with pick axes. I guess. And first will is there the Seven Dwarves or whatever? Skyrom in Space. I've been playing a lot of Skyrom again recently. You know Minecraft, there you go Minecraft in Space. Sure, but you're just looking at me with dead eyes. Joke. I've never played this game. So that what do you

just like? Hit rocks? There's o um Okay, So I think we should talk about UM. Imagine all this works, and we can set down on asteroids, we can sample them, we can figure out which ones have the resources we want. What's the best way to get it? Um Some people have talked about, well, okay, I guess you'd UM, you'd send something out to an asteroid and then it would collect raw materials and then uh and then launch off

and bring it to wherever it's useful. Or other people have talked about simply moving very small asteroids, that you create some kind of capture vehicle that would harness the entire thing and bring it into orbit of the Earth or say the Moon, which would make it a lot easier for us to access it, to get to it

and from it with the return materials. Sure, right, that's Deep Space Industries plan is to UM to harness some near Earth asteroids and bring them back to to either UM, yeah, either Earth, Moon or or that fun in between period that I forget the technical term for that. That that that's pretty much balanced by the gravity of the two. Right, So moving an asteroid could be complicated in the sense of you could have some sort of capture vehicle is

either physically bringing the asteroid on or somehow towing it. Uh, there's there. I've seen proposals where you would put essentially thrusters on the asteroid itself and turn the asteroid into a spacecraft of sorts, and that you're just using the thrusters to maneuver it into wherever, whichever orbit you need. Um, there's the concept of gravity towing, although I don't think that would necessarily work, because you're talking about a very

very slow process. With gravity towing, it's usually more in line with with moving an asteroid, so it takes a different path rather than actually pulling it to a specific destination. And obviously there's some safety concerns here, not just for

the probes but for Earth itself. UM, deep space industries at any rate would only be it says that they would only be targeting, you know, less than thirty meter uh in diameter asteroids, because those would be small enough that if they lost control of the asteroid and it plummeted into the Earth, that would really just plummet into the atmosphere and burn up. It was just depending upon what it's made of. If it's thirty meters, possibly destroy

a small town, maybe a medium size city. At any rate, they they say that there might be um that there's about a thousand, one hundred of these that they have already looked at and targeted and said, hey, that one could work. It's maybe fifteen years off right now. But this is part of the problem is that a lot of these New Earth asteroids are on you know, fifteen or twenty year orbit cycles that only come close enough to Earth to be useful every so often, right, right,

This is the challenge, a challenge aside from space. One distinction we should make, and we sort of made it earlier, but I guess it's worth being clear the difference between a near Earth asteroid and a main Belt asteroid when people think of asters right, But when people think of asteroids, they think of the asteroid belt. Right, This is not

really what we're talking now, asteroid belt. If you if you take very far away, if you take the dis if you were to take the distance between Earth and the Sun and then multiply that by two point five, that's the distance between Earth and the asteroid belt. Yeah, these things are too far away in the near future to really be useful for us. So we're talking about our near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun in a way that every now and then brings them very close

to Earth relatively speaking. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly, so that you know, maybe far off in the future, when we developed propulsion systems that are incredibly fast, we might explore the or or we've actually board beyond Mars. At that point, Um, we might be using asteroids in the asteroid belt for mining purposes. But until that point, it's really take years

for us to get back and forth effectively. Yeah, that could be a great thing in the far future, when you're talking about sort of a mastery of the inner Solar System, a sort of full full colonization future. Um, but yeah, in the near term, there's really no advantage to that, especially until we've got a way of making fuel in space that we don't have to ship fuel into space, which is mind bogglingly not very efficient. Yeah. Well,

I mean we've kind of explored it. We've we've talked about how we've got companies that are actually moving on this, which it's kind of cool. It's turning science fiction into science fact. Whether or not it's successful is something that we still have to wait and see, but it's it's certainly I'm sure that we will be doing it in the future. Whether or not it's through the same process that's outlined in these companies approaches or something entirely different

remains to be seen. But I have no doubt that we will be attempting and successful in those attempts to harness the resources of these asteroids for our own use, and possibly in a way that isn't terrifying. Fingers crossed,

Fingers crossed. Well, one way to feel good about it is that I would just say from a lot of the people that I like to read a lot of astronomy buffs and and people who are big on space exploration, a lot of them tend to be skeptical people, um and they are often quick to to pooh pooh the

more fanciful space exploration ideas. But a lot of people seem to have good feelings about this, and I think that comes from the fact that it's um that there is a strong financial incentive behind it, and it does offer a sort of comprehensive plan that you can fully integrate into the future of space exploration, and there are clear steps that people are taking. I think that both

of these companies outlines are a great ideas. Yeah, and it's it's nice that they have, at least for the first few phases, a specific outline of what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it. Uh. It's it certainly is the sort of thing that is necessary if you're going to go forward with a commercial approach to this and not you know, not a government funded science, just purely science based uh endeavor. Right, So

we'll see how it turns out. We will be following us because it's it's cool stuff, so we're excited to see what happens. And guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics of forward Thinking, I recommend you get in touch with us and tell us because we won't know otherwise. One way you can do that is by sending email our addresses FW thinking at Discovery dot com or go to FMW thinking dot com. That's where we have the blogs, podcast videos, et cetera. That's the way.

That's another way you can get in touch with us. There's a lot of stuff there that's really fascinating. Highly commended. Check it out and we will taught you again, really Sarah. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places