Orbital Rush Hour

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Orbital Rush Hour

It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years. 

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An Asteroid Made of Platinum

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An Asteroid Made of Platinum

Someday, perhaps 30 years from now, companies will be grabbing asteroids and exploiting them for mineral extraction. Asteroids contain the same valuable minerals, from gold to platinum, from cobalt to indium, that space showered upon Earth billions of years ago. One sizeable asteroid can hold $20 trillion worth of minerals. On a smaller, more practical scale, Peter Diamandis estimates that a single 100-foot asteroid can contain as much as $50 billion of platinum. 

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Private Industry Needs NASA to Help It Fail

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Private Industry Needs NASA to Help It Fail

Private investors are beginning to inch into the market created by government investment of our tax dollars. Will this new industry succeed? There will be failures, just as there was during NACA’s long, patient investment in aeronautics. But there will be brilliant successes as well—provided NASA’s most active constituencies start working together to change the narrative. 

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