Yesterday it was the Asteroid Day with a live broadcast from Luxembourg. I was lucky to attend this amazing event and see super speakers among which several astronauts: Jean-François Clervoy who flew 3 times aboard space shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, Ed Lu who flew 2 times aboard space shuttle, 1 time aboard Soyuz and also did a long ISS mission, Dumitri-Dorin Prunariu who went aboard Soyuz, Rusty Schweickart an Apollo 9 astronaut and one of the lucky men having had the privilege to walk on the Moon, and Nicole Stott who flew on space shuttles Atlantis and Discovery and worked for over 100 days on the ISS.
There were also many astronomers, scientists and experts in asteroid.
First of all, experts debated about threats that may represent asteroids. There are several initiatives for Earth defense. Actually the probability for a collision is quite low for this century but the risk is not nil. Humanity has today all the knowledge and technologies needed for an active Earth defense by which you can deviate asteroids presenting a risk to enter the atmosphere. As one panelist said:
“Dinosaurs disappeared because they were not mastering space technology”
It was also pointed out that Earth can be seen as a spacecraft and that we are all collectively part of the crew, not simple passengers, but crew members. In that respect, this is our responsibility to do what is necessary to preserve the spacecraft and then humanity. An usual spacecraft can be deviated to avoid asteroids, but for Earth, inversely, the asteroids must be deviated.
But asteroids represent an opportunity too. Within the Spaceresources.lu initiative, Luxembourg is building a complete regulatory and expertise ecosystem for the exploration and utilization of space resources. The ability to extract valuable metals and water from near-Earth objects will lower the cost of lifting space explorers beyond Earth’s gravity. It will also guarantee that access to the materials for building equipment and sustaining life are already in place for missions to more distant destinations.
Equipment and habitats can be built in-space thanks to the progresses of 3D printing and robotics. AI will also drive those developments allowing machines to predict the needs according to the real environmental conditions and what will be found in-space or on celestial bodies like the Moon. Once prediction is made, AI can allow machines to build other machines. This shall lead to a true space industry where most of the activities are fully automatized, limiting human beings interventions only for very specific tasks.
Apparently many asteroids have an abundant quantity of ice/water. This should be one of the initial focus of space mining.
New space is a fascinating area for superpreneurs and there are great incentives for astropreneurs to come to Luxembourg and contribute to the space resource industry.
If you are interested in knowing more, please contact me.
Build the world you love!
