What does Outer Space have to do with it? (third of a series)

ASTEROID MINING

The recent announcement by Planetary Resources was the inspiration for this series. I made the statement that the idea of mining asteroids is not as crazy as it sounds. I thought I'd have to do a lot of writing to justify that statement; but then came along this article in Popular Science entitled, "Why Mining an Asteroid for Water and Precious Metals Isn't as Crazy as it Sounds." Fancy that.

In the last decade, there have been some stunning achievements using robotics in space. Most people haven't heard of them. The media tend to focus on just three technologies--human space operations (the Shuttle and Space Station), the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Mars rovers--to the exclusion of almost everything else.  So here are some of the coolest space programs you've never heard of:

• From 1997 through 2002, Japan led the way with the launch and successful operations of "Kiku No. 7," known more familiarly in the space community as ETS-VII. These two spacecraft mated and demated several times without assistance from the ground. One of the two craft also had a robotic arm that performed many manipulations of objects, all automatic, without human involvement.
• In 2005, the U.S. Air Force launched XSS-11, which was able to maneuver around and inspect an ARBITRARY object--one not specifically given special features to help with rendezvous. This capability is perhaps more relevant to asteroid exploration than experiments having custom-built rendezvous and docking features.
• 2007 saw the launch and operations of the Orbital Express experiment created by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Defense Department). Your blogger was involved early in the planning phase of this fantastic program. Orbital Express repeated the Japanese success in autonomous rendezvous and docking, but then executed two amazing "firsts"--one spacecraft being refueled by the other, and a computer module being swapped out by a robotic arm.
• Late last year, DARPA announced the Phoenix program, intended to recover valuable resources and bring them to a useful orbit for reuse.

It's important that all of these programs have emphasized autonomous operations--that is, satellites that have the smarts to perform complex operations without a human guiding them at every step. Controlling things tens of thousands of miles away is hard because of time delays, and getting enough information to make safe decisions from afar. Plus, humans sometimes just get overwhelmed, even when they're nearby. The only time a Progress resupply vehicle collided with the Mir space station, a human, not a computer, was in control.

Next post, we'll talk about why any of this could be of any use whatsoever in solving terrestrial resource problems.