Bringing an Asteroid to Lunar Orbit

Long before Planetary Resources was a gleam in the eye of its founders, John Lewis (University of Arizona) wrote a book that put asteroid mining into the public consciousness. Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets and Planets (Perseus Books, 1996) contains no shortage of wonders, as in the well publicized idea that a single one-kilometer asteroid could produce enough gold and silver to equal world production for a century. David Brin writes about this on George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments site, noting that while that would produce a collapse in gold and silver prices, it would also produce incalculable benefits in terms of raw materials production that could change the economic paradigm entirely.
Lewis is a natural fit with Planetary Resources, the highly buzzed-about startup that plans to make asteroid mining a reality, and it’s no surprise to see that he serves as one of its advisors. But remembering Mining the Sky, I was startled to discover that the idea of using asteroid resources goes all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, who wrote about it in The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Motors in 1903 — it was in this same work that the ...