My excuse for visiting Huntsville last weekend was a local National Space Society conference, Exploring and Privateering Space - oddly but apparently deliberately named after those old quasi-piratical sailors, the privateers. While much of the public meeting there was on such technical topics as new ideas for propulsion - for example NASA's planning a solar sail launch in a few years to one-up Cosmos-1 - the underlying theme and excitement originates from a growing consensus that we will very soon be starting to use the tremendous resources space offers.
One of the speakers was Dennis Wingo, author of Moonrush , about the potential for platinum and other precious metal deposits on the Moon - he stayed to autograph copies of his book. Chris Faranetta, VP for orbital spaceflight at Space Adventures, rather than talking about the tourism his company runs on, spoke of his own thoughts on the great benefits space resources and capabilities will bring, and some of the new ways we may soon be getting to orbit.
That same weekend SEDS was running SpaceVision2004 at MIT, in cooperation with the MIT Mars Society. Wired reports on the meeting, indicating a strong theme involving use of space resources on "The Final Capitalist Frontier". And a couple of weeks back, the Colorado School of Mines held their 6th annual Space Resources Roundtable, on precisely this topic. Even NASA is interested in using space resources to accomplish the things it needs to in space, as the Wired article points out.
One can almost see a future here of spaceships traveling to and from our celestial neighbors loaded with precious materials. But will they really have to watch out for enemy-flagged privateers?
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