Loony Luxembourg? Or great forward thinking by the Grand Duchy?
The Luxembourg government’s announcement this week that it is to promote a commercial asteroid mining industry astonished even seasoned space industry observers. The story provoked many general readers to check that April 1 had not come early.
Doubters, myself among them, had many questions. Is it feasible to extract materials from asteroids — lumps of rock and ice hundreds of millions of miles away — and process them into useful products and commodities? If so, can anyone make money out of it? And even if the economics stack up, why should little Luxembourg be involved?
Further consideration and conversations with the project’s promoters are beginning to convince me that it is not a crazy science fantasy.
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