Mystery Space Venture Surprise!

In a teasingly mysterious announcement, a coalition of Google Investors, Software billionaires and Director James Cameron have declared their intention to "unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity."

Sounds like they knew my birthday is next month.

The new venture, called "Planetary Resources", is the center of much speculation. One of the principle founders of the venture and co-director of the million-dollar X-Prize Contest Peter Diamandis has previously hinted towards his interest in exploiting minerals within asteroids,  leaving many to wonder if Planetary Resources might be an attempt at Asteroid Mining.

951 Gaspra, the first asteroid to be observed close-up.

On April 24th, when the venture is fully revealed, we'll get the pleasure of knowing for sure. Asteroid Mining could certainly be very lucrative; A typical asteroid (one mile in diameter) contains billions of dollars worth of precious metals and industrial materials, and spent comets are thought contain large amounts of water and oxygen that could be used to supply prolonged manned space missions.

Whatever the venture, it's certain to be interesting with the rogue's gallery of innovators behind it. Google co-founder Larry Page has signed on as an investor and adviser alongside such others as software engineering visionary Charles Simonyi, and Space Tourism entrepeneur Eric Anderson (known for leading Space Adventures, the first privately-owned company to send people into space).

If these guys feel bold enough to call it "a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity", I believe it. Private Space Entrepeneurship has an unbelievably bright future and extremely exciting implications, granted enough public interest can be garnered.

NASA's decline, not all bad.

While still a prestigious government agency to be sure, NASA just ain't what it used to be. With funding starting to dwindle, the agency responsible for such incredible achievement as landing a man on the moon has largely become a sleepy backwater where public prestige is concerned. Of course, NASA still conducts some pretty awesome research missions, but the large-scale projects of potentially history-making proportion have all but ceased; the Atlantis Space Shuttle was permanently shut down last year, and the Constellation Program was cancelled due to budget constraints. 

Because of NASA's effectual shrinking as an agency, over 9,000 employees and contractors have been laid off. This includes not only skilled machinists and highly trained IT experts, but Physicists, Engineers, and Scientists of all types. An employment market previously dominated by NASA has suddenly been opened wide, and employers from all different sectors have been greedily snatching up such valuable personnel. Conversely, some truly enterprising souls have actually began their own start-ups, some focusing on exploiting the wildly exciting and promising Space Frontier. 

The Aurora Australis, as breathtakingly observed from Space Shuttle Discovery.

As Olga Kharif of Bloomberg Businessweek Technology reports:

 "...The NASA émigrés are working on projects ranging from enterprise software to robotics. Several stuck close to what they already know. Former NASA Chief of Staff George Whitesides is president and chief executive officer of Virgin Galactic, the project backed by Richard Branson that plans to offer suborbital space flights to tourists. Alan Stern, NASA’s associate administrator for the science mission directorate before leaving in 2008, is now chief scientist and mission architect at Moon Express, which is developing unmanned spacecraft that would take cargo, such as soil samples, to and from the moon. “Competition rocks,” Stern says. “I expect to see a lot of failure and a lot of successes.”..."

This is very, very good news. In my opinion, the future of Humanity is in Outer Space. NASA has paved the way, but the Space Frontier won't fully open until Private Industry and Individuals are able to take advantage of Outer Space on their own. If America wants to remain on the cutting edge, the wonder and excitement of Space Exploration must be reinvigorated; some serious breakthroughs driven by the power of Private Interest are just what we need. Game on, I say.