Bellevue, WA planetary Resources are in the process of creating space ships that can mine asteroids. These space ships would mine for precious metals, minerals, and water. The first space ship would be called Arkyd 100 series. There job is to track and photograph asteroids as they fly past Earth. It would also photograph Earth to help scientist learn more about our planet. After the kinks are worked out than the Arkyd 200 series space ships would be sent out. This ship compared to the first has better equipment, tracking devices and will be able to orbit Earth at higher altitudes. It will also have prolusion system to allow movement around asteroids. Next to be sent up into space would be the Arkyed 300 series. These ships determine if an asteroid is worth to mine and than it would go and mine that asteroid. But the mining process is still in development, since they don’t know how to achieve it yet in the zero gravity environments. This final step in this process to collect resources will have to wait at least ten years. But once the wait is over, we’ll be getting resources that can be used for our needs. For example a ninth eight foot asteroid has about fifty billion dollars of platinum inside. Than these resources can be sold and used to create new products.

My opinion about mining asteroids for resources is that it is a good and bad idea. It’s good because if the planet gets overcrowded and resources are diminished. Than we can replace them from ones from space. But it’s a bad idea because the prices of precious metals will drop because there will be more of that product. Reducing the prices of a lot of other products. That’s why I think this is a good and bad idea to mine asteroids.

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http://www.dogonews.com/2012/4/27/planetary-resources-plans-to-extract-precious-metals-and-minerals-from-asteroids