Mine the Asteroids!

The gold rush has officially begun: the mining of the asteroids. Science fiction writers have been predicting it for decades.* Now some seriously hard-hitting billionaires and technical people are joining forces to make it happen, through a privately funded initiative called Planetary Resources, Inc. Investors include filmmaker and explorer James Cameron (yes, he who just dove the Mariana Trench), the founders of the X-Prize Foundation, Google executives Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, Jr., and others. Technical people include—well, for example, the chief engineer is Chris Lewicki, who was Flight Director for NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions.

They're seriously planning to robotically explore and mine near-Earth asteroids, seeking precious metals, such as platinum-family metals, and water (very precious in space, very expensive to lift into orbit). From the Planetary Resources website:

"Initial space resource development will focus on water-rich asteroids. Water is the essence of life and exists in plentiful supply on asteroids. Access to water and other life-supporting volatiles in space provides hydration, breathable air, radiation shielding and even manufacturing capabilities. Water’s elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used to formulate rocket fuel."

Here's a summary of a recent report suggesting that the technology to do this is available or nearly so. 

I think this is one of the most exciting developments in space exploration since the Apollo lunar landings. For more details, visit the Planetary Resources website. For a highly readable but expert analysis, read Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog post: Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it.

I'm not an investment speculator, but if they were selling shares, I'd be in for a share today.

*My own short story, Dog Star, is based on the premise that we'll be actively mining near-Earth asteroids; also, on the smarts of border collies.

Killer Asteroids? Moonbase? Hmm...

I wrote earlier about an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Gregg Easterbrook, called The Sky Is Falling. In it, Easterbrook laid out some reasons why we should perhaps be more attentive to the possibility of disaster raining down on us from space, in the form of Earth-impacting asteroids. The probability is small that we'll be smacked by a planet-killer, but the cost if it happens could be civilization itself. Go ahead and read the article; it'll open in another window. Done? Unfortunately, it suggested arming ourselves for asteroid by abandoning our plans to return to the Moon. Here's my response. (The Atlantic didn't publish it, so I'm publishing it here.)

Gregg Easterbrook gets it half right in "The Sky is Falling" (The Atlantic, June 2008). He argues incisively for the need for those in the space community to take seriously the planetary threat of wayward asteroids and comets. NASA isn't interested, as Easterbrook says, and the Air Force is hardly seizing on it with gusto, either. I spoke recently with a USAF officer whose job is strategic planning, and his unofficial comment was that the Defense Department could be considered criminally negligent in its failure to recognize planetary defense as a crucial part of its job description. If an asteroid-strike occurs (or threatens), are NASA and the Air Force just going to shrug and say "Not my job"? As Easterbrook says, that needs to change.

Where he gets it wrong is his dismissal of the return-to-the-moon program as a waste of money, detracting from other efforts. While balancing funding is always difficult (and the space budget is vastly smaller than most people think, accounting for only about half of one percent of the U.S. budget), a return to the moon could be a promising next step indeed. Learning to homestead other worlds is the next step toward what Captain Kirk famously called "the final frontier." The point is not that a lunar base will be a launch point for a Mars mission--no one suggests that. It is that living on the moon will give us necessary experience for future exploration (to Mars and elsewhere), in a place where help is three days' travel time away, not six to twelve months' travel time. Further, a moon base could be the first place for serious mining of extraterrestrial resources, signaling the beginning of the end of humanity's sole reliance on Earth-based metal and energy resources. Why mine minerals on the moon? Well, if you want to get metals into space--for example, to build satellite-based solar energy systems to beam nonpolluting energy to Earth--it's potentially a lot cheaper and easier to lift tonnage from the low-gravity moon than from Earth, especially if you build solar-powered electric launchers for the purpose. This is a good argument for mining asteroids, as well.

This brings us back to the wayward asteroid and comet problem. While Easterbrook mentions several promising technologies, the best long-term solution may be to build an infrastructure for living and working productively in space--not just one low-Earth space station, but a community of space habitations, complete with multiple, varied, and redundant transportation systems. Instead of hoping someone can get off a nuke to deflect one of those wayward asteroids, let's build a permanent capability to move large objects in orbit. If a deadly ball of rubble comes along, we could nudge it away. If a metal-bearing asteroid comes along, we could move it to a parking orbit. Then, instead of watching it destroy our civilization, we could turn it into a mineral-lode, and put it to work building our new future in space.

That's what I told The Atlantic, and I still think it's true. Sometimes you just have to bring your own soapbox.

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." —Leo Tolstoy

When Mining Asteroids, Don't Forget Your Trusty Dog

The recent arrival of the privately designed-and-built Dragon space capsule at the International Space Station dovetails nicely with another recent event: the announcement of a privately funded initiative called Planetary Resources, Inc., to seek out and mine near-Earth asteroids.

Both dovetail nicely with my own initiative: the release of my short story "Dog Star" as a standalone ebook. The dovetailing has to do with the fact that "Dog Star" is about a young asteroid miner who finds himself grounded on just such as asteroid, just him and his disabled ship... and his trusty "smartmutt," an enhanced border collie named Sam. Dogs who can discuss astrophysics with you while thinking about digging on an asteroid aren't a dime a dozen even in this future. Sam has to prove his mettle while helping his human dig his way out of this life-threatening jam.

This is a reprint of a story that first appeared as part of an online science-oriented anthology of stories called Diamonds in the Sky, which was funded by the National Science Foundation to help further the cause of science education, particularly in astronomy. (This new release has a couple of minor corrections from the text as it was released in the anthology.)

Gretchen, the student who has been working with me, helped get "Dog Star" up for sale on the last day of her interning stint. (Thanks, Gretchen!) It's now free at Smashwords, and you can also get it in the Kindle and Nook stores.

Kindle | Nook | Smashwords (free!)

"Dog Star" will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection, Reality and Other Fictions, which is rapidly moving toward completion. I hope to make an announcement about that in the next few weeks. It will contain about half my published stories, including a couple not released as standalone ebooks. The other half will follow in Going Alien, soon after.

Reality Runs Free!

Actually, I don't know if reality, per se, is running free, but my book Reality and Other Fictions, is free in ebook for the month of August! Really!

Why would I do such a crazy thing? Because I want more people to give a try and see if they like it. And if they like it, maybe they'll give it a good review somewhere.* And they might even try some of my other books, while they're at it.

*Please do! It hardly has any reviews in the stores. And as I've said before, reviews matter.

Here's what it's about, according to the blurb writer (me again):

Five science fiction stories to ignite the imagination.

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. These stories appeared in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, F&SF, and the Boston Sunday Herald. They include Carver’s first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity’s End.

Contents:
Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
Of No Return
Seastate Zero
Rocket Ride!
Dog Star

There's a pretty big range of types of story in this one, and I hope you'll find something to your liking. It's free to try! And for that matter, to keep.

Right now it's free at Book View Café, Kobobooks, and Smashwords. Soon it should show up free at Nook and Apple. If you see it free there, you could do me a big favor by going to Amazon and reporting a "lower price elsewhere" (scroll down to Product Details)—in hopes of getting them to make it free, too. (You can't do that directly at Amazon, unless you go into one of their exclusive programs, which I prefer not to do.) Thanks a million. Oh, and grab a free copy while you're at it.

 

Book View Cafe | Smashwords | Kobo — free now!

Amazon | Nook | Apple — free soon!

(Okay it's free at Kobo again. Still waiting for Nook and Apple, though, and I can't make it free at Amazon until it's free at one or both of those places. Amazing how hard it can be to give something away.) 
 

Reality and Other Fictions

All these years, I've been telling you wonderful people about my novels, with scarcely a mention of my short stories. That's because my short stories have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I've published eleven shorter pieces over the years, in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Boston Sunday Herald. And now I've collected them.

The first of two collections is Reality and Other Fictions, now on sale at Book View Café, for the low, low price of $2.99! Here's what it looks like:

Here’s the blurb:

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. They include Carver’s first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity’s End.

If you've been following my blog recently, you'll have seen my mention of some new stories going up for sale as singles. Some of those are in this collection. Here's the contents page:

• Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
• Of No Return
• Seastate Zero
• Rocket Ride
• Dog Star

"Seastate Zero" is available only in this collection, as are the insightful introductions I've lovingly written for each story and for the book as a whole. At least, I hope you'll find them insightful, or at least interesting. I do share some memories I've never written down before about how these stories came to be, and how they fit into my career.

My second collection, Going Alien, is scheduled for late August. It pulls together all of my short work that involves... can you guess? Aliens.

For both of these books, I am indebted to Gretchen, the high school student (now graduated, and valedictorian!) who typed and formatted a good number of them from old paper copies, while helping me as an intern. And equally to Anna King, who provided extraordinary help in wrestling the final formatting into line. Not to mention Allysen, for catching some embarrassing typos and wordos at the eleventh hour. And finally, Vonda McIntyre, author and BVC founding member, who has been tirelessly helpful in getting this stuff up.

Available exclusively at BVC until July. After that, I'll release it to the usual suspects.

I hope you'll give it a try! (Vote for me!)

Riding a Comet!

The successful landing of Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency is a welcome bright spot in this month’s space news. Bright for science, and bright for the spirit of exploration. Well done, ESA!

As I type this, I don’t know if Philae has yet run out of battery power. In case you’ve been living in a mine this week, Philae dropped across space to a landing, but took a few unfortunate bounces and ended up resting on a precarious spot with too much shadow for its solar cells. I wish we could send it a light! I’d even contribute my Stanley car jumpstart battery, if it would help. Well, I’m sure Philae’s clever scientist-parents will make the most of it. And I can’t wait to find out what they learn. [Update: Apparently it has run out of battery power, after drilling into the comet, but before sending data back. Ow, that hurts. But there may be opportunity for it to recharge slowly, in the coming months, and maybe come back to life for a while. Let's hope.]

It’s amazing how little we knew about comets until we started visiting them in robotic person. We used to think they were basically dirty snowballs. Now we see that they’re much more like asteroids, but with some snow and ice to provide outgassing for the halo.

As I looked at the pictures of the comet, I found myself thinking of John Bandicut, fictional space pilot in my novel Neptune Crossing. John had to smack just such a comet really really hard, to keep it from hitting Earth. Looking at those pictures of a real comet, I reflected on how Bandie was one mongo brave dude to do such a thing. Even if he did have alien science working for him, and was half out of his mind with silence fugue. When I wrote the scene, I knew he was brave. But I don’t think I knew just how brave.

Thanks, Bandie, for riding that other comet!  (Even if you are fictional, and in the future.)

I like XKCD's view of the landing:

http://xkcd.com/1446/