The US Geological Survey Is Getting Serious About Space Resources and Mining

The director of the USGS is a former NASA scientist who flew on the Shuttle 3 times. This bodes well. Getting the USGS to begin characterizing the natural resources of the asteroids available for commercial exploitation is not only useful for the pure data of it, it also indicates that the US Federal Government is finally starting to accept that commercial exploitation of the heavens is not only probably inevitable, it’s also something that the US should be deeply involved with.

Of course, if the US or American corporations begin harvesting asteroids and collecting billions or even trillions of dollars worth of resources (anything from water to be used in space, to rare elements to be used in Earthly manufacturing to energy collection and transmission), then it’s a safe bet that other nations will try to get in on it. And when you have people competing for resources, you’ll have conflicts. It would thus be in Americas best interests to create a force capable of keeping the peace and enforcing the rule of law. A “space force,” if you will. And once that is created, a good use of that force would be to head out to the frontier and set up advance bases.

If Trump gets all this to happen, then all his idiot-child tweets are forgiven.