A House hearing is about to start on, "The Mineral Supply Chain and the New Space Race." Oddly enough, it's not the House space subcommittee, but the oversight committee's subcommittee on natural resource. Trumpist whackadoo Paul Gosar chairs the overall committee, so I'm curious why this subcommittee is holding this hearing.
Anyway, watch at 10:15 AM EST at:
@WordsmithFL Well, I'm glad they're having productive hearings about urgent and vital things that only they can figure out for us. 😜
@kay_dub Asteroid mining is a worthwhile topic, but not with bizarro political spin.
So far, the market has not been sustainable. Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries were startups about 10-15 years ago, when the Obama administration was going to invest in jump-starting asteroid mining technologies. #NASA was going to capture an asteroid and put it in orbit where robots could harvest it. But Congress never funded it, and so they died.
@WordsmithFL Very interesting. And could use informed discussion.
Yeah, my trigger was, the current house has accomplished absolutely nothing, and will continue to do so. Their hearings have all been an embarrassment, with people who know nothing about a subject acting like experts for the sole purpose of political sound bites.
@kay_dub As predicted, the objection was raised that Gosar's subcommittee doesn't have jurisdiction.
This will go nowhere without a government (#NASA) program as an anchor tenant, and Congress has shown no willingness over the last decade to fund it. I'm sure the China threat was an attempt to create fear, just as the USSR was used as fear to justify Apollo in the 1960s.
@WordsmithFL Yeah, with the amount we're willing to spend on non-military NASA funding, we're lucky we get as much research as we do.
Once China makes significant progress in mining and collecting resources , we'll end up spending way too much to play catch up.
@kay_dub Most of these hearings are for show. It won't go anywhere, especially coming out of the wrong committee.
This is a 2014 #NASA video summarizing the project. I loved it, because I thought it would jump start asteroid mining, but Congress defunded it because it wouldn't preserve legacy jobs with companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And so it died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4IBW4XuUFo