China launches road map to explore solar system, including steps towards creating space-age tech to mine and use water ice
- Plan includes steps to mine and use mineral resources beyond Earth and placing nodes at gravitational points between the sun, moon and planets
- Around 122 asteroids near Earth are economically suitable for mining and use, says project scientist Wang Wei
Wang said that with the rapid advancement of space technologies, the economic exploitation of space resources could soon go from the Earth-moon system to deep space and could play a key role in economic competition between nations.
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Their initiative – named after Ming dynasty scientist Song Yingxing’s work Tiangong Kaiwu, or The Exploitation of the Works of Nature – will boost the global space economy and help China leapfrog developments, Wang told a Chinese Society of Astronautics meeting in Beijing on August 19.
“Just like the miracles created in the great age of navigation, a ‘great space age’ featuring the use of space resources will … create the next miracles in human history and bring new prosperity to our civilisation,” he said, according to the state-owned China Space News.
Wang, who is a navigation and gyroscopes expert and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the plan involves using gravitationally-balanced regions between celestial bodies – such as planets, the moon and the sun – as nodes to expand, step by step.
In the past three years, Wang and his team had examined the overall feasibility and key technologies involved in the best use of deep space resources, China Space News reported.
