Democratic U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer is one of two lead sponsors of bipartisan legislation that promotes commercial asteroid mining and gives property rights to companies that extract mineral resources from the rocky celestial bodies.
Kilmer, a Port Angeles native who represents the 6th Congressional District, which includes Clallam and Jefferson counties, introduced the ASTEROIDS Act on July 10 with Republican Rep. Bill Posey of Florida’s 8th Congressional District.
Posey, who worked at the Kennedy Space Center until the end of the Apollo Program, sits with Kilmer on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which held a hearing on the legislation Sept. 10 before the committee’s House Space Subcommittee.
The ASTEROIDS Act — the acronym for the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space Act — is meant to “promote the development of a commercial asteroid resources industry for outer space in the United States and to increase the exploration and utilization of asteroid resources in outer space,” according to the text of the bill, HR 5063.
It would facilitate commercial exploration of asteroids, which can be rich in minerals and most of which, in our solar system, orbit the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in what is known as the asteroid belt.
It also discourages government barriers to private-industry exploration and promotes the rights of U.S. businesses to explore and use those resources.
Minerals extracted from asteroids would become the property of the entity that tapped them, “which shall be entitled to all property rights thereto,” according to the legislation.
The ASTEROIDS Act has 9 percent chance of congressional passage, according to the nonpartisan federal legislation-tracking website, www.govtrack.us.
The bill was lampooned by www.huffingtonpost.com, which headlined its Sept. 9 article on the legislation with the jab: “Congress Could Privatize Asteroids, Because There Isn’t Anything Else To Do,” referring to hot-button issues such as immigration reform that will go untouched before the Nov. 4 general election.
In an interview, Kilmer — a Gig Harbor resident seeking re-election Nov. 4 who is being challenged by fellow Gig Harbor resident and Republican Marty McClendon — told of other legislation he has pursued.
While on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, the one-term congressman also has worked aggressively to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act, which “lends assistance to cutting-edge technology research and development throughout the country,” he said in an opinion piece for Roll Call, a Washington, D.C., newspaper.
Kilmer also formulated the six-point Olympic Peninsula Economic Development initiative, which promotes collaboration between timber industry and environmental leaders.
He asserted that the ASTEROIDS Act does not authorize new federal spending and would lead to job creation in Washington state.
“Part of the challenge is that the capacity for private enterprise to pursue these opportunities and to get financing is limited by the lack of clarity in regards to the regulatory aspects of these space-based enterprises,” Kilmer said.
“If we don’t pass this law, I don’t think commercial enterprises will step into this.”
A report on the Sept. 10 hearing by Mark Strauss, a writer for io9, a science and science fiction blog, at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-asteroid includes links to testimony.
James F. Bell, president of The Planetary Society and a professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, testified that asteroids could provide materials, including those that are oxygen- and water-bearing, that humans will need to live and work beyond Earth.
He supports government investment in the effort.
“The Planetary Society believes that it would be wise to start making the required investments in technology, infrastructure, and transportation systems required to study asteroids in the level of detail needed to make truly informed future decisions about their individual resource potential,” Bell testified.
“As such, we support investments, through both commercial and governmental programs in the kinds of technologies needed for the exploration and utilization of asteroids as contemplated in H.R. 5063.”
Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Institute and co-investigator in NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, testified that the effort to mine asteroids “is beyond the scope of private enterprise.”
For private enterprise, “there would be no expectation of return in investment on . . . reasonable timescales,” he said.
“This is a logical area of governmental investment.”
And Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz, a University of Mississippi space law professor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law, said, “What remains unclear is the ownership status of the resources when they are collected.”
Kilmer cited ongoing interest in such ventures by Blue Origin, a commercial spaceflight startup spearheaded by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Boeing Co., and Planetary Resources, a Redmond-based company.
“We certainly have no expectation that government money will ever be provided for this, which is why our investors have chosen to take it up for themselves,” Chris Nowicki, president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources, said in an interview with the Peninsula Daily News.
Asteroids would be mined robotically from the company’s Redmond facilities, he said.
A Japanese unmanned spacecraft already has landed on an asteroid, Nowicki said.
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa landed on an asteroid in 2005, collected particle samples and returned to Earth in June 2010 with its find.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
