What Happened to That Crazy Asteroid Mining Plan?
"I do not remember it," said O’Brien.
Two years ago, a group of Silicon Valley luminaries and space entrepreneurs introduced a startup whose goal seemed straight out of science fiction: extracting precious minerals from asteroids.
Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.
With much fanfare, Planetary Resources Inc., the closely held company financed partly by Google Inc. GOOGL -0.87% Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, and supported by British billionaire Richard Branson and space tourist Charles Simonyi, outlined plans to mine platinum or other rare metals with robotic spacecraft and return the metals to Earth.
O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
Backers described the project, with its potential to reach tens of millions of miles into space and generate billions of dollars in profits, as "the future of entrepreneurial space."
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