The Next Frontier: Space Miners are the Universe's Future Tycoons - NBCNews.com

A prototype of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) robotic capture module system is tested with a mock asteroid boulder in its clutches at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The robotic portion of ARM is targeted for launch in 2021. NASA

Luxembourg is a European country smaller than Rhode Island, but don't let its size suggest a shortage of vision. Its government launched a $227 million fund

earlier this year to invest in space mining companies that set up operations within the country's borders, sending a strong message that the country intends to play a meaningful role in the changing nature of space travel. The incentive has already attracted American space mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.

"If we want to keep building communities and raising families, at some point we outgrow the earth," says Planetary Resources president and CEO Chris Lewicki, who previously worked on Mars rovers for NASA. "We've left the planet before — it's something we know how to do, something the government has spent money on. The challenge for companies operating in this space is how to do it more cost-effectively, and how to do it for commerce instead of science."

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Lewicki says space miners will face all the same problems that terrestrial miners know all too well. Where's the best place to drill? How much material is there? The fundamental skills and knowledge are largely unchanged, but the environment will be unlike anything humans have ever mined before. "We've previously crossed oceans and flown through the air, and today we have the technology to explore space. Asteroids are like rocks on the ocean shore of a new continent."

As coal miners

lose jobs by the tens of thousands, it's clear that the nature of mining (and even the nature of work itself) is changing dramatically. The mining that humans do on Earth today will be done in space by robots tomorrow, and humanity will be better for it.

How else will we carry out the task of expanding into the solar system?

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