The Top Drawer

The word around New York is that gold is now truly a precious metal in every sense of the word. The World Gold Council statistics show that gold jewelry demand increased by 22% in 2007 as compared to 1996, and that was before the recent jump in costs for gold bullion.

If prices for gold fall back to the old reality, Firenze Jewels and other jewelers expect it will still be an attractive accessory. Many people want the prestige of wearing beautifully crafted gold items that are out of reach to many. New technical processes allow gold to be designed in ways not imagined years ago. Stones that were previously not used along side gold such as peridot are now paired. Sterling and platinum were what the fashion conscious jumped on, but with the new extravagant price of gold, it will be more attractive to all.

NASA wouldn’t have to mine a large portion of Eros—or another asteroid like it– to pay for the next 5 decades of its programs, but it also couldn’t come up with the funds to do so. And carrying out a task of this sort would be a as groundbreaking (pun intended) and newsworthy as any event in the annals of both space-crafting and mining.

Could investment from any number of sources, like the US government teaming up with its 10 most friendly allies, allow for robotic mining of a blasted space rock? It would take many, many years to prepare and would destroy world markets for minerals such as gold as they are flooded by gold from space; but yes it is quite possible. With a massive inventory of jewelry in every size and shape, Firenze Jewels doesn’t like the idea of such an expedition much was it to happen tomorrow. Nor, we suspect, would those of you that own high valued gold or platinum jewelry. So what do you think, is space the place for us to expand our search for precious stones, as well minerals like aluminum?

The Asteroid Eros was closely examined in 1999 by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft. Few Asteroids have been closely examined, and it is believed that Eros may not be unusual in the minerals it contains. There are 1000s of asteroids circling earth. Weighing in at about 20,000 million tons of aluminum and with almost the same amount of gold and platinum, one has to wonder why NASA hasn’t launched a mission to capture the banana shaped asteroid, tethered it to the international space station, and started one of the largest mining projects in the history of the world— in space.

In fact, the amount of precious stone in this not particularly large Asteroid is greater than what could be mined from the entire upper crust of our planet. Twenty to 200 thousand megatons of explosives would be needed to extract substantial amounts of precious minerals. Such a project would more realistically be done by mining on the rock itself by a spacecraft using solar energy and robots.