School of Mines Wants to Launch the First Space Mining Program

The courses are being offered online--it's a shame grad classes are too expensive to just take for fun! Looks like $6,800 or so to take one of the two they're offering next semester, or about $12,700 for both. The Masters degree would end up costing you about $58.7k plus $1,000/semester in fees. It's a hard sell for something that still looks relatively far in the future, but I suppose if space mining is truly is your dream career, it's great that this program exists.

Excluding organic materials like oil/coal/etc the global economy does not spend a lot of resources on mining. Further, we have vast excess supply's of most of what we do mine making space based mining problematic. Sure, it sounds good but we need to be in space for some other reasons before mining becomes practical.

Twenty years ago a high school buddy of mine went to Mines, and he came back wearing a t-shirt showing (if memory serves) the earth with big drills all over it and the rest of the planets in the background and the caption read:<p>&quot;Earth first - we&#x27;ll get to the other ones later&quot;

I clicked on this link hoping it was the French School of Mines (&quot;Ecole des Mines&quot;).

At this point a reference to the groundbreaking and utterly fascinating &quot;Mining the Sky&quot; book by John S. Lewis is in order which should be on everyone&#x27;s &quot;must read&quot; list.

I went to South Dakota School of Mines and was sad to learn this wasn&#x27;t my school doing this..

Haha, they actually do have decent aerospace and mining engineering programs.<p>Their CS program leaves a little to be desired though.

&gt;[T]he class covered the Outer Space Treaty, a creation of the United Nations that governs outer-space actions and (in some people&#x27;s interpretations) makes the legality of space mining dubious.<p>If this topic interests you, there&#x27;s a whole category at your local library for Space Law (it&#x27;s at the end, KZD1002-6715): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loc.gov&#x2F;aba&#x2F;cataloging&#x2F;classification&#x2F;lcco&#x2F;lcco_k.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loc.gov&#x2F;aba&#x2F;cataloging&#x2F;classification&#x2F;lcco&#x2F;lcco_...</a>

My EPICS 2 project was on space mining. Mines already had a good amount of space classes, will have to visit in 2018.

I think if anyone were to do this, it should be them. Just for their name.

I wish this was the School of Mimes wanting to launch the first Space Miming Program.