Kentucky Space

Peter Diamandis: Moon water "petroleum of space flight"

Chairman and CEO of the X-PRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis, writes that finding water on the Moon could be a turning point in human history. 

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It's what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

Wayne

Russia and India Sign Space Accord

Russia and India have signed a pretty interesting accord on future cooperation in manned space activities. This was a high level meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

The accord paves the way for New Delhi to take a Soyuz seat for one cosmonaut by 2013 and develop its own manned spacecraft by 2015. That detail was provided by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian Space Agency.

Details are still sketchy, but here’s what’s interesting. NASA has no manned program it can offer to allies. We have backed ourselves into a corner such that there is precious little today we can dangle before a trading partner. Saying to a sovereign nation, hey, we can help broker a deal on the Russian Soyuz to send your guys to the International Space Station, well, that somehow doesn’t do the trick, does it?

Clearly Russia has a window here, a very large window of several years, in which Russian space infrastructure will be offered either as a commercial deal or as part of a larger trade package. In the Indian case, that larger package included assistance on nuclear reactors. This may be the time to consider how we can promote the export of our nascent commercial space launch program as part of our own overall international objectives. To do nothing will leave the field wide open to both the Chinese and Russian space programs.

--Jeffrey  Manber