Pioneers move from cyberspace to outer space

About 50 years ago, outer space was the future, with the USA and USSR battling to see who go farther and explore more.

After the Soviets went broke and America declared victory and moved on, computers and the Internet ended up fueling scientific and technological progress.

Now, the unimaginable mountains of cash that early Internet pioneers earned starting modern giants like PayPal and Google, are fueling a new privately funded and possibly profitable space travel renaissance.

Today, possibly as you read this column, a rocket built by SpaceX is undergoing a full engine test fire, one week before visiting the International Space Station on May 7, the first privately constructed rocket to do so. SpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal who serves as CEO and chief designer at SpaceX, a company that has built a number of rockets in an effort to further human space exploration.

A lot of news has focused on the recent retirements of former space shuttles Enterprise and Discovery. What you probably haven't heard is that they are being replaced by SpaceX rockets.

Musk has said his ultimate plan is to retire on Mars, and he wants to take people, thousands of them, with him.

SpaceX hopes to send a man to Mars within 10 years. Beyond that they are already planning to sell tickets to the red planet for $500,000.

And unlike Gingrich's "moonbase in less than eight years" plan, Musk actually has the resources, the engineers and the plans to make space exploration and settlement possible.

He's not the only one.

Last week, a company called Planetary Resources unveiled their plan to, along a timeline similar to Musk's, explore space to mine precious material from asteroids.

They are also reaping the rewards of Internet entrepreneurial success, receiving funding from Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and member of Apple's board of directors.

Collecting ore from asteroids is not a novel idea, for sure, but it's an important one.

During a 2005 speech by Peter Diamandis, another Planetary Resources investor, Earth's resources are "a crumb," while the space around us is "a supermarket filled with resources."

As the miners get closer to their goal, they will prove the massive profit potential of space exploration.

Until now, the most money prior endeavors hoped to get for space travel was by charging Richard Branson to go higher than his hot air balloons could previously take him.

Now there are trillions of dollars on the table. Mining two or three asteroids could eliminate our entire national debt.

And people go where the money is.

America was not first settled by religious refugees, as some claim.

The Jamestown colony in Virginia was set up by merchants to hunt precious metals before they discovered another American treasure, tobacco, nearly 20 years before any pilgrim set foot on the Mayflower.

Now the promise of massive rocks full of precious metals just floating around in space, along with Musk's plans of colonization, may finally allow decades worth of dreams of rockets, space stations and entire off-world colonies to come true.

Is there anything the Internet can't do?

(Zach White is a Havre Daily News staff writer.)