Tag Archives: mining

Gouging a mine into the Earth is so 1924. In 2024, scientists are figuring out how to mine with plants, known as phytomining. Of the 350,000 known plant species, just 750 are “hyperaccumulators” that readily absorb sky-high amounts of metals and incorporate them into their tissues. Grow a bunch of …

Two of Blue Origin's earliest employees, former president Rob Meyerson and chief architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The company has been operating in stealth since its founding in 2022, …

The robot about to be let loose on the Norwegian seabed looks like a giant tripod, kicking up sand as it drills to collect samples from one of the last untouched places on Earth. This eerie contraption belongs to Loke Marine Minerals, expected to be among the first companies to …

The Norwegian Parliament voted this week to allow companies to scour its territorial waters for mining opportunities. The decision is a historic event: While some exploration has taken place in international waters in the Pacific, Norway is the first country to open its continental shelf up to deep-sea mining. Environmental …

Everyone’s into asteroids these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and …

Seven years after it left for the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with a celestial souvenir. On the morning of Sunday, September 24, as it passes by Earth the probe will release a canister holding about 9 ounces of space rock. The container will plummet through the …