Asteroid Mining in Fiction, Past and Present

asteroid capture — Small, water-rich near-Earth asteroids can be captured by spacecraft, allowing their resources to be extracted, officials with the new company Planetary Resources say.

(Image credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)

A new billionaire-backed venture announced today that it plans to use robots to mine asteroids for precious metals and in the process add trillions of dollars to the global economy. If the so-called Planetary Resources group, which includes director James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page, succeed, they will breathe life into an idea that is more than a century old and a staple of many science fiction books and movies.

One of the earliest works to explore this idea is the 1898 American space opera, the Thomas Edison-endorsed "Edison’s Conquest of Mars." Written by astronomer-fiction author Garrett P. Serviss, the book, which also stars Edison as the hero, follows a fleet of spaceships that run into huge-headed Martians mining asteroids for gold. The book was a watershed title for the sci-fi genre, introducing tropes like asteroid mining, as well as alien abductions, disintegrator laser beams and more. [Does Asteroid Mining Violate Space Law?]