What the U.

S.

The U.

K.

And Russia agreed that space exploration should benefit everyone.

That space should be free to explore and use the country's won'th station nuclear weapons in space and that they can't occupy your claims.

Certain parts of space is their own.

This all may seem a little far fetched now, but when you consider the steps being taken toward mining asteroids, you can see how property claims in space could come into play.

Life in space is happening, but if we want to move deeper into the dark and possibly colonize planets lift off, it's going to take more than rockets and space suits.

Our best chance at life in space majors be asteroids afterwards are something that worry about threatening the Earth.

But in truth, actually, they're the greatest opportunity that we have.

Chris Lewicki is an aerospace engineer who is obsessed with space.

He's helped NASA land two rovers on Mars in his company, Planetary Re sources are confident Asteroid's hold the passport to the cosmos were focused on a single task, finding resources and asteroids and bringing those resource is to a market that's gonna start here in low Earth orbit and grow into the solar system.

Thes are more than just chunks of rock.

Many are packed with medals that Lewicki wants to mind for building materials.

In fact, many of Earth's most valuable metals can also be found in asteroids.

But the real treasure Lewicki is hunting is water, thier discovery of oil and the way that it transformed the 20th century.

We see the water and the fuel on asteroids as providing that same transformational capability for the 21st century.

The idea is to build orbiting gas stations that harness the sun's power to split water into a liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that would then be used for rocket fuel.

That way, spaceships wouldn't have to carry all of their fuel with them and could top off at these cosmic filling stations, allowing them to go even deeper into space.

Asteroid mining sounds kind of like a SciFi fantasy.

Me.

How realistic is this?

What's possible is inevitable.

Everything that was once scifi I had to change at some point in time, so this is a piece of an asteroid, right?

Yes, it is.

Could you theoretically create a spacecraft or three D printed spacecraft in space?

If you're able to get your hands on these metals?

Absolutely.

These are how we will build the future starships and future colonies and future habitats in space stations.

We will use medals from asteroids to do that, and we'll use three D printing as the technology.

Lewicki and Company have already launched a satellite to analyze asteroids, and they're gearing up to deploy another.

We're in our operations and system test facility, supporting the construction and test of the Ark in six satellite.

So they're actually building your next base.

We're building our next spacecraft right on the other side of these windows.

There are 10 asteroids that planetary resource is is considering mining.

It's a dangerous job, but luckily the company's robots will be doing the digging.

There are a lot of people who are skeptical that you guys were gonna be able to pull this off, that asteroid mining will become a reality.

I think they're right to be skeptical, but it takes those people who do believe that will happen to find out how to make it happen.

Space mining won't be cheap, but some of the world's richest see the potential and have invested in the company were programmed to go places we've never been find refuge on land we've never touched.

Could asteroid mining as impossible as it seems, help us reach the frontier that seems most out of reach.