Beginning of Essay
On December 10, 1986 the Greater New York Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the engineering section of the New York Academy of Sciences jointly presented a program on mining the planets. Speakers were Greg Maryniak of the ....

Middle of Essay
.... a political problem. Maryniak continued by noting that the early settlers in North America did not attempt to transport across the Atlantic everything then needed to sustain them in the New World. Rather they brought their tools with them and constructed their habitats from local materials. Hence, he suggested that the solution to the dilemma to which he referred required not so much a shift in technology as a shift in thinking. Space, he argued, should be considered not as a vacuum, totally devoid of everything. Rather, it should be regarded as an ocean, that is, a hostile environment but one having resources. Among the resources of space, he sugg ....