As a workplace, the asteroid 433 Eros has a decidedly downtown allure, a
raw--one might even say painful--charisma. Situated more than 14 million
miles from Earth (that's nine months by rocket), Eros is devoid of both
air and water; its daytime temperatures average 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
And yet San Diego visionary Greg Nemitz is now developing a plan for a spartan
miners' colony on Eros, a 21-mile-long potato-shaped rock that is three
percent iron and therefore, Nemitz concludes, would yield $325 quadrillion
worth of platinum. The colony--as designed by Nemitz, founder of Orbital
Development, a consultancy for space and lunar developers--would be underground,
away from Eros's heat. Called the Metro Circus, it would consist of a series
of linked railcars traveling at 90 mph nonstop around the rim of a circular
trench. The centrifugal force would create about a half-gravity--"Enough,"
Nemitz says, "for the circus's residents to maintain bone density."
The railcars, meanwhile, would afford small cell-like living quarters, not
to mention an invigorating dash of danger. "Inevitably there'll be
an onboard explosion," Nemitz concedes. "People will die. People
died on the Oregon Trail--it happens. We'll just pay the widows out of an
insurance fund and move on."
Metro Circus has unprecedented financial promise, Nemitz says, because--by
his reckoning--he has found a way to bypass the Outer Space Treaty of 1967,
which prohibits ownership of celestial bodies. Nemitz argues that the treaty
applies only to nations, and not to "Natural Persons" such as
himself--and, he notes, "I did not sign the Outer Space Treaty of 1967."
In March 2000 Nemitz filed an official (though extralegal) claim
to "outright ownership" of 433 Eros with the Archimedes Institute,
an online registry specializing in outer-space real estate. This year, when
the United States landed its Shoemaker spacecraft on Eros, Nemitz wrote
NASA a courteous note: "I wish to bring to your attention the small
detail of the parking/storage fee. The fee is presently $20 per Earth century."
NASA demurred. Still, Nemitz is hopeful. A half century from now, he says,
the Metro Circus could even blossom into a destination resort--perhaps a
honeymoon hot spot. "The thing's named Eros," he reasons. "I'm
sure that can be sold."
