fusion, inertial confinement fusion, or the properties of platinum group metal matrices. The critics denouncing cold fusion as illusionary after reporting negative results have largely lacked this professional experience and have often begun their condemnations after only a few weeks in the laboratory. The number of teams reporting positive results as reported in The New York Times index, the position of the leading journal Fusion Technology10^ and the impeccable publishing credentials of Jones and Mayer in appropriate fields are all persuasive. I would conclude that cold fusion is almost certainly real and warrants extensive research. Most cold fusion experiments have used Palladium and Platinum. Patent filings and news articles indicate that applied research for proprietary engineering applications is proceeding in a number of countries, particularly Japan.12,10M American works seems to be primarily performed by small independent startups while Japanese work is in the labs of industrial giants such as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. While established authorities argue about the reality of cold fusion, engineers are working to present a fait accompli. The form that cold fusion technology might take when engineered for a mass market is speculative, but it is important to realize that Palladium is a rare and expensive element and this fact could severely limit the ultimate usefulness of cold fusion as a new energy source for reactors using PGM. Several sessions of the first IAF conference on Space Power held in Cleveland in 1989 explored how space resources could be used to meet the world's energy needs. With the arrival of cold fusion, PGM mining of asteroids is directly relevant to the topic of space power. Asteroids and Platinum Group Metals There are in the range of 10,000 asteroids13 larger than one half mile in diameter that cross or approach Earth's orbit. Only about one per cent of these objects have been charted. Congress has directed NASA to intensify its search for Earth passing asteroids. The publicity given the Alverez "killer asteroid" theory of dinosaur extinction and the recent discovery of a large crater in the Yucatan thought to be the "smoking cannon" from 65,000,000 BC has created popular interest in the Earth passers. The "fingerprint" that led Alverez to suspect an asteroid strike as the cause of the end of the Cretaceous era was a high concentration of Platinum Group Metals, particularly iridium, in the sediments at the end of that era.14 A large group of planetary astronomers led by John Lewis have long pointed out that the best sources of PGM are asteroids and that the high values of PGM in an industrial economy makes missions to near Earth asteroids or the Martian Moons to mine such metals economically promising space ventures.15,16,17 Despite a generation of publicly funded planetary research little more hard data is available today about asteroids than was known in 1957 at the dawn of the space age. "DT chauvinism" in the physics community is matched by a "Lunar chauvinism" that is seriously entrenched in space policy circles. The focus of NASA for the last thirty years has been toward operations that lead to bases on the Moon and later, Mars. The organizationalculture giving rise of this
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