policy has been shaped by goals of prestige revolving around the cold war with the "payoff for such missions being the questionable glory of being first to land on the Moon. A large Mars lobby has grown up in the 1980s stimulated by four "Case for Mars" conferences at Boulder Colorado in 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1989. The "Mars Underground" of the 1980s has developed as a challenge to the Moon lobby for research funds and NASA priority. The hundreds of papers published by both groups are largely silent on the issue of how a base on either the Moon or Mars could eventually pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D and hardware required. The 1973 oil shock led to interest in the notion of using lunar materials to build arrays to generate solar power for Earth use. While space power satellites (SPS) spawned the L-5 society and many engineering studies, hard economic analysis18 argue that Earth based photovoltaic collectors should be several orders of magnitude cheaper than space systems for serving an Earth market. The scientific and engineering work financed by Congress for the Moon, Mars, and orbital SPS largely ignores microeconomics and financial considerations. One is forced to conclude that space thinking aimed at promoting self sustaining private ventures aimed at real civilian markets is largely foreign to NASA's organizational culture and has gotten ignored or crowded out in the congressional appropriations process. The argument for making the small bodies of near Earth space the focus of space research revolves around the materials available at these bodies that are not easily available in planetary crusts (Earth, Moon, Mars). Platinum group metals are the most readily marketable commodities that fit this description. PGM Platinum, Palladium, Rhodium, Iridium, Ruthenium, and Osmium are the Platinum Group Metals (PGM). The U.S. Bureau of Mines estimates that the 1990 world production of Platinum group metals was about 10,000,000 troy ounces, or less than 500 metric tons, with Russia and South Africa accounting for 90% of world production.19 Platinum, Palladium, amd Rhodium are the active elements in automotive catalytic converters. Chemical and petroleum catalysis, jewelry, and specialized electrical components account for much of the rest of world demand. The price of all six PGM has, until the late eighties, trended upward in real terms with Platinum going for $380 a Troy ounce on June 12, 1991 on the New York cash market. Because of their high density and tendency to alloy with iron and nickel most of the PGM on Earth is in the planet's iron-nickel core. The little accessible in the crust is produced from copper-nickel mining as a byproduct. Current theory about the origins of the solar system suggest that the PGM can be found in much higher concentrations in undifferentiated bodies such as asteroids and comets than in the crust of large bodies such as Earth, Mars or the Moon. Meteorite samples of several types tend to confirm this (see figure below). [Ibid 15]
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