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 Space Studies Institute (SSI) and Dr. Carl Peterson of the Mining and Excavation Research Institute of M.I.T. Maryniak spoke first and began by commenting that the quintessential predicament of space flight is that everything launched from Earth must be accelerated to orbital veloc ....