Education And Training

By AMIR EFRATI

The riddle of the space asteroid start-up has been solved.

On Tuesday, Planetary Resources Inc., whose mission has been shrouded in secrecy, will outline in Seattle its plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid and mine it for valuable metals and water that could be used in further space exploration or returned to earth.

The company, backed by several billionaires, is working to recruit engineering and mission-planning expertise and allow private companies to bid to help it launch the spacecraft, said John S. Lewis, a University of Arizona planetary-science professor who said he is an adviser to Planetary.

Planetary last week said it would launch on Tuesday an effort to “overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.” The company said it is backed by Google Inc.

co-founder Larry Page, Hollywood director James Cameron and space-exploration proponents such as Peter Diamandis, a co-founder of Planetary who has publicly discussed his goal to become an asteroid miner.

Spokeswomen for Planetary declined to comment.

Mr. Lewis, whose 1997 book, “Mining the Sky,” helped popularize the idea of extracting natural resources from asteroids, said Planetary’s president already owns a small firm that builds spacecraft.

Despite the early financial support from wealthy investors and the backing of well-known space-exploration researchers, Planetary Resources faces many technical questions and uncertainties about costs and the technology required to extract materials from asteroids.

Scientists have said such a pursuit could cost hundreds of millions of dollars at least.

The 70-year-old Mr. Lewis said the technical requirements for sending an unmanned mission to an asteroid near Earth is “easier than landing on the moon because there is almost no gravity” to contend with on asteroids.

Scientists, including some researchers from National Aeronautics and Space Administration, have said they believe mining asteroids is crucial to future space exploration. Mr. Lewis said asteroids could yield “astronomical quantities” of minerals such as iron and nickel that could be used to build components for housing space explorers, and supply water for a fuel source.

“We could cut the umbilical cord that ties us to Earth,” he said.

In addition, studying asteroids could help humans figure out methods to prevent large ones from colliding with Earth, he said.

Rather than send spacecraft to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Mr. Lewis said, a better way to reach an asteroid is to target those that come close to earth’s orbit.

Separately, numerous scientists, including some at NASA, earlier this month published a study that said by 2025, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined.

NASA currently is working on an unmanned mission called OSIRIS-Rex that would launch in 2016, land on an asteroid, study it, and bring a tiny amount of it back to earth by 2023. But Mr. Lewis said that isn’t enough and that it has been painfully frustrating to see the “slowness of progress” being made by NASA on the topic.

—Andy Pasztor contributed to this article.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Planetary Resources Inc. intends on Tuesday to outline its plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid and mine it for valuable metals and water that could be used in further space exploration or returned to earth. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said part of the aim of Planetary Resources would be to convince governments that the technology exists to snare an asteroid and pursue space mining in the near future at a relatively low cost.

A version of this article appeared April 24, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Start-Up Sees New Frontier In Mining: Asteroids in Space.

By MAGGIE BEIDELMAN

San Francisco is notorious for making it difficult to open and run small businesses. For Juliet Pries, who just opened The Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley, it meant months of red tape and rent to realize her goal. Maggie Beidelman reports.

For decades, San Francisco has been a difficult place to set up and run a small business—especially a restaurant. Eager to keep entrepreneurs on their feet and attract new ones, the city is trying to make it easier.

The Board of Supervisors in January proposed an ordinance to reduce the number of restaurant definitions, each with its own zoning regulations, from 13 to three—Restaurant, Limited Restaurant, and Bar.

“There are all these really contradictory rules,” said City Supervisor Christina Olague, who proposed the ordinance along with Supervisor Scott Wiener. The board is expected to consider the measure in the coming weeks.

The move is one of several in San Francisco aimed at helping small businesses start up and keep running.

Mayor Ed Lee announced an additional $1.5 million for the city’s Small Business Revolving Loan Fund in January, and the Board of Supervisors recently approved it. That follows the establishment in 2008 of the Office of Small Business, a program to help potential business owners navigate the city’s cumbersome licensing and permitting requirements, which include a lengthy review process in which neighbors get a say on any new business plans.

The goal is to avoid the kind of experience Candace Combs recently had with her day spa, In-Symmetry. When she decided in 2010 to move her nine-year-old business from one location in San Francisco to another, Ms. Combs ran into zoning regulations and other city rules that dragged out her search for a year and a half. She took on five real-estate agents to find a space with the appropriate zoning and paid roughly $15,000 in permit fees before reopening in December.

“San Francisco is a nightmare,” said Ms. Combs. “You’re constantly butting your head up against the most ridiculous city bureaucracy.”

Restaurants face some of the most onerous rules. An eatery in San Francisco typically completes up to 12 permit applications and filings. The entire process of opening a restaurant usually takes nine to 14 months, sometimes longer, said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the Office of Small Business.

In contrast, a restaurant in Oakland could open in as little as four months, with only three permits, not including county permits, according to Oakland’s Planning Department. The process rarely takes longer than nine months, and Oakland’s planning code has just four definitions of restaurants, compared with San Francisco’s 13.

“In San Francisco, you could spend a year or two paying rent through the permit process,” said Rob Black, director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a nonprofit trade association. “In Oakland, they will bend over backwards to help you open a restaurant.”

The city of San Francisco acknowledges the thicket of regulations and even pokes fun at itself for it. Last year, the Planning Commission created a YouTube video, “Hello City Planner,” quoting directly from the planning code. One sample line: “How big is the space you would be renting? 1,000 square feet or less would make you a Small Self-Service restaurant. Above that, you would be a Large Fast-Food Restaurant. …Wait, it doesn’t matter in this district anyway, because neither one is permitted here.”

Overall, there were 71,000 small businesses in San Francisco as of July 2011, not including insurance companies or banks, according to the Office of Small Business. Small businesses employ about 50% of all employees in the city and contribute about 52% of the total sales tax.

San Francisco’s layers of small-business regulations date to 1987, when the city rezoned its mixed-use neighborhood corridors into neighborhood commercial districts, allowing for a more detailed review process. Before the rezoning, the city approved 97% of the permit applications submitted for small businesses, according to the San Francisco Planning Department. By 2007, the latest year for which data were available, only 30% were approved.

The situation began to change in 2008, when then-mayor Gavin Newsom launched the Office of Small Business. The office is a one-stop shop for small businesses looking for help on how to open and operate in the city. It now handles 140 to 185 inquiries a month, 65% of them coming from people who want to start a business.

In 2009, the city started the Revolving Loan Fund with $670,000, to help create jobs and get small businesses access to capital. Microlender Working Solutions distributes the fund and provides five-year assistance for borrowers.

“I can think of nothing worse than seeing vacant storefronts,” Mayor Lee said. “We must make capital available to entrepreneurs to open up shop and support existing small businesses through the revolving loan fund.”

Ron Miguel, a member of the Planning Commission, cautioned that “you’re never going to do away with the bureaucracy,” but added, “We can always come up with a better way of doing things.”

For some small-business owners, the new moves are coming too late. Juliet Pries, 44 years old, said she opened The Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley in January after spending nearly $300,000 and two years to get her zoning-designated Full-Service Restaurant off the ground.

“I thought I had all the information. But every step I took, there was something more,” Ms. Pries said. If the proposed restaurant ordinance had already been in effect, she added, “I would have been open a year and a half ago.”

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

PHILADELPHIA—Proposed new diagnostic criteria for autism don’t appear to reduce the number of children diagnosed with that condition, according to preliminary data presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting on Sunday.

Those findings could damp the controversy that has surrounded suggested changes to the main psychiatric diagnostic manual in the U.S., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, about how autism and related disorders that are characterized by social impairments and repetitive behavior are categorized.

One of the main changes, which has yet to be finished, recommends combining several disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome and “pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified,” with autism into one broad category known as autism-spectrum disorder.

In January, researchers at Yale University presented an analysis that suggested the new criteria wouldn’t diagnose every child who had received the diagnosis using the current criteria, which might lead to service being denied to some 35% of currently diagnosed children.

Diagnoses can be important for parents to persuade their health insurers to pay for treatment and for schools to cover special-education services.

On Sunday, the committee overseeing the changes to the autism criteria announced data from so-called field trials conducted by several academic centers showing that children diagnosed with autism or related disorders using the current criteria almost always received a diagnosis using the proposed new criteria as well.

The prevalence of autism using both criteria was essentially unchanged, though there were a few cases where children were diagnosed by one set of criteria and not the other, according to Susan Swedo, head of the work group and a senior researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. Over 600 children were tested as part of these trials.

The concern that children who need services for autism-related symptoms will be denied them because of proposed changes to the autism diagnostic criteria is “not true,” said Dr. Swedo.

The group proposed the more-encompassing autism-spectrum disorder label, and also introduced a separate, new disorder for children with social-communication issues but lacking other features of autism. The goal is to have clinicians better distinguish among certain developmental disorders.

More accurate diagnosis will help children get the right services they need, said Dr. Swedo.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 7, 2012, on page A3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Study Damps Fears on Autism Change.

By AMIR EFRATI

The riddle of the space asteroid start-up has been solved.

On Tuesday, Planetary Resources Inc., whose mission has been shrouded in secrecy, will outline in Seattle its plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid and mine it for valuable metals and water that could be used in further space exploration or returned to earth.

The company, backed by several billionaires, is working to recruit engineering and mission-planning expertise and allow private companies to bid to help it launch the spacecraft, said John S. Lewis, a University of Arizona planetary-science professor who said he is an adviser to Planetary.

Planetary last week said it would launch on Tuesday an effort to “overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.” The company said it is backed by Google Inc.

co-founder Larry Page, Hollywood director James Cameron and space-exploration proponents such as Peter Diamandis, a co-founder of Planetary who has publicly discussed his goal to become an asteroid miner.

Spokeswomen for Planetary declined to comment.

Mr. Lewis, whose 1997 book, “Mining the Sky,” helped popularize the idea of extracting natural resources from asteroids, said Planetary’s president already owns a small firm that builds spacecraft.

Despite the early financial support from wealthy investors and the backing of well-known space-exploration researchers, Planetary Resources faces many technical questions and uncertainties about costs and the technology required to extract materials from asteroids.

Scientists have said such a pursuit could cost hundreds of millions of dollars at least.

The 70-year-old Mr. Lewis said the technical requirements for sending an unmanned mission to an asteroid near Earth is “easier than landing on the moon because there is almost no gravity” to contend with on asteroids.

Scientists, including some researchers from National Aeronautics and Space Administration, have said they believe mining asteroids is crucial to future space exploration. Mr. Lewis said asteroids could yield “astronomical quantities” of minerals such as iron and nickel that could be used to build components for housing space explorers, and supply water for a fuel source.

“We could cut the umbilical cord that ties us to Earth,” he said.

In addition, studying asteroids could help humans figure out methods to prevent large ones from colliding with Earth, he said.

Rather than send spacecraft to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Mr. Lewis said, a better way to reach an asteroid is to target those that come close to earth’s orbit.

Separately, numerous scientists, including some at NASA, earlier this month published a study that said by 2025, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined.

NASA currently is working on an unmanned mission called OSIRIS-Rex that would launch in 2016, land on an asteroid, study it, and bring a tiny amount of it back to earth by 2023. But Mr. Lewis said that isn’t enough and that it has been painfully frustrating to see the “slowness of progress” being made by NASA on the topic.

—Andy Pasztor contributed to this article.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Planetary Resources Inc. intends on Tuesday to outline its plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to an asteroid and mine it for valuable metals and water that could be used in further space exploration or returned to earth. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said part of the aim of Planetary Resources would be to convince governments that the technology exists to snare an asteroid and pursue space mining in the near future at a relatively low cost.

A version of this article appeared April 24, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Start-Up Sees New Frontier In Mining: Asteroids in Space.