(credit: Deep Space Industries)
Asteroid mining is the ultimate high-risk, high-reward business. While there are undoubtedly billions—some argue trillions—of dollars’ worth of valuable minerals and metals in near-Earth asteroids, a host of questions remain about the practicality of harvesting them. How much technology is required to identify asteroids and extract the materials? How difficult will it be to return them to Earth or other desired destinations? And how much will the upfront costs be?
A few companies, such as Planetary Resources, have begun to try to answer these questions, and it seems the initial responses aren’t entirely positive. The venture has decided to put its initial focus on Earth observation rather than deep space asteroid mining. But another asteroid company, Deep Space Industries, appears to be pressing ahead. On Tuesday, that company announced its intent to fly the world’s first commercial interplanetary mining mission, Prospector-1.
Under the company’s new timeline, Deep Space Industries plans to launch the Prospector-X mission in 2017 into low-Earth orbit as a technology test bed for further development of low-cost exploration spacecraft. Then, “before the end of this decade,” the company would launch Prospector-1 to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid and investigate its value as a source of mineral resources.
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Source: Ars Technica – Mining firm plans launch to a deep space asteroid by the decade’s end