Future of Space Mining?
I had never given space mining much thought until I came across a passage about it in some SAT practice. The passage discussed the possible pros and cons of such outcome on the economy, environment, even political and global relationships. This led to me to look up whether actual companies like these exist. I found one impressive one called "Deep Space Industries"(which is not the most creative name, but, due to the field's obscurity, might as well trademark the most basic name). According to their mission, they are creating micro- and nano- satellites that are capable of mining asteroids and comets. They take inspiration from NASA’s Dawn,( mission was to study two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres), JAXA’s Hayabusa (explored the asteroid Itokawa, studied the asteroid's shape, spin, topography, colour, composition, density, and history), and ESA’s Rosetta( In 2014, landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko).
Their inaugural mission is called Prospector-X:
- Partnership with Deep Space Industries and the Luxembourg Government
- Really vague mission statement to be honest, "Technology to fuel the future." But maybe its because they don't want to reveal exactly what they are working on.
http://deepspaceindustries.com/prospector-x/ - On this website, you can interact with the model of the satellite.
Prospector-1: "Searching for valuable resources on a near-Earth asteroid."
Really specific specs about their thrusters( which might be interesting for more research when thinking about the anatomy of a ship) :
