A team of entrepreneurs and engineers on Tuesday unveiled plans for a space mining company that would tap nearby asteroids for raw materials to fuel satellites and manufacture components in orbit.
Deep Space Industries, based in Santa Monica, California, said its inaugural mission is targeted for 2015, when it would send a small hitchhiker spacecraft called “Firefly” on a six-month expedition to survey an as-yet-unidentified asteroid.
The 25kg satellite, about the size of a laptop computer, would be launched as a secondary payload aboard a commercial rocket carrying a communications satellite or other robotic probe.
Photo: Reuters
About 1,000 small asteroids relatively close to Earth are discovered every year. Most, if not all, are believed to contain water and gases, such as methane, which can be turned into fuel, as well as metals, such as nickel, which can be used in three-dimensional printers to manufacture components, Deep Space chief executive David Gump said.
Gump is a co-founder of three previous space and technology start-ups, including Astrobotic Technology, which is focused on exploration and development of lunar resources.
“There is really nothing in the business plan that Deep Space Industries is pursuing that cannot be done with technology research already accomplished in laboratories across the planet,” said John Mankins, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory manager who is the start-up company’s chief technical officer.
Photo: Reuters
“The technology may not have been used in space for the exact purposes that we propose, but the fundamental technologies are really at hand,” Mankins said.
Company officials, who unveiled their plans at a press conference at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, California, that was also Web cast, did not comment on their financial backing except to say they were looking for investors.
Deep Space Industries is the second company to unveil plans to mine asteroids, rocky bodies of various sizes that orbit the sun. So far, about 9,500 asteroids have been found in orbits that come near Earth. Small fragments of asteroids regularly pass through the planet’s atmosphere, lighting up the night sky as they incinerate and occasionally surviving to become meteorites.
Last year, Planetary Resources, a Bellevue, Washington-based company backed by high-profile investors including Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and advisers like filmmaker James Cameron, announced a program that would begin with small, low-cost telescopes to scout for potentially lucrative asteroids.
Firefly, as well as a follow-on line of planned asteroid sample-return satellites called Dragonfly, would be based on miniature research spacecraft known as CubeSats that are built from commercially available, off-the-shelf electronic components.
The cost of a Firefly mission would be about US$20 million, half of which the company expects will come from government and research institute contracts and half from corporate advertising, sponsorships and other marketing ventures, Gump said.
The follow-on Dragonfly missions, scheduled to begin in 2016, would entail returning 23kg to 45kg of material from select, high-value asteroids, an endeavor that would take two to three years.
In addition to selling samples, Deep Space Industries wants to grind up some of the material, extract metals and other valuable commodities and develop the technology to produce fuel and components, such as solar cells, in space.
The company said it has a patent pending on a three-dimensional printer called a “Microgravity Foundry” that uses lasers to deposit nickel in precise patterns in zero gravity.
On Earth, similar printers produce three-dimensional components by depositing layers of nickel metal powder. The process is somewhat like the buildup of ink on paper in a traditional ink jet printer.
Gump said the patent was filed within the past 18 months and is not yet listed in publicly accessible databases.
The ultimate goal is to build a fleet of robotic ships to extract resources for fuel and to mine valuable minerals from asteroids.
“We’re at an early stage,” Gump said. “It’ll probably be 2019 or 2020 before we’ll have commercial quantities of propellant for sale.”
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure