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The idea of mining in space surely can’t be anything more than a massive tax dodge by the richest people on the planet, but… a second space mining company has announced plans to mine asteroids for valuable minerals. It’s really going to happen.
The latest plan, from a company going under the lovely name of Deep Space Industries, involves sending out small initial probes on one-way missions to hunt for likely targets. These cheap mini probes, which the company is calling Fireflies, would be made from off-the-shelf parts, piggybacking rides alongside commercial satellite launches to further cut costs.
Once these mini probes have found a likely asteroid laden with gold, frankincense and space diamonds, larger probes known as “Dragonflies” would be sent off on round trips to return with samples. Then god knows what happens. Robots with shovels. It’ll be very difficult whatever it is.
Surely just digging up Greenland would be easier? [DSI via BBC]
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“These cheap mini probes”
I fail to see how something that will be sent to space to analyse asteroids for harvestable materials will be cheap. Cheap like Asda Smart Price or cheap by costing ONLY one billion dollars?
It also didn’t mention if the Fireflies return which, if not, will not make it cheap to send out a new one each time.
“Cheap” as in a few hundred million will get you a device that will fly out to an asteroid and snap some pictures & take a few whiffs with a spectrometer.
Also, RTFA:
“…sending out small initial probes on ***one-way missions*** to hunt for likely targets. These cheap mini probes, which the company is calling ***Fireflies…***”
Sorry.
YOU SHOULD BE!!!!
Nice video, but fuck all else in terms of info. Who is bankrolling this? At least with Planetary Resources you could see they had several billionaires to fund it, this could be a kickstarter project for all we know.
Theres always a bigger fish!
Let’s just hope someone on-board knows how to repair a drive plate.
just so long as they also keep the vending machines running.
If we start bringing back tons of materials it will increase the Earths mass….This can’t be good. We need to keep the equilibrium. We should ship off Apple users to….
Why Apple users? Everyone knows they’re trendy and hip and typically thinner than their overweight, basement-dwelling, android-using counterparts. Might as well go for the highest mass-per-person, amirite?
(All jokes aside, why turn this into an Apple thing?)
Just for fun really.
(I wouldn’t be exempt. I have a Android phone and a iPad!!!!)
this is probably the most important thing we will do as a species this century. The ability to move mining off-world would utterly remove our need to dig and blast the earth to get at materials that we make everything from.
following this would be the ability to move manufacturing off-world too.
these are both massive “green” solutions. lower energy needs and lower pollution. make more space and best yet create the job title “space miner”
badass
I’d like to take a guess that when a probe attaches itself to an asteroid, the company that owns the probe, also owns the rights to mine the asteroid. So with that thinking in mind, if I made probes, I would make them really small and send absolutely shit loads up there…really quickly.