The asteroid mining business got a bit more crowded as a new concern called Deep Space Industries (DSI) enters the ring. The company announced its public launching at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, California where a panel presentation of officials and guests outlined DSI’s philosophy and plans for becoming a major force in opening up asteroid mining within a few years.
DSI, currently based in McLean, Virginia, was started mid-2012 and is currently seeking additional investors and customers. According to the panel, there are 9,500 near-Earth asteroids with 1,700 of these easier to get to than the Moon. The company believes that by keeping costs down and concentrating on creating a series of near-term returns it’s possible to make mining these asteroids not only feasible, but a business field capable of almost unlimited expansion.
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The first DSI spacecraft is the Firefly. According to a company spokesman, it will cost US$20 million to deliver three finished versions into orbit. Based on cubesat and nanosat design, its function is to target candidate asteroids based on value, return times and learning their composition, structure and spin rate.
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The next craft is the Dragonfly. It’s job is asteroid capture and retrieval, though only as very small samples for study and processing experiments. The customers for these missions would be researchers and private collectors who’d probably buy a Moon rock if one came on the market.
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The first really big DSI spacecraft is the Harvestor (sic), which is large enough to require a Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Proton or Ariane 5 rocket to lift it into space. It’s intended to bring back asteroids on a wholesale basis to the tune of thousands of tons per year, though the size of individual asteroids brought back to Earth orbit would be limited to about 30 meters (100 ft) in diameter for safety reasons.
Asteroids of that size routinely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere every year, so these wouldn't pose much of a hazard. These would be used for harvesting water, propellant, metals, and building and shielding materials. This would work in conjunction with the Fuel Refinery craft, which refines water and hydrocarbons found in carbonaceous asteroids.
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DSI anticipates the first Firefly flights taking place in 2015.
