Asteroid Mining; Company Seeks Funds for Interstellar Business Proposition
A company of space entrepreneurs announced plans on Tuesday to get investors interested in mining precious metals from space.
The company Deep Space Industries stated it has plans to launch a fleet of micro-satellites to explore potential asteroid mining sites. Once the sites have been found, the company intends to deploy larger spaceships to harness those asteroids and drag them back to Earth for mining and processing.
A statement on the company's website relayed the goal of the organization and offered up a potentially rich bonanza of resources that have yet to be claimed.
Company CEO David Gump began asking investors to look into the out-of-this-world idea as Deep Space Industries needs a few million dollars is needed to kick-start the project.
"We're only going to raise $3 million this year and $10 million next year," Gump said optimistically, according to Fox News. "When you combine that with progress payments from customers, that's all we need to get the initial phase underway."
Deep Space Industries claims that the plan can begin as early as 2015. The company will start by building a small fleet of 55-pound "FireFlies" to do the first phase of the job. Gump added that they will work with NASA and other companies and groups to identify potential exploration targets to exploit.
Tuesday's announcement comes nine months after the unveiling of another interstellar project by Planetary Resources, a company led by space tourism pioneers Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis. That group, backed by investors such as filmmaker James Cameron and Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, said it hopes to get its first unmanned probes into space by the end of 2013, according to CNN.
If any of the asteroid mining plans get off the ground, it will likely have a drastic impact on markets back on Earth, according to an article in The Economist entitled "Fool's Platinum?" which stated: "A doubling of supply from space might, for instance, exert such downward pressure on the price of platinum on Earth as to undermine the whole business case for the venture."
