The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported what it considered a bit of a scoop: that asteroid mining company Planetary [...]]]>

Illustration of a Planetary Resources Arkyd-100 spacecraft in orbit. A company official showed last month a larger version of the larger Arkyd-200 series that could launch as soon as late 2015. (credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported what it considered a bit of a scoop: that asteroid mining company Planetary Resources had pivoted on its business plan. “Now, largely without publicity, the team of former National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials that runs Planetary Resources has shifted the company’s focus to a more mundane space resource: water,” the Journal reported in an article headlined “What Happened to That Crazy Asteroid Mining Plan?”. According to the Journal, the company was now focused extracting water from asteroids to use as propellant.

There’s just once problem with that breaking development: it’s not new. Indeed, since the company unveiled its plans a little more than two years ago, the company has emphasized plans to extract water from asteroids for use as propellant. “If we were able to provide that propellant for a price of one-tenth of the effective cost of bringing it from the Earth, that would shave off a large portion of the cost of going into deep space,” company co-founder Eric Anderson told me in an interview just before the company announced its existence in April 2012. So that shift in focus the Journal crowed about was not really a shift at all.

But don’t trust just me. “At an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight, a group that included former National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials unveiled Planetary Resources Inc. and said it is developing a ‘low-cost’ series of spacecraft to prospect and mine ‘near-Earth’ asteroids for water and metals,” the Journal reported about Planetary Resources in April 2012 (emphasis added).

The company also hasn’t abandoned interest in extracting other resources from asteroids. In a presentation during a space panel at the AwesomeCon science fiction convention in Washington, DC, last month, Peter Marquez, vice president of global engagement for Planetary Resources, said the company was also interested in extracting metals, in particular platinum-group metals, from asteroids.

At that panel, Marquez did reveal a different, more technical, shift in the company’s work. He revealed a new design for the company’s Arkyd-200 series of spacecraft that he dubbed “HomerSat,” after cartoon character Homer Simpson and his love of donuts. “It’s a telescope wrapped in fuel tanks,” he said of the design, showing a telescope surrounded by two toroidal propellant tanks. “It looks like two donuts stuck on top of each other.”

Those propellant tanks give the spacecraft, weighing a couple hundred kilograms, as much as 5 kilometers per second of delta-v, making it very maneuverable. “We can scoot around quite a bit, quite often,” Marquez said.

That Arkyd-200 spacecraft could launch as soon as late next year, he said, although the company was still working on launch arrangements. A small prototype satellite is scheduled to be launched later this year from the International Space Station.

Planetary Resources, the Seattle-area startup that revealed plans just over a year ago to develop a series of small spacecraft to [...]]]>

Illustration of a Planetary Resources Arkyd-100 spacecraft in orbit. The company is starting a crowdfunding campaign today to raise money to provide public access to one of these spacecraft. (credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)

Planetary Resources, the Seattle-area startup that revealed plans just over a year ago to develop a series of small spacecraft to prospect and, eventually, extract resources from near Earth asteroids, is announcing plans today to raise $1 million through crowdfunding to provide public access to one of its first spacecraft.

The company is using an event in Seattle today to reveal plans for what it calls “the world’s first crowdfunded space telescope”: access to one of its Arkyd-100 series small spacecraft in low Earth orbit specifically designed for public outreach. Backers of the crowdfunding campaign, run through the Kickstarter site, will have access to the space telescope for observations or simply a commemorative image, depending on the size of their donation.

“The idea started after our announcement last year,” said Chris Lewicki, president of Planetary Resources, in an interview Tuesday. “We were totally overwhelmed by the amount of interest we had in what we were doing.” The company, he said, got thousands of unsolicited job applications and even offers to invest, among other indications of interest in the company. “We kicked a number of ideas around with what we could do with it. More and more, as we started to talk to people in the community, this idea took shape.”

The campaign offers a range of options for participation depending on funding level. The $5,000 “Education Ambassador” and $1,750 “Education Supporter” options will allow a K-12 school access to the telescope for a series of observations. A $150 “Private Astronomer” option gives an individual an opportunity to take up to a 30-minute exposure of any celestial object (excluding the Sun), and a $99 “Help Find Killer Asteroids & Alien Galaxies!” level donates five minutes of observing time to students or citizen scientists, with a membership to The Planetary Society included.

At lower funding levels, Planetary Resources is offering what they call the “#SpaceSelfie”. The Arkyd spacecraft will be modified to include an external camera and small display. For $25, a picture of the donor’s choosing will be shown on the display, and an image of it and the spacecraft will then be taken by the external camera, with the Earth and space serving as the backdrop. This is, Lewicki said, designed to be something fun for someone interested in space. “It’s designed to connect everyone’s inherent interest in space with something that’s easy to do,” he said. “It’s something that, as we’ve been talking with people about it, everyone thinks it’s a really cool idea.”

The $1 million Planetary Resources is seeking is enough to develop the modified version of the Arkyd-100 spacecraft, as well as tools to allow people to access the telescope and educational material. At that level, Lewicki said, the spacecraft would likely be used only part time for public imaging, with Planetary Resources using the excess time for its own technology demonstration and other uses. However, if the crowdfunding campaign exceeds their goal, the additional funding would go to support additional use of the telescope by donors, including activating additional ground stations to downlink images. “It’s possible there’s enough interest in the campaign to take up most of the resources of the satellite,” he said. “And if it’s that successful, we’ll just keep building more.”

The campaign represents a major leap in space-related crowdfunding. Past efforts have raised up to about $100,000 for nanosatellites and other efforts. Earlier this year, Golden Spike tried to raise $240,000 through another crowdfunding site, Indiegogo, but ended up receiving less than $20,000.

In the case of Planetary Resources’s campaign, Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing affair: if they fall short of their $1 million goal, they receive none of the money. If that happens, Lewicki said they’ll proceed with their current plans, including development of a small prototype satellite, called Arkyd 3, that is planned for launch next year.

Lewicki, though, hopes the thrill of being able to participate in a mission—to actually control a spacecraft, for those who select those reward levels—will excite the public enough to push them over the top. “As much as I enjoy doing space exploration, I enjoy sharing it as well,” he said. One of the most incredible experiences he’s had in his career, he said, was his involvement on the Mars Exploration Rover and Phoenix Mars Lander missions, being able to tell a spacecraft what to do and to see the results. “We’ll be able to give anyone who wants it that experience. That’s the thing I’m super excited about.”

Deep Space Industries (DSI) [...]]]> Last year Planetary Resources made a big splash when the startup company announced plans to develop a series of spacecraft to prospect and, eventually, extract resources from near Earth asteroids. Now another company plans to get into this long-term market, although many key details about their plans remain to be revealed.

Deep Space Industries (DSI) will formally announce their asteroid mining plans at a press event at 10 am PST (1 pm EST) Tuesday in Santa Monica, California, an event that will be webcast live. The DSI team does include some familiar names for those who have followed past space entrepreneurial efforts, including Rick Tumlinson, chairman of DSI; and David Gump, who is CEO. The company’s team also features Geoffrey Notkin, star of the TV show “Meteorite Men”, although his role with the company isn’t specified.

DSI plans to follow a path similar to Planetary Resources, with a fleet of small spacecraft to prospect asteroids. FireFlies, weighing 25 kilograms, will launch starting in 2015 on two- to six-month missions to study asteroids, while 32-kilogram DragonFly spacecraft will launch starting in 2016 on two- to four-year missions to return samples weighing up to twice as much as the spacecraft itself.

Those sample return missions will be followed by full-scale resource extraction efforts. DSI says it has a “patent-pending technology” called the MicroGravity Foundry, a 3-D printer that can convert raw asteroid (presumably metallic) material into complex metal parts. The company is also interested in extracting volatile materials from asteroids to use as propellant—a key focus of Planetary Resources as well—and has an NDA with an unspecified “aerospace company” to discuss how to potentially work together to use such propellants to refuel communications satellites. (A problem here is that while some asteroids are rich in water ice and similar volatiles, many satellites use hydrazine in their maneuvering thrusters.)

While the press release goes into great detail about their long-term plans for missions and the various resources that can be obtained from asteroids, they say virtually nothing about the company’s finances. The company doesn’t disclose how much money it has raised or who its investors are. (By contrast, Planetary Resources emphasized at its announcement the A-list investors it has, including Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, although it didn’t disclose how much they raised.) DSI does state in its release that it “is looking for customers and sponsors who want to be a part of creating this new space economy,” and mentions it’s open to the idea of corporate sponsorships for individual FireFly missions.

If DSI is serious about starting to launch spacecraft in 2015, it presumably has already laid significant groundwork, including establishing facilities, hiring engineers and other staff, and making at least initial contacts with launch services providers, details missing from its press release. How much progress they’ve made in those areas that they’re willing to reveal, particularly at the press conference later today, will make it clear how serious a competitor they are to Planetary Resources. Both companies, though, face the challenges of making progress in a field—asteroid mining—that still seems like science fiction.

Science-fiction authors and space commercialization advocate alike have dreamed for decades of mining asteroids. So when Seattle-based Planetary Resources, Inc. announced last week it will unveil on Tuesday “a new space venture with a mission to [...]]]>

Illustration of Planetary Resources Inc.'s initial spacecraft, the Arkyd-101 space telescope in Earth orbit. (credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)

Science-fiction authors and space commercialization advocate alike have dreamed for decades of mining asteroids. So when Seattle-based Planetary Resources, Inc. announced last week it will unveil on Tuesday “a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity” that has the backing of an all-star list of investors—Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, James Cameron, and Ross Perot, Jr., among others—the Internet exploded with visions of 21st century ’49ers heading out to the asteroid belt to make trillions of dollars mining gold and platinum.

That vision, as it turns out, is partially correct. Planetary Resources does plan to mine asteroids, eventually, but is taking an incremental approach with a series of robotic missions in Earth orbit and beyond to get there. And once they’re ready to start mining, the first resources they’re interested in are not precious metals but instead volatile compounds like water that can be used for propellant depots, enabling a wide range of commercial and government missions. In short, they’re initially more oil drillers than ore miners.

“Over the next five to ten years, considerable capability will be added in terms of launch vehicles and spacecraft,” company co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson said in a telephone interview last week, citing developments in commercial and government crewed and other vehicles. “The ability to use space resources to help explore space is a missing piece.”

Propellant depots have been an area of interest in recent years as a way to lower launch costs by allowing spacecraft to launch “dry”—that is, with empty tanks—and then gas up in space; or, to refuel their tanks to extend their missions. For propellant depots to work, though, the cost of bringing the propellant up separately and operating the depots would have to be less that simply launching fully-fueled spacecraft on larger rockets. Depot advocates in the past have suggested that supplying depots with relatively inexpensive propellants could be an ideal market for new, untried low-cost launch vehicles, particularly reusable launch vehicles.

In Anderson’s vision, obtaining water from near Earth asteroids and hauling it to propellant depots in Earth orbit or in cislunar space (such as one of the Lagrange points) would provide propellant in the form of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for spacecraft at a tenth of the cost of hauling that water from the Earth. “I think there’s a market that, once the capability is there, will be easy to demonstrate,” Anderson said.

“I think we’ll have propellant depots in operation within the decade, before 2020,” Anderson said. He added that the company is open to either operating the depots itself or selling fuel to other depot operators, who would, in turn, sell propellant to spacecraft that needed it.

The company isn’t forgetting about the potential to mine asteroids for precious metals that are becoming harder and more expensive to mine on Earth, Anderson said. “I’m certainly not shying away from emphasizing that, but it’s a less urgent example,” he said. He said that “certainly within 20 years” there will be a strong, positive case for extracting such metals from asteroids. “I think the near-term driver for the space resources market is volatiles from near Earth objects” for refueling spacecraft and supporting robotic and human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, he said.

Getting to the point of extracting those volatiles and other resources will be a multi-step process. The company plans to launch its first spacecraft within 18 to 24 months that will go into low Earth orbit and carry telescopes and instruments to observe near Earth objects, characterizing them to determine which ones would be most promising to visit by future missions.

The “Arkyd-101″ spacecraft will be small and simple, said company president Chris Lewicki in a separate interview. Each spacecraft will fit into a box 40 centimeters on a side and weigh about 20 kilograms. Planetary Resources will look for secondary launch opportunities—hitching a ride on a larger spacecraft’s launch—to launch these spacecraft, of which several will be flown.

Within a few years of launching those Earth orbiting missions, the company then plans to launch “swarms” of small spacecraft on missions to candidate asteroids to study them in situ. Lewicki said that phase would include missions to rendezvous with near Earth objects as well as “intercept” missions to asteroids passing close to the Earth “in the spirit of the Ranger missions done to the Moon in the 1960s,” although not necessarily impacting the asteroid.

Lewicki said there were several keys to the company’s technical approach, including technology, small teams, simplicity of design, and overall mindset. For example, on the technology side, the company has been doing work on optical, or laser, communications that would enable high-bandwidth communications among the spacecraft and with Earth while requiring only limited power. Arkyd Astronautics, also run by Lewicki, received a $125,000 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award from NASA in 2011 for work on “Multi-functional Optical Subsystem Enabling Laser Communication on Small Satellites”.

The company has attracted a number of experienced people from JPL to help develop its spacecraft. Lewicki himself worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander. “We have many people on my team that I brought from JPL who were as excited about the opportunity as I was that they jumped ship from Mars Science Laboratory and other exciting projects to really redefine the way robotic space exploration can be done,” he said.

Lewicki likened the company’s efforts to perform low-cost planetary exploration—and eventually exploitation—to how Scaled Composites was able to develop a crewed suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne, in the early 2000s, an effort that four decades earlier required the resources of a nation. “In a lot of ways, what we’re focused on at Planetary Resources is doing the same for robotic exploration,” he said. “We’re putting forth missions like the Mariners and Rangers and Surveyors of the ’60s.” Now, though, he added, the technologies make such missions possible for a commercial company.

What financial resources that Planetary Resources can bring to bear is uncertain. Anderson did not respond to questions about the level of funding that the company has raised from its billionaire investors. He did indicate that, in the nearer term, the company could generate revenue by selling versions of its Arkyd-101 and other spacecraft to various customers, including for Earth observing applications. Anderson also would only say that they have “a number of thoughts” on how to accomplish the resource extraction missions to near Earth asteroids.

Lewicki was clearly eager to work on this, while understanding it will be a long term effort to extract asteroid resources. “For me, it’s just really exciting,” he said. “It’s just the promise and the hope that we’re actually gotten to a time and place where private resources and technology, and the foundation that NASA has laid,” can enable such an effort. “We are taking what is that first, necessary step.”