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Deep Space Industries intends to fly a small "Prospector" spacecraft to an asteroid by 2020:
Deep Space Industries announced today its plans to fly the world's first commercial interplanetary mining mission. Prospector-1™ will fly to and rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, and investigate the object to determine its value as a source of space resources. This mission is an important step in the company's overall plans to harvest and supply in-space resources to support the growing space economy.
[...] Recently, Deep Space Industries and its partner, the government of Luxembourg, announced plans to build and fly Prospector-X™, an experimental mission to low-Earth orbit that will test key technologies needed for low-cost exploration spacecraft. This precursor mission is scheduled to launch in 2017. Then, before the end of this decade, Prospector-1 will travel beyond Earth's orbit to begin the first space mining exploration mission. [...] Prospector-1 is a small spacecraft (50 kg when fueled) that strikes the ideal balance between cost and performance. In addition to the radiation-tolerant payloads and avionics, all DSI spacecraft use the Comet™ water propulsion system, which expels superheated water vapor to generate thrust. Water will be the first asteroid mining product, so the ability to use water as propellant will provide future DSI spacecraft with the ability to refuel in space.
Coverage at Ars Technica and Space News.
Previously:
Planetary Resources Signs Investment Agreement With Luxembourg.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday August 26 2016, @02:07PM
So we know there is ice floating about up there, and in theory it could be used as propellant. What I'd like to know is how big are the engineering challenges between that theory and the reality.
1 - How pure is a typical lump of space ice? Does it have significant quantities of other materials mixed up in it?
2 - How pure does the propellant have to be? Does it matter if there are other elements dissolved or floating in it? Presumably you don't want space-grit clogging your nozzles or organic molecules screwing with your melting / evaporation points.
3 - Assuming 1&2 are not problems / solvable problems, is it as "simple" as scooping up a lump of ice, putting it in an internal compartment, heating it up and squirting it out?
4 - I put "simple" in quotes above because at the very least that requires a means of breaking the ice into bite-sized pieces, a means of manoeuvring the pieces into the ice collection aperture, an aperture with a watertight (airtight?) seal and all the hassles of dealing with heat and sloshy liquids in space. All managed either remotely from Earth with all the hassles that entails, or autonomously by software on the craft, with all the hassles that entails.
5 - I guess what I'm getting at is, are we really anywhere near this level of technology, even for an experimental prototype as envisaged in TFS?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday August 26 2016, @02:41PM
1) Not very. Consider the "water" in Earth-bound rocks and even subterranean river courses. Incredibly impure, just happens to exist.
2) Quite. You can filter but then your filters need to clean themselves.
3) Nope. To make any kind of propellant (I think you're thinking of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen?) you would need to melt them and then electrically separate them (anything else involves chemicals and physical processes that are even more complicated). To even separate them, you need a shed-load of electrical energy, basically equal to the energy you intend to get back from the fuel by burning it. So to push an asteriod even 1km across, you need to generate enough electrical energy to push that asteroid in the first place (just over a longer period of time, and without having to store it in batteries, etc.).
As a quick number: "Practical electrolysis (using a rotating electrolyser at 15 bar pressure) may consume 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram (180 MJ/kg)"
Then include compression, pumping, storage, maintenance, pressurisation, melting, etc. and it gets expensive quick.
4) Yep.
5) You can do it. It's just incredibly, stupendously, ridiculously, expensive and impractical. You have to send up a huge solar array that stays oriented, but can send electricity to a moving (and spinning) asteroid, on the order of megawatts, and stay like that for years, and operate perfectly, to generate enough "fuel" to then put into a thruster you also have to send up there, to try to manoeuvre an asteroid to do? What? get it into an Earth orbit is as difficult as launching a satellite, but you're doing it from space, in low-power, with virtually no human intervention. So that you can get something near Earth that you can launch even more expensive (millions if not billions) to hold of a bit of - you hope - rare mineral that if it all works perfectly and gets back to Earth costs more per kilo than anything you've ever seen on Earth?
It's a waste. There's a reason that, despite the big announcements, this is really just another "Have a look at what the asteroid is made of" missions, rather than capture, movement, mining, etc. of the thing.
(Score: 1) by Frost on Saturday August 27 2016, @03:37PM
The "Comet" thruster uses water for reaction mass, not for fuel. The energy to heat the water is provided by an external electric power supply. It's not clear from the "Comet" brochure where they expect the electricity to come from. Could be some sort of fuel cell or a battery charged by solar panels.