Asteroid mining has been an interest of mine for a little while, but I hadn’t checked in on the progress for a while now.
Heartbreak. There were a handful of companies working on the problem, but it looks like in the last two years they all went through some combination of acquired, pivoted, and defunct. There is no one left focusing on the problem specifically. Planetary Resources got acquired and then went defunct, stuff auctioned off in the summer. Deep Space Industries pivoted to small satellites and then got acquired.
Though it does seem that a bunch of the people from Planetary Resources founded a new company, First Mode, which is participating in NASA’s Psyche project for prospecting asteroids. They’re an engineering services company, but it would not surprise me if they were to make a pivot towards asteroid mining.
Tangentially related, I found this paper about the political economy of large space projects from 1999. It describes the difficulty of raising a huge amount of money for a very long-term payoff. Note to self: I have a summary to finish, about precisely that.
Asteroid mining has been an interest of mine for a little while, but I hadn’t checked in on the progress for a while now.
Heartbreak. There were a handful of companies working on the problem, but it looks like in the last two years they all went through some combination of acquired, pivoted, and defunct. There is no one left focusing on the problem specifically. Planetary Resources got acquired and then went defunct, stuff auctioned off in the summer. Deep Space Industries pivoted to small satellites and then got acquired.
Though it does seem that a bunch of the people from Planetary Resources founded a new company, First Mode, which is participating in NASA’s Psyche project for prospecting asteroids. They’re an engineering services company, but it would not surprise me if they were to make a pivot towards asteroid mining.
Tangentially related, I found this paper about the political economy of large space projects from 1999. It describes the difficulty of raising a huge amount of money for a very long-term payoff. Note to self: I have a summary to finish, about precisely that.