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starship-design: Private Asteroid Mining
Here's some good news for near-term space development that I ran across:
A small company unveiled plans today to launch the first private
spacecraft to leave Earth's orbit, on a mission to visit a nearby
asteroid. A team of University of California, San Diego, students are
working on the design of the Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP),
which would be launched in 1999, says Jim Bensen, chair of Colorado-
based SpaceDev. The company hopes to turn a profit on the sale of data
from the target asteroid, which will be chosen later and depends on the
exact launch date.
Bensen is betting that his company can build and launch the spacecraft
for under $50 million--a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA space
science mission--and offer the resulting data to government agencies for
less than a government mission would cost. NEAP would carry a camera, a
proton spectrometer to determine the composition of the asteroid's
surface, and a neutron spectrometer that could detect the presence of
hydrogen.
The ultimate goal of the company, he adds, is to mine nearby asteroids
for precious metals and ancient comets for hydrogen and oxygen. These
elements could be ferried to a low-Earth orbit and turned into materials
and propellant for other missions. SpaceDev has raised nearly all of the
money needed to build the spacecraft from private investors, but Bensen
declined to identify them.
(from www.sciencenow.org, 9/10/97)