Chinese company to send asteroid-mining robot into space in November

A Chinese company has planned to launch its first asteroid-mining robot into orbit in two months as China aims to take the lead in the potentially lucrative space industry.

Origin Space, a Beijing-based private space resources company, is set to send Neo-1, a 30-kilo (66-pound) small satellite carried by a Chinese Long-March series rocket, into space in November.

Despite dubbing the spacecraft ‘space-mining robot’, the upcoming mission is to test its capabilities of identifying and extracting valuable resources rather than actually mining an asteroid, the firm says.

‘The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital manoeuvre, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification and control,’ Yu Tianhong, an Origin Space co-founder, told US science magazine IEEE Specturm.

The firm claims its spacecraft will be the first space-mining robot produced by a commercial company in the world, and the mission will be a milestone for the space resources industry.

The mining of space resources has become increasingly popular in recent years, with several ventures aiming to profit from the potentially trillion-dollar industry.

The Beijing company also has another mission, Yuanwang-1 (‘Look up-1’), nicknamed ‘Little Hubble’, which is slated to launch in 2021.

It will develop the ‘Little Hubble’ satellite together with DFH Satellite Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of China’s main state-owned space contractor CASC.

It will carry an optical telescope designed to observe and monitor Near Earth Asteroids, according to the US magazine, citing the Chinese firm, which notes that identifying suitable targets is the first step toward space resources utilisation.

Origin Space also aims to take its satellite to the Moon, with a possible launch date of late 2021 or early 2022.

But experts have warned that our solar system needs to be protected from an impeding ‘gold rush’ of space mining efforts that could leave us in a resource catastrophe in centuries.

Researchers from the US Smithsonian Institution and King’s College London argue for preserving seven-eighths of the solar system as official ‘space wildernesses.’

Astrophysicist Martin Elvis of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts teamed up with King’s College London philosopher Tony Milligan to explore how quickly space mining might exhaust the solar system’s viable resources.

The duo found that humankind would use up an eighth of the solar system’s realistically-accessible resources within 400 years, assuming an annual growth rate for the space mining industry of 3.5 per cent.

This growth rate would be comparable to that found in the use of iron from the start of the Industrial Revolution until the present day.

After four centuries, we would have only 60 years to rein in the growth of the space economy before the solar system’s usable resources would be completely gone.

Based on these findings, researchers are proposing that industrial exploitation of the solar system’s resources be capped at one-eighth — leaving the rest as protected, wilderness-status areas.