Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has announced the completion of the assembly of the DeepSpace-2 spacecraft. It is scheduled to launch later this year as an accompanying payload on a Falcon rocket 9 along with Intuitive Machines' IM-3 lunar lander mission.
AstroForge CEO Matt Jialik said, that the company has a series of asteroids, which they will fly to depending on the launch day. The journey to the goal will take from two to nine months. DeepSpace-2 will take pictures with two high-resolution cameras. The main goal of the mission is to demonstrate the functionality of the spacecraft, which will become part of the line of inexpensive devices, that the company will use to explore asteroids.
DeepSpace-2 is the first flight of a new modular spacecraft platform, which was developed by AstroForge. She will be able to carry up to 50 kg of payload in the following missions. The cost of the device is a little less 5 millions of dollars, and the total cost of the DeepSpace-2 mission is less 10,5 a million dollars.
The company's long-term ambitions are related to the mining of metals on asteroids. AstroForge notes, that "the mineral wealth of the solar system will become increasingly important to the advanced future of humanity". SpaceX also plans to conduct asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main belt asteroids, providing abundant raw materials for space industries and reducing the need to launch mass from Earth.
Matt Gialik believes, that the highest commercial achievement for space is the extraction of resources in the universe. Previously, his company was a single company, who risked implementing these plans, and the joining of Elon Musk proves that, that the topic outgrows the category of science fiction and may become strategically important for the future.
Source: https://spacenews.com