The Final Frontier is closer than ever before and AI may help harvest the riches it offers, as one startup has raised $20 million towards building autonomous spacecraft that can fly to asteroids and mine their resources.
Indeed, a Denver-based startup Karman+ has recently raised $20 million in an investing round led by Plural and Hummingbird, with the goal to develop autonomous spacecraft that would travel to asteroids, mine resources, and bring them back to Earth, according to the company’s press release on February 19.
Other participants in the seed round included HCVC, Kevin Mahaffey (Lookout), Karman+ co-founder and CEO Teun van den Dries, and angel investors, and the company expects its first demonstration mission and customer missions to begin in as early as 2027.
Autonomous asteroid-mining
According to Karman+, its goal is to be able to mine space resources from near-Earth asteroids and provide ample, sustainable energy and resources both in space and on Earth, benefitting from space being on track to become a multi-trillion dollar economy by 2035.
Experts believe that the key drivers of this growth will be the space-based and/or enabled technologies like communications; positioning, navigation, and timing; and Earth observations services. Karman+ believes that this influence will expand to include intelligence, research, and manufacturing, as more is done in space than ever before.
Furthermore, there have been multiple missions demonstrating the retrieval of material from asteroids, including JAXA’s Hayabusa 1 and 2, and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, but these incur exorbitant costs. Case in point: the OSIRIS REx mission cost more than $1.3 billion to return 121 grams of material, which would equal to about $10.7 billion per kilogram.
Karman+ plans to address this issue with scalable low-cost autonomous asteroid-mining that would reduce the expenses of delivering material to customers in several large orders.
The Regolith Age
One of the specific objectives is to excavate regolith (a blanket of unconsolidated solid deposits of dust, broken rocks, and other related materials covering solid rock) from near-Earth asteroids and extract water for refueling in orbit.
This water can be used directly to power spacecraft or decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen, removing the need to launch from the Earth’s gravity well. With this, refueling costs for satellites in orbit should go down up to 10 times compared to Earth-sourced fuel and make deep space missions a reality.
To this end, Karman+ is developing tech for autonomous operations, such as optical navigation for interplanetary cruises (known as beacon nav) for mapping and interacting with asteroids and creating zero-gravity mining equipment for regolith excavation at scale.
On top of that, the team is using a ‘COTS+’ approach to leverage off-the-shelf components from other industries, which it then tests and qualifies for space to build its spacecraft platform and systems in-house, allowing it to keep the mission budget under $10 million.
Commenting on his company’s ambitious plans, Teun van den Dries explained that:
“Over the next two years, we are building the technology and infrastructure to make it possible to access materials in orbit and transform them into rocket fuel to supply the space economy. We believe the Regolith Age, powered by abundant space resources, is an inevitability that we can accelerate and we’re delighted to have the support of passionate investors on this journey with us.”
Meanwhile, China is looking to establish itself in the area of sending humans to space and its Center of Space Exploration (COSE) has proposed building ‘Extraterrestrial Planet Cave Bases’ for this purpose. Primarily, the caves would serve as the foundation for Lunar and Martian bases, and the organization has already prepared ecosystem experiments in a large-scale closed cave system at Youyang, Chongqing.
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