“We had a plan that would take off after a certain point, and we didn’t get to that point,” he explains. What went wrong? Predictably, ex-employees and investors tell slightly different stories.īonin blames DSI’s demise on investors’ unwillingness to take long-term risks. The heavens were ready for Silicon Valley. The stars had burned through their red tape. Japan, Scotland, and the United Arab Emirates announced their own asteroid-mining laws or investments. Luxembourg had given the company a multimillion-dollar grant to open a European office. Engineers tinkered with small cube satellites behind thick glass walls, crafting plans to launch prospecting machines. And everyone who buys one is creating an ecosystem of users now that can be fueled by resources of the future.”īy the spring of 2017, Planetary Resources was operating a lab in a warehouse in Redmond, Washington, decorated with NASA paraphernalia and vintage pinball machines. “What DSI had been doing is developing propulsion systems to run on water. “Both companies believed one of the early products would be propellant itself-that is, water,” says Grant Bonin, the former chief technology officer of Deep Space Industries. Water can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen to make combustible fuel, or-as in DSI’s technology-just heated up and expelled as a jet of steam. That, in turn, would make it possible to work toward a goal that Eric Anderson predicted could be reached by the mid-2020s: extracting ice from asteroids near Earth and selling it in space as a propellant for other missions. “Nothing says this is impossible except our own belief systems.” “Crazy ideas: that’s what moves culture forward,” he said at a 2017 event in New York. But it had its own high-profile backers, pie-in-the-sky goals, and a particularly evangelical board member named Rick Tumlinson, who made the rounds at conferences pitching the company’s vision. It raised much less cash: just $3.5 million, supplemented by some government contracts. Together with a third partner, Eric Anderson, Planetary Resources had raised $50 million by 2016, of which $21 million came from big-name investors including Google’s Eric Schmidt and filmmaker James Cameron.īefore long, a competitor called Deep Space Industries (DSI) appeared on the scene. The founders’ résumés and connections gave the zany idea institutional legitimacy: Lewicki had worked on major NASA missions such as the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and Diamandis was a well-known space-tourism booster. Their startup, Planetary Resources, was launched in 2012 with the modest dream of mining asteroids for minerals, metals, water, and other valuables. In the best of worlds, Chris Lewicki and Peter Diamandis might have changed the course of human civilization.
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