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 small satellite carried by a Chinese Long-March series rocket, into space in November. The Beijing-based private space resources company is set to send Neo-1, carried by a Chinese Long-March series rocket, into space in November ‘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. 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.