Less than a week after Moon Express became the first private company to be granted permission for a Moon mission, Mountain View-based aerospace company Deep Space Industries has announced plans to launch an asteroid mining mission by the end of the decade.

Asteroids contain large amounts of rare and valuable minerals that are much easier to access than they are here on Earth…that is, if you can actually get to the asteroids in the first place. Deep Space Industries says that the technology for such a mission exists today, and it wants to be the first to commercially exploit our solar system’s vast wealth of space rocks.

“Deep Space Industries has worked diligently to get to this point, and now we can say with confidence that we have the right technology, the right team and the right plan to execute this historic mission,” Rick Tumlinson, chairman of the board and co-founder of Deep Space Industries, said in a statement. “Building on our Prospector-X mission, Prospector-1 will be the next step on our way to harvesting asteroid resources.”

According to the company, its first spacecraft, Prospector-1, weighs only 50 kg (roughly 110 lbs) when fully fueled, which makes its launch cost relatively low. Deep Space Industries has a test flight planned for the unmanned spacecraft in 2017, which will put Prospector-1 into a low earth orbit that will allow the company to test several technologies that will be necessary for the long flight to the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

While minerals are one of the primary resources that can be found in asteroids, Deep Space Industries’ first mission will be to extract water. The purpose behind this is not to obtain more water to bring to back home, but rather to extract supplies for future space missions, eliminating the need to launch them from Earth.

“During the next decade, we will begin the harvest of space resources from asteroids,” said Daniel Faber, CEO at Deep Space Industries. “We are changing the paradigm of business operations in space, from one where our customers carry everything with them, to one in which the supplies they need are waiting for them when they get there.”

Image courtesy of Deep Space Industries