“A diverse group of supporters, including Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, actor Seth Green, Star Trek’s Brent Spiner (Data) and Rob Picardo (The Doctor), Bill Nye the Science Guy, futurist Jason Silva, and MIT astrophysicist Dr. Sara Seager,” went the email, “have joined forces with Planetary Resources to make access to space widely available for exploration and research.” That vaguely phrased “access to space” sounded bold. Did you guess it meant “space telescope”?
Wednesday morning, Bellevue’s Planetary Resources, who hope someday to be in the business of mining asteroids, hosted a media event at the Museum of Flight to announce that they’d like to rent out (via Kickstarter) a space telescope for public use. The goal is a nice, round $1 million, which sum would be used to launch the telescope (on Virgin Galactic), keep the telescope up and running, create the UI needed for the “public use” part, and build an interactive educational component. No line-item summary is provided.
[UPDATE: $1 million goal reached, with 10 days left in the campaign! But they will take $2 million, if you haven’t donated yet, and configure the telescope to hunt exoplanets.]
One day later, they’ve raised close to $200,000 from more than 1,700 backers. Two people have given $10,000 or more, while about 100 have promised $25, which is the level at which you get a “space selfie.” The telescope is outfitted with a video screen and camera arm; your photo is displayed and the telescope takes a picture of itself (and your face, possibly) orbiting the earth. When it passes over Seattle, those shots are downloaded (limit: 150 per day). For $200, you get a one-time space snapshot of the celestial object of your choice (sun not included); for $450, three observations. If you’re feeling truly philanthropic, you can buy time for schools or museums.
The space telescope in question is Planetary Resources’ ARKYD 100, which uses a 200-mm aperture, f/4 primary optic, and is smaller than many backyard telescopes. (Smaller is better when you have to pay launch costs.) It registers wavelengths from 200 nm to 1100 nm, can detect objects up to visual magnitude of 19, and records using a 5 MP+ image sensor.
Planetary Resources would one day like to have a fleet of these in orbit, sniffing out the millions of asteroids too small to track currently. On the low-hanging-fruit side of things, more than 1,500 asteroids “are as easy to reach as the surface of the moon,” they point out; with a space telescope, they could get down to prospecting for mother lodes of precious metals, or identifying ice caches for future space doings. At the moment, there are no ARKYDs orbiting anything, so you have to imagine the telescope’s capabilities.
There’s no reason to doubt the team’s competency — despite their failure to get a livestream of their event working yesterday. (“AI is easy,” joked Peter Diamandis, “A/V is hard.”) The technical team are veterans from NASA’s Mars landers and rovers. Those rovers are, in an exploratory capacity, the kind of drilling robots that Planetary Resources thinks can happily chip away at asteroids for profit. Last year, Bechtel, the terrestrial engineering, construction, and mining giant, agreed that there might be something to it, coming in as an investor and collaborative partner.
Still, the motivation behind this Kickstarter campaign is oddly intertwined with the fact that its donors would be helping a for-profit company (with not one but several billionaire investors) launch a prototype that, while available for public use, also represents a trial run for the company. (The Kickstarter campaign page mentions a whole list of things that could go wrong for which Planetary Resources can’t be held responsible — sorry, no refunds.)
