Planetary Resources

Deep sea mining has been off limits because it's awfully hard, and because governments haven't yet firmed up regulations around extracting minerals offshore. That might soon change with The Metal Company's latest move – perhaps sooner than it should.

There's enough natural hydrogen trapped underground to meet all projected demands for hundreds of years. An unpublished report by the US Geological Survey identifies it as a new primary resource, and fires the starter pistol on a new gold rush.

Nano-engineering happens all day long in our bodies, and California startup Aether is designing and testing millions of new enzymes to do a range of other useful tasks – like directly extracting battery-grade lithium from sources nobody else can use.

The green economy desperately needs huge quantities of battery metals, and they're sitting right there on the deep ocean floor. Here's a device designed to harvest them with the minimum possible impact to one of the world's last untouched ecosystems.

If it could work with asteroids, why not the Earth? That's the thinking behind space mining company Planetary Resources' plan to adapt its asteroid prospecting satellite design to Earth observation.

At CES in Las Vegas, the asteroid mining company Planetary Resource unveiled the first object 3D printed using extraterrestrial materials.

The asteroid-mining industry has taken a step closer to becoming an actual thing, with the successful deployment of Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft from the International Space Station Wednesday night.

At a press conference arranged only a few hours after the event, NASA released details of the explosion of the Antares rocket carrying the unmanned Cygnus supply ship to the International Space Station (ISS).

To help avoid being surprised by new discoveries of near-Earth asteroids and comets, NASA, Planetary Resources, and Zooniverse have formed a collaboration to use citizen scientists to detect members of the vast swarm of near-Earth objects not yet recognized or mapped.

Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company based in Bellevue, Washington, completed its Arkyd 100 space telescope Kickstarter campaign on Sunday after a 33-day run that raised US$1,505,366 from 17,600 backers.

In which Gizmag visits the company’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters and talks to the President and Chief engineer, Chris Lewicki.

Planetary Resources is offering to upgrade an Arkyd 100 satellite for exoplanet hunting if pledges reach $2 million before the Kickstarter campaign ends on May 30.