On January 22, 2013, Deep Space Industries, Houston Texas based, said its inaugural mission is targeted for 2015, when it would send a small hitchhiker spacecraft called "Firefly" on a six-month expedition to survey an as-yet-unidentified asteroid. The 55-pound (25-kg) satellite, about the size of a laptop computer, would be launched as a secondary payload aboard a commercial rocket carrying a communications satellite or other robotic probe. Spokesperson for Private Wealth Magazine spoke in September 2014, “Houston-based Deep Space Industries (DSI) doesn’t have the star power of Planetary Resources, but it hopes to fund its operations through investors, through progress payments from government customers and through payments from commercial customers. While both Planetary Resources and DSI plan to mine asteroids for precious metals, their interim plan is to process asteroid materials into fuel and parts that can extend the lives of satellites.”
We are about to have fully commercial transportation to fully commercial destinations in space,” says Rick Tumlinson, chairman of Deep Space Industries, noting that companies such as SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and Blue Origin are freeing us from any dependence we had on governments to get us to and from space, and that soon we’ll have fully commercial destinations that will give us freedom from having to go to government space stations. Private money is pushing innovation, which is pushing launch costs down, and that’s largely because companies are finding ways to save the rocket. Today, when you launch something into space, the rocket usually burns up in the atmosphere. Companies such as SpaceX and XCOR are finding ways to make the rockets reusable, and it’s likely to bring down launch costs exponentially. As that happens, investor interest is only expected to accelerate. “The cost equation for getting to orbit—the gateway to the universe, literally—is about to shift and cross a price threshold. When it does, the number and scale of activities in space will literally skyrocket,” Tumlinson says. [for greater in-depth analysis on Space Commerce, read article Are Commercial Satellite/Space Markets Fading?]
