Progress continues with Planetary Resources, the private syndicate that proposes to mine asteroids in the near future for rare metals. Here’s their latest communication:

We’ve been working our tails off at Planetary Resources planning our initial launches of our first spacecraft.

We call these first Asteroid finding spacecraft Arkyd Series-100 (next email we’ll tell you where the name ‘Arkyd’ comes from).

We’ve had hundreds of emails asking us about our ability to point our cameras the Moon, planets and even at specific spots on the Earth.

We’ve also had literally hundreds of folks asking about the resolution and whether we’d be willing to sell access to our satellites imagery…

…whether you could etch your name on the satellites, buy a full-scale replica, etc…

Soooo… Here’s the answers:

Yes, we can point at any celestial object… (well, except the Sun)…

…and if pointed at the Earth you can get photos with 1-2 meter resolution.

Your questions totally got us thinking!….

Maybe there’s a near-term way to get YOU involved!

Our near-term goal is to build and launch an incredibly powerful, super-cutting-edge, 20 kilogram *Space Telescope* and do it FAST.

Our medium-term goal is to build and launch a constellation of 10 – 15 of these Arkyd Series-100 spacecraft in the next 3 years.

So we started thinking, maybe we could allow YOU to be part of our first missions.

IF YOU WANT!

Would you be interested in being able to decide where to point the cameras?

Use it to explore space, or image the Earth?

The decision is totally up to you.

From my own experience, this is something that the traditional space-industry would never do…

Which is EXACTLY why we’re offering this to you… IF you are interested.

We’re happy to build extra spacecraft capacity That we can offer to you as co-conspirators to do with as you wish…

…Take photos of your backyard, the superbowl, your school, Saturn, the Moon or deep space.

IF there’s sufficient interest, we’d probably do this as a Kickstarter Campaign where you can participate for $100 (or more)… and become part of the team and user community.

Here’s what we need:

We need your ideas for Kickstarter Pledge Levels – so that we make sure that you’re super-excited to help spread the word about first launch.

We’ve listed out our ideas on this Blog Post we’ve just put up.

If you could throw in your 2 cents on cool ideas for Backer Levels on this kind of project (and be sure to Vote Up any other people’s ideas that you think are cool).

We’ve made you a little video for you on the PRI blog that explains the whole thing.

Get your creative juices flowing – it’s time to go to space and start finding Asteroids!

If there’s not enough interest, no problem, we’ll continue on our original plan to building and flying spacecraft for our own use.

But, if there is interest, then great, lets have some fun!

Onward to the stars… Going where no ONE has ever gone before!

Filed under: Amateur Astronomy • Asteroids & NEOs