China to launch first ever asteroid mining robot into space

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Origin Space, a privately-owned Beijing-based company is set to launch the world's first mining robot into space this November. 

Despite being described as an 'asteroid mining robot', no actual mining will be done. Instead, NEO-1, as the robot is being called, is a preliminary assessment - field-testing technologies designed for eventual asteroid mining.

NEO-1 will most likely be launched as a secondary payload on a Chinese Long March rocket and at just 30 kg, is relatively light by spacecraft standards. It will enter its orbit around the earth at an altitude of 500 km. 

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Origin Space co-founder Yu Tianhong said: “The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital manoeuvre, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification and control."

How much actual progress the NEO-1 mission can make is still subject to much speculation, given that such a mission has not been tried before. 

Origin Space describes the "robot" as a prospector, rather than a miner, though if successful, NEO-1 would open up a multi-billion dollar industry. 

While mining in space has become a staple of science fiction, the reality has yet to manifest itself.

Space is still largely uncharted territory, but the race is heating up. Between Elon Musk's repeated remarks about the colonisation of Mars, the head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency declaring Venus a "Russian planet", and the European Space Agency looking at the feasibility of mining the Moon, space looks certain to be the next frontier in human expansion and privatisation. 

The ethics, however, of selling planets, moons and pieces of space is still being widely debated by scientists, many of whom are not in favour of the privatisation of space. A large sticking point is the question of who does one buy it from? Nonetheless, the launch of NEO-1 will most likely put those debates on the back burner as a new space race gets underway.

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