Planetary Resources, founded in 2009 and later acquired by ConsenSys in 2018, was an American company aiming to develop technologies for asteroid mining. While its long-term goal was to extract resources like water and precious metals from asteroids, its initial plan involved developing and deploying cost-reduced space telescopes for Earth observation and asteroid surveying. The company launched two test satellites, Arkyd 3 Reflight and Arkyd 6, to orbit as part of its mission. Planetary Resources ultimately aimed to establish a new paradigm for resource utilization in space, but the company ceased operations, and its IP was made public in 2020.
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Elizabeth Frank, a planetary scientist who previously worked at Planetary Resources, raised issues including challenges extracting platinum-group metals from asteroids, difficulty identifying such metals using existing remote sensing instruments, and a lack of experience working with metallic asteroids.
U.S. company Planetary Resources launched several technology demonstrators before encountering financial difficulties and was acquired by ConsenSys, Inc. in 2018.
By early 2019, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, the two major startups in the space resources industry, had been acquired by other companies with no interest in space resources.
ConsenSys Space was established by blockchain company ConsenSys after it acquired Planetary Resources nearly a year before the TruSat rollout.
The government of Luxembourg lost 12,000,000 EUR invested in Planetary Resources.
A venture linked to former space mining company Planetary Resources rolled out a project called TruSat on 2019-10-21 in Washington during an event tied to the 70th International Astronautical Congress.
The Luxembourg government, through SpaceResources.lu, invested 12,000,000 EUR in Planetary Resources in 2016 and lost nearly all of that investment when Planetary Resources was purchased by ConsenSys.
Planetary Resources was acquired by ConsenSys in October 2018.
Planetary Resources was acquired by ConsenSys a little more than two months before Bradford Space acquired Deep Space Industries.
Planetary Resources announced plans in 2012 to develop a series of spacecraft to prospect for and extract resources such as water ice from near-Earth asteroids.
In November 2016 SpaceResources.lu invested 25,000,000 EUR in Planetary Resources, split between grants and an equity stake.
Planetary Resources was being acquired by ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company, as of 2018-10-31.
The Luxembourg government acquired a 10 percent shareholder stake in Planetary Resources as part of the SpaceResources.lu investment.
Planetary Resources Inc. was acquired by ConsenSys, Inc. in an asset-purchase transaction on 2018-10-31.
Planetary Resources first announced its asteroid mining plans in 2012 after operating in stealth mode for three years.