<blockquote>'We have a long view. We're not expecting this company to be an overnight financial home run. This is going to take time.'
- Anderson ('
..Arkyd Series 100 spacecraft.')</blockquote>
<blockquote>“I’m excited to be part of the Planetary Resources’ team working on extracting precious minerals from near Earth asteroids. The only way to truly explore our Solar System is to develop the technology and means to sustain our presence in space without depleting resources of Earth.”
- Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group (
Source, 2013)</blockquote>
..there are over 20,000 near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 100-meters in diameter. Of these, 17 percent, 3,400 are energetically closer than the moon. It's these relatively close asteroids that Planetary Resources will be "prospecting."<blockquote>'With Linux, however,
Planetary Resources can build a common spaceship operating system more cheaply and much more easily. Almost all software used in the current generation of spacecraft is custom made and manually coded. That's expensive.
In addition, the company considers virtualization is very important for their spacecraft, since decoupling the software and hardware virtualization will make security and fault isolation much easier.
Planetary Resources won't be using Linux only in space. "Linux can be everywhere in our stack, said Allen. "There will be a single board computer running Linux on the spacecraft and on the ground station, a single board virtual machine clone." This will better enable engineers to troubleshoot problems harmlessly on the ground rather than address them dangerously in space.
In addition, Planetary Resources will use Linux and other open-source programs, such as
Git and
Jenkins to manage its software projects. The company will also be using
Monte-Carlo simulations on open-source-based cloud using
QEMU to work out the best, and most affordable, asteroids to mine.
..
..there are over 20,000 near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 100-meters in diameter. Of these, 17 percent, 3,400 are energetically closer than the moon. It's these relatively close asteroids that Planetary Resources will be "prospecting."
The company will do this with its ARKYD series of robot spaceships. The first of the
ARKYD 100 Series, should be in orbit in 2014. These are microwave-oven-sized commercial space telescopes that will look for asteroids that may be likely sources of water or valuable minerals.
..
It’s possible, then, that a single asteroid could be worth tens of billions of dollars. .. In addition, Planetary Resources is mining for water, to be used to fuel both other near-Earth orbit and deep space robot asteroid mining spaceships.
Sound interesting? Allen concluded by saying that "
We're looking for a few good asteroid miners." In particular, the company is looking for software and electrical engineers. If you love space and open-source software, this may be the job for you.'
- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols,
..Asteroid mining and Linux, September 22, 2013</blockquote>
Context<blockquote>Funded:
ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone, 2013
Space Factories:
SpiderFab™ Additive Manufacturing and Assembly On-Orbit (3D Printing)
NewCircle (..professional training company focused on open source development.) (
Marakana Twitter)
(The third industrial revolution) 'The digitisation of manufacturing..' - The Economist(Space) '..a new era in exploration..'The Linux Foundation: Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup - '..to broadly support open source technology in automotive industry.' Your future 'car' shall fly in the Electric Atmosphere(Open Source) - '..Netflix. The application is .. cloud-native open source platform.'(Earth Defence - Earth Shield) - China joins RIMPAC 2014 - (Rim of the Pacific Exercise - NEOShield to assess Earth defence)(MIX) - Can you lead without authority? - '..the need to “lead without authority.” ' - Rethinking the Work of Leadership</blockquote>