19th March 2021

Interview with CEO of Asteroid Mining Corporation

In this recent podcast, Mitch Hunter-Scullion talks about the economics, technologies and opportunities of asteroid mining and the future of the space industry over the next 50 years.

Credit: Asteroid Mining Corporation

Mitch Hunter-Scullion is a young British entrepreneur who founded Asteroid Mining Corporation in 2016, after completing his dissertation entitled "The Case for Asteroid Mining: Examining the economic and political benefits to be gained from mining in Space."

Asteroid Mining Corporation (AMC), the UK's only company dedicated to commercial extraction of space resources, has since grown into a team of eight people with specialities in astronomy, engineering, finance, and IT. Their first prospecting satellite – in the "CubeSat" class – will perform telescopic observations of candidate bodies, leading to the creation of a database with information about thousands of asteroids. This data could be sold to provide funding for future missions with more advanced capabilities, such as a rendezvous with asteroid 1986DA.

AMC recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Space Robotics Lab at Tohoku University in Japan, to begin working on the mutual development of Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorers (SCAR-E).

A single asteroid could potentially contain trillions of dollars' worth of useful materials, such as gold and platinum. While currently in its very earliest stages, Hunter-Scullion believes that the mining of these bodies could grow into one of the biggest industries of the mid-late 21st century. The combination of a soaring global population, depletion of finite resources, and increasingly low-cost access to space suggests he may be right. AMC hopes to partner with international investors and high-net-worth individuals to achieve the long-term goal of obtaining and returning these precious metals and minerals to Earth.

In this recent interview with Chris Milton, who runs the Brighter Tomorrow podcast series, he discusses the company's plans in more detail. He also offers some predictions on what the space industry could look like by 2070:

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