For eight years, Planetary Resources has been researching near-Earth asteroids — there are perhaps 15,000 of them — designing space probes and prospecting for financial backers to mine asteroids.

Chris Lewicki, left, with a visiting official from Luxembourg, which has invested in the company (Photo by Planetary Resources)

Longtime space and tech entrepreneurs Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson founded Arkyd Astronautics in Redmond in 2009 with a name fuzzy enough to keep its asteroid-mining mission a secret. In 2012, though, the company changed its name to Planetary Resources and announced that it plans to mine water and rare minerals from asteroids.

Chris Lewicki, a veteran of NASA, is the venture’s president. Lewicki worked on a NASA probe that flew by the 433 Eros near-Earth asteroid in 1998 before orbiting and landing on it permanently in 2000 and 2001. He also was NASA’s flight director on two Mars rover missions and the surface mission manager for another that landed on Mars to hunt for signs of water and microbial life. And he ended up with an asteroid named after him — 13609 Lewicki.

In an interview late last year with Crosscut, Lewicki said that Diamandis’ and Anderson’s vision originally struck him as crazy, but he quickly bought into the concept. “It is realistic, but something you think [about achieving] in the long term,” Lewicki said.

Even as interest in space exploration has attracted attention from some of the world’s most high profile entrepreneurs, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, there has been considerable speculation about whether asteroids offer real resources that could bring financial rewards. Lewicki declined to discuss Planetary Resources’ finances and budget.

However last month, Geekwire reported that Planetary Resources missed a fundraising deadline and appears to have had some people leave the company. No information was available on financial figures related to those missed deadlines.

In 2014, Planetary Resources arranged to send its first satellite Arkyd-3 — a 9-pound package of control and communications devices the company wanted to test — into space as part of a bigger payload on a private rocket headed to the International Space Station. But the rocket blew up a few seconds after launch. A second Arkyd-3, called Arkyd-3R, successfully made it to space in a subsequent launch in 2015.

On Jan. 9 of this year, the more-advanced, cereal box-sized Arkyd-6 launched as part of the payload of another rocket that took off from India.

It is supposed to be the first of several Planetary Resources satellites orbiting the Earth to collect spectral information from asteroids and to earn the company some money by collecting spectral data from the Earth for natural resources, forestry, water quality and agricultural purposes. “We like to test our ideas incrementally,” Lewicki said in the interview late last year.

Geekwire reported that Planetary Resources apparently plans to sell some of Arkyd-6’s imagery and data to fill that revenue gap.

In addition to interest from investors, Planetary Resources’ boundary-pushing projects have caught the attention of other companies. International engineering giant Bechtel Corp agreed in 2013 to partner with Planetary Resources on long-term goals. Another company will help Planetary Resources put three-dimensional printers into space; the 3-D printers could use ground-up asteroid rocks as dust-like raw materials to build equipment in outer space.

So why does Planetary Resources want to mine asteroids?

One reason is because of the presence of lots of platinum, gold and other rare metals if you pick the right asteroids.

Arkyd-3R seen from the International Space Station (Images by NASA)

But the most immediate reason is water — that is, water as a raw material for spaceship fuel.

A huge expense in rocketing to Mars or elsewhere in the solar system is fuel. And getting lots of fuel out of the Earth’s gravity is highly expensive. The plan is to take mammoth chunks of ice from an asteroid and send them to an outer space facility that will melt the ice and zap the water into hydrogen and oxygen. A spacecraft would pick up that hydrogen to use as fuel to reach Mars or the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt.

So, Planetary Resources’ first priority is to find and mine that ice while building water-zapping and refueling stations in outer space. Mineral mining will come later.

The company’s plan is to send its first scouting probes in 2020 to near-Earth asteroids, some of which are already on a list of possible targets.

How does it pick targets? For one thing, it wants to stay away from the ones going the fastest around the sun because the mining probe would need more fuel to catch up, which displaces room in the small spacecraft for mining equipment. Ditto on the super-fast spinners. And an asteroid less than 1,000 feet in diameter is not a good prospect to hold enough water to be worth mining.