Planetary Resources, the company that has already become famous for announcing future space missions for asteroid mining in April, 2012, a few days ago announced the project of construction and launch of a public access space telescope funded through the crowdfunding system on the Kickstarter site.

Planetary Resources was founded in November 2010 with the name Arkyd Astronautics by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson. The company’s original name was deliberately ambiguous to keep secret its asteroid mining plans and was a tribute to “Arakyd Industries”, a droids manufacturer in the Star Wars saga. Last year, those plans were revealed and the company took its current name.

Now came the announcement of the plan to build and put into orbit a space telescope Arkyd-100, an instrument that is small as it will be a little more than 40 cm (about 1.5 feet) long for a mass of about 15 kg (abount 33 lbs) but technologically advanced. This plan is connected to the mining because the Arkyd-100 was designed to locate asteroids to be examined to determine which minerals they contain.

Since the start, the idea was to provide astronomical observations services to a large pool of potential customers due to its reduced costs. Given the recent successes of various crowdfunding campaigns, the heads of Planetary Resources must have thought it worthwhile to offer the services of the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope by financing its construction and so they set up its funding campaign on Kickstarter.

According to the plans, the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope should be launched using the Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne system, based on the White Knight Two aircraft, the same one used to launch the SpaceShipTwo. In this case, a small rocket would be would be launched into orbit carrying the telescope. For the launch of small satellites, the use of an airplane instead of a big rocket is cheaper.

Planetary Resources is supported by celebrities such as director James Cameron and important people in the world of technology as Google co-founder Larry Page and Google chairman of the board Eric Schmidt. The deal with Virgin Galactic gave the company the support of its owner, billionaire Richard Branson. This campaign is also backed by Bill Nye, the famous American science supporter through his Planetary Society.

As always in Kickstarter’s campaigns, the more you offer the more you’re entitled to have in return. In the case of the financing of the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope the possibilities include a particular photograph because it will be taken from a camera that frames the telescope itself while on its screen it shows the image of the person who made the offer.

The highest offers, of the order of thousands of dollars, entitle among other things to make a number of observations with the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope. That’s certainly why several offers of that level have already arrived after a very short time.

The campaign started on May 29, 2013 and at this moment it reached nearly $600,000. The million dollars goal is to be achieved by June 30, 2013 but if the offers keep coming it will be reached in a few days. Surely many schools and museums may be involved in the project.

The next year, Planetary Resources should test the launch of a prototype of the Arkyd-100 Space Telescope and the launch of the actual instrument is scheduled for 2015. It won’t certainly be at the level of NASA and ESA’s space telescopes but the involvement of so many people will certainly bring enthusiasm for this initiative.

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