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Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

For someone interested in the future of the...err...space, what type of technical background is required to be hired today to work at a company with plans to attempt this type of mining?

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Personally, if I were doing this, and I might still, I would focus on the challenges of actually mining. The reason is that rockets and probes etc are pretty well plowed areas but while Curiosity, the mars rover, can drill a small hole and using non-replacable reagents look for certain compounds, these things will need to process tons of material from an asteroid to try and extract kilograms of materials. That is a very unsolved problem and a very under funded one.

A lot of current extraction techniques use liquid water (not available on an asteroid), all extraction techniques depend on the raw ore being transportable by buckets or belts with gravity keeping things in place (also not available on asteroids). And many refinement techniques are very energy expensive (challenging to ship to an asteroid). So if you can figure out how to solve even one of those problems and asteroid mining company that hires you will be ahead of the game.

Do anyone know of research groups involved in this?

I worked at Planetary Resources. They are mostly looking for the various engineering roles you'd expect when building a spacecraft, especially mechanical engineering types. Most people had some sort of aerospace background (lots of ex-JPL), but some came from the software tech industry (like me), the auto industry, or straight out of school.

Look at the job reqs at SpaceX or Blue Origin. Often they raided bored, talented young engineers at NASA or established space companies.

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