Five-thousand tons of water-ice delivered to cislunar space per two-year mission! In a recent announcement, TransAstra Corporation proposed a spacecraft able to achieve this. They call it the Queen Bee, a new part of the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies (APIS; Apis) architecture. Queen Bee is a large scale version of their asteroid mining spacecraft design.
TransAstra is a Los Angeles, California based aerospace company founded in 2015 by Joel Sercel. Their goal is to help make industrial processes in space possible. A key process they study is extracting volatiles, including water, from small Near Earth Asteroids (NEA). Their past work has focused on Optical Mining, asteroid encapsulation, and solar thermal thrusters for the mining and utilization of carbonaceous Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) volatiles.
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