Luxembourg is becoming an important centre for companies involved in the exploration and future exploitation of resources harvested in space, notably from asteroids and from the Moon. However, Odysseus Space believes that there is still a great lack of information about where such useful resources are located. “No one is obviously going to send a mining expedition to an asteroid without first evaluating which one is the most profitable,” says Jordan Vannitsen, the CEO of Odysseus Space.
His company therefore focuses on prospection technologies, to be used for gathering information on the best targets for resources extraction missions, and on reducing the costs of solar system probes. “Our objective is to capitalise on the latest progress made in small satellite technologies in order to reduce the cost of interplanetary missions by at least a factor 10, and to send our probes to various asteroids,” Mr Vannitsen explains. The company will start by focusing on technologies that are necessary for this long-term goal but which can also immediately be put on the market, for example for the operation of small satellite constellations.