The Luxembourg government has agreed to purchase up to 49 percent of the equity in asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources’ Luxembourg operations as part of the effort to make Luxembourg the nexus of space-based resource exploitation, an industry official said.
An announcement of the agreement was scheduled for June 13 in Luxembourg, the official said.
Luxembourg will make an initial investment of 200 million euros ($227 million) to become the “Silicon Valley of space resources” under an initiative that will primarily benefit two American asteroid mining companies.
The investment will fund asteroid survey missions by Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources that will be launched within three years, government officials said at a press conference on Friday. Luxembourg will also fund research and development into technologies needed to identify, extract and process minerals, water and other materials.
The two companies have agreed to set up operations in the European tax haven. Deep Space Industries has signed an agreement with the Luxembourg government to work together, officials said. A similar agreement with Planetary Resources is in the works.
In addition to funding space missions and R&D, Luxembourg is considering making direct capital investments to become shareholders in the two companies, Vice Prime Minister Étienne Schneider told journalists.
Those efforts are seemingly emboldened by the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), legislation passed by Congress and signed into law last November. A section of the law grants companies the rights to resources they extract from asteroids, which clears up, at least at the level of domestic law, the question of whether companies could own material they extract from an asteroid. Yet, even with that law in effect, there are still unresolved issues, both at the federal and the international level, for prospective asteroid miners.
Asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, together with the Luxembourg Government and the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement (SNCI), the national banking institution in Luxembourg, have signed an agreement formalizing their partnership to explore, use, and commercialize space resources as part of Luxembourg’s spaceresources.lu initiative.
The Luxembourg Government will work with Deep Space Industries to co-fund relevant R&D projects that help further develop the technology needed to mine asteroids and build a supply chain of valuable resources in space. The co-funding will be implemented under the Luxembourg space program, (LuxIMPULSE), the national R&D support program, and using financing instruments of the SNCI.
The first Early Jurassic (late Hettangian) theropod dinosaur remains from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
Authors:
Delsate et al
Abstract:
Body fossils of earliest Jurassic (Hettangian) dinosaurs are scarce worldwide. Here we report two isolated dinosaur remains from the marine upper Hettangian (the Schlotheimia angulata ammonite Zone) Luxembourg Sandstone Formation, collected at Brouch, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The small to medium-sized pedal phalanx III-1 is referred to a neotheropod dinosaur based on the combination of the following features: proximal end with a lateral margin formed by two straight margins meeting at a wide angle, distal end with a well-defined semilunate extensor fossa and a proximodistally elongated shaft. The isolated tooth crown most likely belongs to an indeterminate theropod, because of its labiolingually compressed shape and the presence of sharp mesial and distal carinae and denticles along its distal edge. These remains represent the first Jurassic dinosaur specimens reported from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, enlarging the meagre record of the group immediately after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event.
