Bechtel joins crew for meteorite mining One of the world's biggest engineering groups, best known for Earth-bound projects such as the Channel Tunnel, has joined space adventurers the Google founders and film director James Cameron in their venture into the final frontier. Privately owned Bechtel has decided to throw its weight behind Planetary Resources as an investor and partner in a mission to mine near-earth asteroids for raw materials using robots. IN Science Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, Planetery Resources co-founders, have already attracted a string of super-rich investors and backers including Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, but the backing of the blue-chip engineering company should help counter some of the project's many doubters. "Planetary Resources" mission is ambitious, but they've assembled a world-class team to succeed," said Riley Bechtel, chairman and chief executive of the San Francisco-based project manager and engineering group. The company, which has revenues of $33bn and helped build the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, would not give any further details about its involvement in the project. But Mr Anderson told the Financial Times he expected Bechtel's expertise to come to the fore when the project reaches the mining stage, which he said was still 10 to 15 years away. "[Bechtel] have wanted to get into space for a long time but it wasn't until they saw our concept that they thought it was both credible and one where they could add value," he said. Mining is an industry they are involved a lot in on Earth. Planetary Resources" initial goal is to search for water and mineral-rich asteroids, among some 1,500 near-earth objects, by launching the first of a number of space telescopes in the next 24 months, Mr Anderson said. It has a team of 50 engineers working on the programme. After that it intends to design a family of probes to survey promising candidates before moving into the even more challenging stage of mining the resources. The first aim is to secure a source of water in space - a crucial ingredient for any future crewed exploration and exploitation of the solar system. Water is needed to sustain life and can also be broken down into its constituent parts - hydrogen and oxygen - to make fuel to power spacecraft. "The primary goal of the company is to set up fuel depots in space," said Mr Anderson, adding that there were plenty of potential customers, ranging from the refuelling of commercial satellites to government-funded interplanetary space missions. We want to become the Exxon of space. A crewed mission to Mars, for example, would need refuelling points in space as it is prohibitively expensive to launch all the necessary provision into space from Earth. The so-called "payload amplification factor" makes it 30 times cheaper to manufacture something in space rather than transport it on a rocket from Earth, if the raw materials are available. Mr Anderson said it would cost about $1bn to set up the first refuelling station. The company would not disclose how much funding it had raised but he said it had enough for "several years" of development. The company also believes that as technology matures it could at some point in the future mine asteroids for precious metals, such as platinum and gold. Planetary Resources is one of two companies looking to mine asteroids and part of a new wave of ventures hoping to commercialise space. Mr Anderson's Space Adventures has already taken passengers paying $50m each for week-long stays at the International Space Station.