Deep Space Industries

Deep Space Industries (DSI) was a US asteroid mining and spacecraft propulsion company founded in 2013 in San Jose, California. The company proposed a roadmap starting with small prospector spacecraft (Firefly, Dragonfly) to survey and sample near-Earth asteroids, building toward resource extraction for water-derived propellant in cislunar space. DSI's most commercially viable product was its Comet water-electrolysis thruster — a propulsion system using water as propellant (electrolyzing to hydrogen/oxygen) that competed with hydrazine thrusters for small satellites. The company supplied Comet thrusters to commercial satellite operators before being acquired by Bradford Space (Netherlands) in January 2019. Under Bradford, the propulsion line continued while the asteroid mining roadmap was shelved, representing the typical trajectory of 2010s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) ventures — practical propulsion products survived, speculative mining plans did not.