China to send people to live on asteroids and mine them, authorities announce

The Chinese government plans to find, catch and land on an asteroid – before mining and even living on it. Beijing hopes to be able to take the precious and rare materials that are thought to be inside of many asteroids by catching one as early as 2020, according to officials from China's space programme. The country will launch its first spacecraft over the next three years or so, chief commander and designer of China's lunar exploration program Ye Pijian told state media. But the project will be much broader than that – eventually using the asteroids as the base for a Chinese space station. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.