Irish Examiner View: Asteroid mining will be the gold rush frontier in space

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched from Launch Complex 39A on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard, Saturday, May 30, 2020, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

EVER since the demise of America's Space Shuttle programme, US astronauts had to hitch a ride on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station, a multi-national project involving five participating space agencies.