Last month in China, the Mawei Shipyards launched the Deep Sea Nautilus, the world’s first ship designed for mining deepwater seabeds.  The Deep Sea Nautilus is a 745-foot-long megaship capable of carrying 39,000 tons of ore—plus a 200-person crew and deep-sea mining robots. Nautilus Minerals, which owns the ship, plans to start gold and copper mining in the Solwara I, a mile-deep site in the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea. Nautilus Minerals is a Canadian company with an ambitious deep-sea mining plan, centered around high-tech underwater robots that wouldn’t look totally out of place in Star Wars. This February the company successfully tested its line-up of three robots at depths of 1,500 meters, or about 0.93 miles, or about 4900 feet. Two robots are purpose-built for preparing and pulverizing the metal rich seabed; a third robot will mix the pulverized ore into a slurry, to be pumped up to the Deep Sea Nautilus for further processing. Click here to see and read more