2,000 apply for jobs building asteroid-mining robots

If you want to be an asteroid miner, you've got some stiff competition.

Less than three weeks after officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans, the billionaire-backed firm Planetary Resources has already received thousands of job applications, officials said.

On April 24, the company announced that it was looking to hire a few qualified people  - not pickaxe-swinging astronauts, mind you, but engineers who would help design and build a fleet of asteroid-mining robotic probes. The resulting resume deluge was so intense that Planetary Resources has turned off the spigot. ...