In April 2023, a microwave-sized satellite launched into space. His goal: to prepare for asteroid mining. Although the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, has run into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on space resources.
Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals such as platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and batteries for electric vehicles, respectively. Although there are many of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than on mountainsides, making them easier to scrape off. And space scraping, advocates say, could reduce the harmful effects mining has on this planet. Space advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket fuel? Space dirt for astronaut housing and radiation protection?
Previous companies have pursued similar goals before, but failed about half a decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the scene, however, “interest in the field has exploded,” said Angel Abboud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
Much of the attention is focused on the Moon, as nations plan to establish outposts there and will need supplies. NASA, for example, has ambitions to build base camps for astronauts within the next decade. Meanwhile, China hopes to open an international station to explore the moon.
Still, the pull of space rocks remains powerful and the new crop of companies encouraging. The economic picture has improved as the cost of launching rockets has decreased, as has the regulatory environment, with countries creating laws that specifically allow space mining. But only time will tell if this decade’s prospectors will win where others have struck red, or be buried by their business plans.
An asteroid mining company needs one key ingredient to get started: optimism. Hope they can start a new industry that is out of this world. “Not many people are built to work this way,” said Matt Gialich, co-founder and CEO of AstroForge. Since the company’s demonstration mission in April 2023, it has yet to come close to mining anything.
What he and his colleagues hope to extract, however, are platinum group metals, some of which are used in devices such as catalytic converters that reduce gas emissions. Meanwhile, substances such as platinum and iridium are used in electronics. There are also opportunities in green technology and new pushes to produce platinum-based batteries with better storage that could find their way into electric vehicles and energy storage systems.
To meet the company’s goals, AstroForge’s initial mission was loaded with simulated asteroid material and a refining system designed to extract platinum from the simulator to show that metal processing could happen in space.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. Once the small craft entered orbit, it was difficult to identify and communicate among the dozens of other newly launched satellites. The solar panels that power the spacecraft would not initially deploy. And the satellite was initially surrounded by fluctuations that hindered communication. They failed to do the simulated extraction.
The company will soon launch a second mission with a different goal: to shoot a slingshot to an asteroid and take a photo, a surveying project that could help the company understand what valuable materials exist on a particular asteroid.
Another company, called TransAstra, sells a telescope and software designed to detect objects such as asteroids moving across the sky; China’s Origin Space Corporation has an asteroid-monitoring satellite in orbit around Earth and is testing its mining-related technology there. Meanwhile, the Colorado company Karman+ plans to go straight to an asteroid in 2026 and test excavation equipment.
To achieve the ultimate goal of extracting metals from space rocks, TransAstra, Karman+ and AstroForge have received a total of tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding to date.
Another company with similar goals, simply called Asteroid Mining Corporation Ltd., does not want to rely heavily on outside investment in the long term. Such reliance actually helped sink previous companies. Instead, founder and CEO Mitch Hunter-Scullion is focusing his company’s early work on ground-based applications that pay off immediately so he can fund future work in the wider universe. In 2021, the company partnered with Japan-based Tohoku University’s Space Robotics Laboratory to work on space robots.
Together, they have built a six-legged robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E. Designed to operate in microgravity, it can crawl around a rough surface and take data and samples of what’s there. In 2026, the company plans to do a demonstration mission to analyze the soil on the moon.
For now, however, SCAR-E will remain on Earth and inspect ship hulls. According to one market research platform, this is a market of nearly $13 billion globally – compared to the asteroid mining market, which is currently $0 because no one has mined an asteroid yet.
Such grounded work could provide the company with a revenue stream before and during their time in space. “I think every asteroid mining company realizes that the money is running out, the investors are getting tired, and you have to do something,” Hunter-Scullion said.
“My view is that if you haven’t built something that makes sense on Earth,” he added, “you’ll never be able to mine an asteroid.”
