The Asteroid Mining Bet: Inside the High-Risk, Astronomical-Reward Startups Looking Beyond Earth

A certain type of ambition appears almost embarrassing until it doesn’t. A company named Planetary Resources declared in front of the cameras in 2012 that it would mine asteroids in order to recover water and rare metals from space rocks that were drifting close to Earth’s orbit. There was James Cameron. Larry Page was, too. The media’s coverage varied from enthusiastic to blatantly derisive.

The money then quietly ran out. In 2019, the company was sold to a blockchain company, and its aspirations for asteroids were turned into a side project that tracked satellites. The company’s former CEO, Chris Lewicki, described the initial concept as “laughable” and “zany” to many onlookers, despite the fact that people were clearly disappointed with how things turned out.

The story didn’t end there, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider that setback. At the same time that Planetary Resources was waning, Deep Space Industries, a rival, also failed and was absorbed into Bradford Space before it had ever launched a spacecraft close to an actual asteroid. Asteroid mining had seemed inevitable for a short while in the early 2010s, supported by serious capital, serious names, and serious engineering talent. Then it didn’t. The founding CEO of Planetary Resources, David Gump, said, “We just ran out of money,” in a statement that somehow manages to be both straightforward and devastating.

The fact that none of this seems to have killed the idea is what makes the present moment peculiar. If anything, the field is experiencing a resurgence of hope due in part to the fact that launch costs are actually declining and in part to the unsettling fact that some metals are getting harder to find on Earth. The six elements that make up the Platinum Group Metals, which include palladium, rhodium, and platinum, are mostly mined under harsh conditions in North America, South Africa, and Russia.

They are costly to extract, polluting during processing, and deeply ingrained in the Earth’s crust. In early 2023, the price per kilogram of platinum was approximately $31,000. Rhodium was sitting close to $400,000. Earth is simply running low on simple solutions for some of the rarer materials needed for cancer treatments, retinal implants, and automobile catalytic converters.

Here comes AstroForge. The startup, which was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Huntington Beach, California, raised $13 million in seed money from Initialized Capital and Y Combinator. On paper, its plan is both more straightforward and bizarre than previous ones. The company wants to demonstrate that it is physically feasible to refine platinum group metals in space before establishing full mining operations on an asteroid. A quarter-inch sample of material resembling an asteroid was transported into Earth’s orbit by its Brokkr-1 mission, a small satellite constructed with UK-based OrbAstro. Heat is applied to the sample until it evaporates. The platinum within it is then separated and extracted using a proprietary method.

The test is very small. But that’s practically the point. AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich stated, “This is the first time a refinery will ever go up to do in-space refining,” and even skeptics find it difficult to discount that claim. Without seeming irony, Gialich has stated that if the business is successful, it will likely be the most valuable company ever established. It’s the kind of thing that, until you look at the math, seems ridiculous. Metals worth trillions of dollars. hundreds of millions of asteroids. Thanks in large part to SpaceX’s and other companies’ efforts to improve launch economics, spacecraft now cost a fraction of what they did ten years ago. It’s possible that this decade is different and that the timing wasn’t ideal in the past.

There is, however, skepticism that merits careful consideration. According to planetary scientist Richard Binzel, who worked at MIT for 33 years, deep-space mining seems more appropriate for the 22nd century than the present. Only around 8% of near-Earth asteroids are metal-rich, especially M-type space rocks, which are essentially the remains of planets that never fully formed. The process of locating the ideal one, getting there, extracting materials, and profitably returning them is a series of challenges, each with its own unknowns. More optimistically, Kevin Cannon of the Colorado School of Mines says that you could actually supplement or replace terrestrial mining if you brought back enough of these metals. But in that sentence, “if” has a lot of weight.

With what CEO Mitch Hunter-Scullion refers to as a “Swiss Army knife approach”—creating missions adaptable enough to extract water, precious metals, or whatever else a specific customer needs—the UK-based Asteroid Mining Corporation is also working toward the same overall goal. In the context of deep-space travel, water is particularly valuable because it can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used as rocket fuel. Compared to AstroForge, it is a more patient approach. It’s still genuinely unclear if speed or patience is the best approach.

It’s difficult not to consider how many industries seemed unattainable before they didn’t as you watch all of this happen. Asteroid mining is still a risky, long-term venture that relies on unproven technologies. However, those who are making that wager are not idiots. They believe they understand why it failed because they have seen what happened in the past. They want to know now if they are correct.