Topline
SpaceX may be best known for launching reusable rockets, and less for the orbital economy it hopes to enable, but there’s another seemingly futuristic activity even fewer investors are talking up — asteroid mining. As mentioned in its IPO filing on May 20, asteroid mining is currently being pursued more seriously than ever by several companies that are now moving beyond paper studies, with AstroForge having flown a deep-space asteroid-imaging mission and others developing or funding demonstration hardware for future asteroid-resource missions. The SpaceX filing does not make asteroid mining imminent, but it does put the idea inside the commercial strategy of the world’s most closely watched private space company. Here’s everything you need to know about asteroid mining, a concept that until recently remained largely theoretical as a business.
SpaceX’s IPO filing mentions asteroid mining as a potential long-term market as experts say cheaper launches and water resources could make space mining more realistic. According to research published in 2025 by Spherical Insights & Consulting, the global asteroid mining market size is projected to grow from $2.12 billion in 2024 to $11.3 billion by 2035. (Artist’s impression)
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Key Facts
According to research published in 2025 by Spherical Insights & Consulting, the global asteroid mining market size is projected to grow from $2.12 billion in 2024 to $11.3 billion by 2035.
SpaceX is framing asteroid mining as infrastructure, not treasure hunting. The filing links asteroid resources to space-based industry and the goal of reducing mass launched from Earth.
Water — found in carbonaceous asteroids — may matter before platinum-group metals. Water can support life support, oxygen production and rocket fuel, making it more useful in space than platinum shipped back to Earth.
Asteroid mining is expensive. Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa-2 mission returned samples from Ryugu in 2020, costing around $150 million, while NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned samples from Bennu in 2023, cost around $1.16 billion.
Asteroid mining in SpaceX’s IPO
“We plan to pursue asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, providing abundant raw materials for space-based industries and reducing the need to launch mass from Earth,” SpaceX’s IPO filing states. That’s an unusually bold claim for a financial document. It goes further, naming “platinum-group metals, rare earth elements, nickel, cobalt, iron and water” as resources that could one day support a space-based industrial economy. The filing argues that reusable launch, autonomous robotics and in-situ processing could make asteroid resources more accessible over time. That language is striking, but the idea is simple enough: instead of launching every ounce of metal, water and fuel from Earth, future space industries could use materials already in space. Despite renewed momentum, asteroid mining remains a long-term, high-risk business. “It’s a difficult business model,” said Dr. Nick Moskovitz of Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, in an interview ahead of International Asteroid Day, a United Nations-recognized global awareness campaign about asteroid risks and opportunities, on June 30. “It’s going to cost you billions, and you might see profit 50 years from now.”
Why SpaceX Changes The Asteroid Mining Equation
SpaceX’s role may not be to mine the first asteroid itself, but to lower launch costs. With its Falcon 9 reusable rocket and, in time, with the much larger Starship, which SpaceX says is designed to carry more than 100 metric tons to orbit, space is more accessible now than it ever has been. That matters because asteroid mining requires repeated testing: prospecting, rendezvous, autonomous navigation, sample analysis, extraction and processing. Each step needs hardware in space.
After a flurry of activity in the early 2010s — notably by Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries — a second wave has emerged of companies interested in turning off-Earth resources into a business. “What has happened in the past is that start-ups attract a big investor, make a lot of progress, and then they run out of their seed funding and go away,” said Moskovitz.
Reality Of Asteroid Mining
“It’s not like mining on the Earth, where we seek out ore that’s concentrated,” said Moskovitz. “The geology of asteroids is very different.” Valuable materials may be dispersed in small grains at parts-per-million or parts-per-billion levels. Extracting and refining them in space remain major unresolved problems. Microgravity is another obstacle. A spacecraft cannot mine an asteroid the way equipment mines on Earth; it must anchor, hover, or use specialized sampling and capture systems. It’s also about availability. Broadly speaking, resource discussions often focus on three categories of asteroid — water-rich carbonaceous asteroids, metallic asteroids rich in iron-nickel alloys, and stony asteroids that contain iron, nickel, and magnesium. However, which ones are available depends on which have orbital paths that bring them close to Earth.
New Wave Of Asteroid Mining Startups
The current wave is trying to avoid the same fate by attempting to fly missions earlier and focusing on practical milestones. Huntington Beach, California-based AstroForge is focusing on mining platinum-group metals. Its Odin mission launched on February 26, 2025, to image asteroid 2022 OB5 (although it suffered a solar-array failure after launch), and the company says its DeepSpace-2 mission is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026 to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid. TransAstra, based in Los Angeles, has proposed capturing a near-Earth asteroid and moving it into a stable orbit for processing, potentially with a rendezvous in 2028 or 2029 if funded. A third player, Karman+ from Colorado, says it aims to mine asteroids to supply affordable natural resources for the space economy. According to Payload, it raised $20 million in seed financing for its first demo mission, High Frontier, which is targeted for February 2027. “The thing that’s different this go-around is that we’re actually seeing companies get to space,” said Moskovitz. “We’re actually seeing companies launch platforms to test some of the technology needed to do asteroid mining.”
Water Could Be The First Asteroid Resource Economy
The SpaceX filing highlights metals, rare earth elements and water. Moskovitz argues that water may be the most realistic first resource. “I think where we will see asteroid mining take off, maybe within our lifetimes, is with the utilization of water,” he said. Some asteroid types may contain significant water locked in rock. If extracted, that water could support astronauts, provide oxygen and be split into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. “It’s all about being able to produce things in space rather than having to launch everything with you,” Moskovitz said. Although it’s often painted as a precious-metals rush, asteroid mining may first look more like the creation of fuel depots, life-support stations and supply chains for spacecraft.