Asteroid Mining Gives Companies Hope in the Search for Rare Metals

As concerns over Earth’s limited resources continue to grow, some entrepreneurs are eagerly looking beyond our planet to establish the next big business venture: asteroid mining. The prospect of setting up mining operations in space holds the potential for enticing rewards of rare metals that can’t be easily found on Earth.

However, these projects face an uphill climb. Asteroid mining missions may cost upwards of billions of dollars, and the technology they’d need to rely on requires further development. Still, several companies have envisioned ambitious plans to acquire precious resources from asteroids in the coming years. Scientists, meanwhile, are interested in another objective: mining for water and organic molecules to furnish future space missions. 

Three main types of asteroids populate space, all with varying contents and classified based on the way light reflects off their surfaces. 

The most common are C-type asteroids, made of clay and silicate rocks and darker in appearance. C-type asteroids are carbonaceous — meaning they are abundant in organic carbon — and they additionally contain water. While these asteroids aren’t the most lucrative, the presence of water and carbon could play a major role in supporting space exploration.

S-type asteroids are somewhat brighter and contain silicate and metals like iron, nickel, and cobalt. They also contain much smaller concentrations of platinum and gold, making them more economically desirable than C-type asteroids. 

The rarest among the three are M-type asteroids, which are metallic, containing a much larger concentration of iron-nickel compared to the other two asteroid types.

Read More: No One Owns Outer Space, But Could Space Mining Change That?

Several companies have already gotten a head start in preparing for asteroid mining missions. 

London-based company Asteroid Mining Corporation plans to send its SCAR-E robot to the moon in a future mission headed by Tokyo-based iSpace. The six-legged robot will trek across craters on the lunar terrain and demonstrate its potential application for asteroid mining. 

California-based company AstroForge, also throwing its hat in the ring, launched its Odin spacecraft as a payload of the IM-2 lunar mission in February 2025, hoping to fly by 2022 OB5, a near-Earth asteroid. However, the company announced in early March that it had lost communication with Odin. It will get a fresh chance with its next spacecraft, Vestri, which is slated to launch on the IM-3 lunar mission in late 2025.

Despite the high price tag of asteroid mining missions, the payoff may just be worth the staggering costs. Mining the top 10 most cost-effective asteroids — largely based on how close they are to Earth — could rake in a profit of $1.5 trillion, according to Asterank, a database keeping track of over 600,000 asteroids. 

NASA has proven that successful extraction of materials from asteroids is possible; this was most recently seen with the promising results of its OSIRIS-REx mission, which retrieved samples containing organic compounds from Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid. Scientists are also eyeing the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, which will be orbited by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft starting from 2029 to 2031. 

Near-earth asteroids will be in the limelight as space mining gains traction, yet looking to the 2030s and beyond, companies may eventually want to explore the Main Belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. These asteroids would yield more valuable resources than the ones closer to Earth, yet getting to the Main Belt will be a real challenge that can't be tackled yet.

It may be possible, though, to someday launch asteroid mining missions from Mars’ orbit, as suggested by a 2022 study in Planetary and Space Science. In this study, researchers claim that a station that has an orbit similar to Phobos, a moon of Mars, could be an ideal base of operations, potentially reducing exploration costs and granting easier access to the Main Belt.

For now, the race to mine asteroids near Earth is building tremendous speed. While the outcomes aren't certain, this could become a lucrative industry of the future; it may even start to drive companies away from deep-sea mining, potentially introducing both economic and environmental benefits.

Read More: Basic Building Blocks of Life Found on Asteroid Bennu

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• NASA. New NASA Mission to Help Us Learn How to Mine Asteroids

• Harvard International Review. Economics of the Stars: The Future of Asteroid Mining and the Global Economy

• NASA. Psyche

• Center for Astrophysics. Mars as a Base for Asteroid Exploration and Mining

• Planetary and Space Science. Phobos and Mars orbit as a base for asteroid exploration and mining

Jack Knudson is an assistant editor at Discover with a strong interest in environmental science and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University and previously interned at Recycling Today magazine.