Space mining means gathering useful materials from asteroids and the Moon instead of launching everything from Earth. At first, the most valuable resource may not be gold or platinum, but water ice. It can be split into hydrogen and oxygen to produce rocket fuel in space. If spacecraft can refuel in orbit, they won’t need to carry all their fuel out of Earth’s gravity, a major savings that drives the economics of the idea. Metals and other resources may follow, but for now, the field is still largely in the prospecting stage.
What Space Mining Would Extract
The resource that makes space mining pay first is water, because it is fuel where it sits. Water ice hides in permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles and inside many asteroids. Split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you have the two ingredients of rocket propellant. Making that propellant in space, rather than launching it from the ground, is the difference between a mission that carries all its fuel and one that tops up along the way.
Metals are the longer-term prize. Some asteroids are rich in platinum-group metals, the same elements that are scarce and costly on Earth, concentrated because these bodies never melted and sorted the way a planet did. A single metal-rich asteroid could in principle hold more of these metals than has ever been mined on Earth. Turning that into a business means finding the right asteroid, reaching it, extracting the metal, and returning it at a price that beats terrestrial mining, and every one of those steps is unproven.
Helium-3 is the most speculative target. It is a light form of helium, rare on Earth but laid down in lunar soil over billions of years by the solar wind. Proposed as a clean fuel for fusion reactors, its value rests entirely on fusion power becoming practical, which has not happened. Until a working fusion plant needs it, helium-3 mining stays a possibility on paper.
The asteroid side is covered in our asteroid mining explainer, and the lunar side, from polar water ice to helium-3, in our moon mining explainer.
Why Mine in Space at All
The case for space mining rests on one stubborn fact: launching mass off Earth is expensive. Every kilogram lifted to orbit has to be pushed out of a deep gravity well, which is why rocket fuel makes up most of a launch. Anything already in space skips that cost. Water found on the Moon or an asteroid starts its life above the gravity well, so using it there is far cheaper than lifting the same water from the ground.
Propellant is the clearest example of that logic. A future network of refueling depots, stocked with propellant made from mined water, would let spacecraft launch with lighter tanks and refill on the way to the Moon, Mars, or beyond. That vision is why water tops the target list. It also explains why the early industry aims at usefulness in space rather than shipping raw material back to Earth, since returning heavy metal through the atmosphere adds cost that in-space use avoids.
The customer for that propellant, and what has actually been demonstrated, is covered in our orbital refueling explainer.
The Companies Chasing It
A handful of companies have pursued asteroid and lunar mining, and the field has already seen a full cycle of ambition and reset. Two early startups, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, raised money and drew attention in the 2010s before both wound down their asteroid-mining plans and were absorbed by other firms. Their exits cooled the sector and showed how far the technology and market still had to go.
Newer entrants have taken a leaner approach. AstroForge is developing small spacecraft to prospect and eventually extract metals from asteroids, aiming to prove the steps cheaply rather than build a large operation up front. National space agencies contribute the groundwork: NASA and others have flown sample-return missions that landed on asteroids, collected material, and brought it home, proving the flight and sampling are possible even though the goal was science rather than profit. The gap between a science sample and a commercial mine remains wide.
A company-by-company table, including the two that shut down, is in our asteroid mining companies list.
The Legal Framework
Space mining runs into a treaty written before it was possible, and the rules are still being sorted. The foundation is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, overseen by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, which says no nation may claim sovereignty over the Moon or any other celestial body. The treaty bars owning the ground. It does not clearly address whether a company may extract resources and sell them.
Two countries have moved to fill that gap in their own law. The United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act in 2015, granting US citizens the right to own resources they extract from space, while stopping short of claiming the territory. Luxembourg passed a similar law in 2017 and positioned itself as a base for space-resource companies. These national laws read the treaty as permitting extraction even though it forbids ownership of the body itself.
| Rule | What it says | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Outer Space Treaty (1967) | No nation can own a celestial body | Whether resources can be extracted and sold |
| US law (2015) | US firms own resources they extract | Whether other nations will recognize the claim |
| Luxembourg law (2017) | Grants extraction rights to its firms | Same international recognition question |
The unsettled part is international agreement. National laws bind only their own companies, and there is no global consensus that extraction is permitted or how competing claims to the same asteroid would be resolved. That legal uncertainty is a real business risk, on top of the technical ones.
The full treaty, article by article, including who has signed it, is explained in our Outer Space Treaty explainer.
Space Manufacturing: A Related but Different Business
Space mining is often mentioned alongside space manufacturing, and the two get conflated, but they are different businesses solving different problems. Mining is about extraction: pulling raw water, metal, or helium-3 out of an asteroid or the Moon, a step no company has yet done commercially, as covered above. Manufacturing is about production: taking material, often launched up from Earth rather than mined in space, and processing it into a finished product using the microgravity environment orbit provides for free.
The clearest working example is Varda Space Industries, which flies small capsules that grow pharmaceutical crystals in microgravity, then returns them to Earth for recovery. Certain drug compounds crystallize differently, and sometimes more effectively, without gravity pulling on the process, which is the specific advantage Varda’s business is built around. Unlike asteroid mining, this does not require solving deep-space extraction or transport. It only requires getting a small payload to orbit and back, a problem the launch industry has already largely solved.
That distinction matters for judging how close either business is to being real. Space manufacturing, exemplified by Varda’s operating capsules, is commercially further along today than asteroid or lunar mining, which remains at the prospecting and technology-demonstration stage. The two fields will likely stay connected in the long run, since a mature space-mining industry would eventually feed raw material into in-space manufacturing rather than shipping it back to Earth, but today they sit at very different points on the path from concept to business.
Beyond Varda: Other In-Space Manufacturers and an Open Regulatory Question
Orbital pharmaceutical research has already contributed to an approved therapy on Earth. Since 2014, Merck has flown crystal-growth experiments to the International Space Station (ISS), including microgravity crystallization work on the monoclonal antibody pembrolizumab, marketed as Keytruda. According to NASA, that microgravity research produced a more uniform crystal particle-size distribution than matched control experiments conducted on the ground. Merck applied those findings directly to its terrestrial production line. On September 19, 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a subcutaneous, injectable formulation of pembrolizumab based in part on that orbital data. The medicine itself is manufactured on Earth rather than in orbit, but the flight research directly shaped the approved clinical product.
Other biotechnology teams are testing orbital hardware to produce medical implants rather than reformulate terrestrial drugs. LambdaVision has flown nine missions to the International Space Station to develop a protein-based artificial retina implant for patients blinded by retinal degenerative disease. The production process uses layer-by-layer microgravity manufacturing to deposit thin films that settle unevenly in Earth’s gravity. The artificial retina remains in the preclinical stage, with clinical trials planned but not completed. In 2026, Auxilium Biotechnologies operated its AMP-1 orbital bioprinter aboard the station, producing tissue structures containing human liver, kidney, and cartilage cells alongside 28 nerve-repair implants. Neither the tissue structures nor the nerve-repair implants are ready for human transplantation, and clinical testing remains incomplete.
Dedicated reentry capsules are also attracting competing hardware builders seeking to industrialize return cargo beyond Varda Space Industries. Outpost is developing CarryAll, a shipping-container-sized reentry vehicle designed to move cargo to and from low Earth orbit. Instead of custom-building every spacecraft for a single payload, Outpost designs standardized manufacturing modules, called Space Factories, that mount inside the CarryAll hull and scale to customer specifications. Outpost lists pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, crystals, and optical fiber among its target materials. The company plans its first orbital demonstration mission for 2028, targeting the manufacture of a metal-fluoride optical fiber product it calls StarFiber.
These hardware developments leave an open regulatory question: how health authorities will oversee medicines and medical devices produced entirely outside terrestrial borders. As of September 2026, the United Kingdom has established a more formalized regulatory posture on space-manufactured therapies than the United States. In March 2026, the UK Space Agency, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Regulatory Innovation Office, and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) released guidance, case studies, and a regulatory sandbox designed to trace an explicit path from microgravity research to patient access, with a joint regulatory roadmap scheduled for autumn 2026. The United States maintains no dedicated, unified framework specific to orbital drug manufacturing. Products returning from orbit must navigate the standard general drug and device review channels administered by the FDA.
How Feasible Space Mining Is Today
Space mining is plausible in physics and unproven in practice, and the gap is the whole story. No company has extracted and sold resources from an asteroid. Robotic missions have proven that reaching a small body, landing, and returning a sample can be done, which is a real milestone, yet a science sample weighs grams and a mine must move tonnes at a profit. Between those two lies the hard part: cheap heavy-lift, autonomous extraction in deep space, and a buyer willing to pay.
Space mining also comes up on lists of speculative space-tech investment themes, mostly because so little of it has reached revenue yet. AstroForge, the asteroid-mining startup covered above, remains privately held, so there is no public stock tied directly to asteroid extraction today. Our Varda stock page covers whether that related space-manufacturing company can currently be bought as a stock. Watching this corner of the sector today mostly means tracking technology milestones rather than trading an existing space-mining stock.
Water for propellant is the likeliest first business because it is used in space and skips a return trip. Metals and helium-3 depend on markets and technologies that do not yet exist. Space mining also connects to other commercial-space ambitions, from the growing business of space tourism to the far-future engineering of a space elevator, an orbital space-based solar power station, or a proposed space-based data center. To judge whether space mining is near, watch the prospecting missions from companies like AstroForge and the water-extraction demonstrations on the Moon, since those steps would prove the industry real long before any headline about a trillion-dollar asteroid.