A startup wants to mine minerals in space

The company AstroForge plans to launch a vehicle into space this year, the mission of which is to take high-quality images of an asteroid that may consist entirely of useful metals. The company does not disclose what kind of asteroid it is because it plans to extract minerals from it in the future for their subsequent use on Earth. It is not yet known when the project will launch, but the creators have already managed to attract $13 million in investments, CNN reports .

According to the plan, the company should put on rails the production of processing stations that will collect minerals from asteroids in space, process them and send them back to Earth.

Metal reserves on Earth are depleting. The company's scientists and creators believe that asteroids that formed more than 4.5 billion years ago contain or are made entirely of materials that may soon not be left on Earth.

In April 2023, the company was already sending a device called Brokkr-1. It consisted of a small satellite and a processing station the size of two loaves of bread. The company loaded the device with a material similar in composition to an asteroid and sent it into space to see if it could do its job in a vacuum: crushing asteroids to extract minerals from them.

Many countries such as China, USA, Japan and the UAE are seriously considering the possibility of mining in space. This is largely due to the fact that SpaceX, with its developments, has made space operations much less expensive. NASA and JAXA, Japan's aerospace agency, have already retrieved asteroid samples and returned them to Earth. China has a similar mission planned for 2025, and the UAE for 2028.

There were already attempts to launch such missions in the 2010s, but they failed. Dan Britt, director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Science at the University of Florida, states: “I guess one might wonder if [people] are completely crazy to do this. The answer will be: it’s too early to say, but no, not definitively.”

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