There Are Asteroids Worth More Than Earth's Entire Economy. A Startup Just Finished Building the Ship to Go Get Them.

One rock. Floating silently between Mars and Jupiter. Packed with enough platinum, nickel, and gold to make every billionaire on Earth look poor.

We haven't touched it. We haven't mined a single gram of it. For the entire history of human civilization, we've stared at our feet — at the soil, the sea, the crust beneath our cities — for everything we need to build the modern world.

That changes this year.

A California startup called AstroForge just completed assembly of its DeepSpace-2 spacecraft — the most ambitious commercial mining vehicle ever built — and it's scheduled to launch before 2027. Not to take photos. Not to do a flyby. To go to an asteroid and figure out how to extract metal from it.

If it works, the economics of Earth will never be the same.

That number feels fake. It isn't. NASA sent its own spacecraft, also called Psyche, to study the asteroid in October 2023. It's not a rocky body. It's a metal world — a 232-kilometer-wide sphere of nickel, iron, gold, and platinum-group metals. Scientists believe it's the exposed core of a protoplanet that was stripped of its rocky shell by ancient collisions billions of years ago.

It's essentially the inside of a planet. Just... floating out there.

The Company That Already Tried Once — And Failed

AstroForge isn't naive. They've been here before.

In January 2023, they launched Brokkr-1 — a small spacecraft designed to test asteroid-refining technology in orbit. The mission didn't go as planned. The spacecraft struggled with its objectives and the company didn't get the results they needed. Most startups fold after something like that.

AstroForge went back to the drawing board. They spent over a year rebuilding, incorporating every lesson from the failure, and in June 2026 they announced that DeepSpace-2 is complete. Ready to fly. Smarter than its predecessor.

The target for DeepSpace-2 hasn't been publicly confirmed, but the mission profile is bold: rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, analyze its composition, and test extraction hardware. Not in a lab. In space. On an actual rock hurtling through the void at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

Why Asteroids. Why Now.

Platinum is worth about $30,000 per kilogram on Earth. It's used in catalytic converters, cancer drugs, fuel cells, and the microchips in the phone you're reading this on. It's also incredibly rare on Earth — because almost all of it sank to the planet's core when Earth was still molten, billions of years ago.

The platinum we mine today? It arrived later. Carried here by asteroid impacts. The entire surface supply of platinum on Earth came from space rocks. Which means the asteroids themselves are swimming in the stuff.

A single metallic asteroid the size of a house could contain more platinum than humanity has mined in all of recorded history.

That's not a metaphor. That's geochemistry. And it's why investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like AstroForge, Planetary Resources (which failed in 2018), and Deep Space Industries (acquired in 2019). The field has a graveyard. But the physics hasn't changed — the metal is still up there.

You can follow Earth's near-asteroid traffic in real time on SkyLens's live tracker, where approach data for known near-Earth objects updates continuously from public NASA data.

The Law Hasn't Caught Up to the Physics

Here's the part nobody talks about.

Who owns an asteroid?

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty — signed by the US, USSR, and most of the world — says no nation can claim sovereignty over a celestial body. But it says nothing about resources. In 2015, the US passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which lets American companies own whatever they extract from space. Luxembourg passed similar legislation in 2017.

But China, Russia, and most of the developing world have signed nothing of the sort. If AstroForge returns with a payload of asteroid platinum, there is no established international legal framework to govern what happens next. It would be the first time in history a private company extracted natural resources from a celestial body, and the treaties weren't written for that moment.

NASA Is Already There (Sort Of)

AstroForge isn't alone in the neighborhood. NASA's own Psyche spacecraft — launched in October 2023, cruising toward its target at 26 km/s — will arrive at asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029. Its mission is scientific, not extractive. But the data it sends back will be the most detailed compositional map of a metallic asteroid ever assembled.

That map will be publicly available. Which means AstroForge — and every other mining startup — will know exactly what's in the most valuable rock in the solar system before they build their next ship.

What Happens If It Actually Works

The optimistic version: asteroid mining becomes the oil industry of the 22nd century. Rare earth metals used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and semiconductors stop being geopolitically sensitive — because there's effectively an infinite supply, floating overhead, waiting.

The pessimistic version: the economics never work. The energy cost of traveling to an asteroid, extracting material, and returning it to Earth or orbit exceeds the value of what you bring back. Every company that tried this before AstroForge collapsed. The graveyard of asteroid mining companies is longer than the list of survivors.

The realistic version: the first missions won't be profitable. They'll be proof-of-concept. The real gold rush — if it comes — is a generation away. But someone has to go first. Someone has to build the ship, fly it to the rock, and come back with data.

AstroForge is building that ship. Right now. In a warehouse in California.

The timeline of all known near-Earth objects — including the ones AstroForge might eventually target — is tracked in real time on SkyLens. Every asteroid approach visible on the dashboard represents not just a potential threat to monitor, but a potential resource deposit worth more than any mine on Earth.

That last number is still zero. For now. Read more about how we track near-Earth objects — and what we know about what's inside them — in our orbital science explainer.

Sources: AstroForge (press releases, SpaceNews June 2026), NASA Psyche Mission, US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015, Outer Space Treaty 1967, NASA CNEOS near-Earth object database.