The Next Trillion-Dollar Industry – Why Space Mining is Wall Street’s Ultimate Long Game

Odin, a small unmanned spacecraft, took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early on February 27, 2025. NASA was not involved in the mission. There was no live broadcast with a countdown clock on every television network, and there were no throngs of people gathered on the grass outside the visitor center. AstroForge, a California startup that spearheaded the launch, invested $6.5 million in the project. In contrast, a mid-tier tech company might spend about that on San Francisco office renovations. The destination was the eight million-kilometer-distance asteroid 2022 OB5, which was chosen as a promising target for mineral extraction following thorough analysis. Engineers believe Odin passed beyond the Moon approximately nine days after launch. They lost contact with it shortly after. The signal abruptly cut off.

That result could easily be interpreted as a joke, demonstrating that space mining is still fundamentally an intricate fantasy wrapped in language that appeals to investors. However, there is a counterargument that is worth considering, and it begins around 2002, when Elon Musk, who was thought to have run out of sensible things to do with his PayPal money, founded SpaceX.

The concept of a private company producing orbital rockets was viewed at the time with the kind of courteous skepticism that people save for things they don’t want to publicly ridicule. About twenty years later, SpaceX is launching more rockets than any government organization on Earth, and its Falcon 9, which launched Odin into orbit, is the most orbital rocket ever flown. The lesson is not that all ambitious space endeavors are successful. It’s that sometimes the most consequential ones are the ones that initially seemed the most ridiculous.

For longer than most people know, asteroid mining has been on the periphery of serious discussion. A business named Planetary Resources declared in the spring of 2012 that it intended to retrieve metals and water from near-Earth asteroids. Charles Simonyi, Ross Perot Jr., and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google were among its backers. Their combined net worths were well into the tens of billions, and they probably had enough financial advisors to tell them when something was truly a bad idea. The project was advised by James Cameron, who has spent significant parts of his own career doing things that experts said were impossible. In the end, the endeavor failed in its initial form. However, it showed that the discussion had at least partially moved beyond science fiction and that serious money was prepared to take the idea seriously.

The infrastructure is what sets this moment apart from 2012. Since SpaceX proved that reusable rockets can function at scale, the cost of traveling to space has significantly decreased. A startup can now launch a spacecraft on a Falcon 9 for the same amount of money that a medium-sized software company might spend on a marketing campaign. Previously, launch costs made asteroid prospecting missions financially absurd. AstroForge’s $6.5 million mission budget is not proof of carelessness; rather, it is proof that the fundamentals of space access have changed to the point where small businesses can now take part in discussions that were previously only available to governments and defense contractors.

Some members of the investment community believe that space mining is being handled similarly to how internet infrastructure was handled in the early 1990s; this is an idea that obviously has enormous long-term value, but the timing and business model are still genuinely unclear. Space resources are one of the higher-potential categories in McKinsey’s 2024 analysis of future economic arenas, which predicted that eighteen emerging sectors could bring in between $29 and $48 trillion by 2040. That’s the kind of number that often attaches itself to things before anyone has a complete understanding of how to construct them. The real timeline might be longer than the optimists claim. It’s also possible that the first successful asteroid extraction mission will alter the economic calculations so quickly that, looking back, all of the current estimates appear conservative.

Near-Earth asteroids contain valuable resources. Water, nickel, cobalt, and platinum-group metals are the same materials that are being extracted from mines in politically complex locations under circumstances that are drawing more and more regulatory attention. These materials are also becoming more and more contentious on Earth’s surface. More platinum could be found on an asteroid the size of a small building than has ever been extracted from the Earth’s crust in human history. Promotional materials did not create that figure. It is derived from simple geochemical analysis of the asteroid types that have already been classified and identified in orbits that are reachable from Earth.

As this industry develops, it becomes evident that failures are just as important as successes, if not more so. After losing contact with Odin, AstroForge’s founder promised to try again. This response sets this generation of space entrepreneurs apart from the promotional press releases that characterized previous waves of space enthusiasm, more than any technical detail. The infrastructure is being constructed. The missions are being flown. The program did not go silent, but the signal did. That’s typically what winning looks like in lengthy games.