Near-Earth Asteroids Could Be the Future of Resource Mining

Neil deGrasse Tyson once stated that the world’s first trillionaire will be the person who takes up intergalactic mining. Indeed, according to some calculations, a single asteroid could earn you millions, billions, or even trillions in profit.

It is perhaps hardly surprising. As world demand for metals and other precious resources multiplies and issues around supply chains abound, the hunt for new sources intensifies — and space looks like a promising frontier. Asteroids, in particular, can offer a rich reservoir of metals essential for building electric components. The asteroid Psyche, for instance, is a 64,000 square miles colossus thought to be 30 to 60 percent metal. But there’s just a small catch: distance.

Asteroids like Psyche sit far away in the Main Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, making transport costs prohibitive and current technology limiting. While there have been missions to collect sample material from asteroids, there haven’t been many, and they come at a cost of millions in return for small quantities. But there are objects much closer to Earth that some researchers believe could, if not exactly mined themselves, provide a testing ground for future mining operations in space.

Quasi-Moons, Mini-Moons, And Near-Earth Objects

Earlier this month, astronomers spotted a quasi-moon called 2025 PN7 — an asteroid from the Arjuna asteroid belt that, from a certain angle, looks like a satellite but is really just joining us in our orbit for a short while (128 years, according to current predictions).

2025 PN7 is not alone. It is one of more than 100 objects currently engaged in an Earth-like orbit, circling the sun alongside our planet, for differing amounts of time. Kamo‘oalewa, another asteroid, is locked in for a period of 381 years. Then, there are those — relatively few and far between — that become even more entangled in Earth’s movements, becoming “mini-moons” temporarily caught up in our orbit.

Indeed, the same authors published a paper last year describing the asteroid (2024 PT5), which became a “mini-moon” for two months before leaving again. Whether it was truly a mini-moon or not has been debated.

A Test Run?

Some astronomers argue that these short-lived companions could provide mining opportunities — or, at the very least, offer space for a dry run. In 2018, a team of international researchers published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, suggesting minimoons could — among other things — provide opportunities for “evaluating in-situ resource utilization techniques on asteroidal material.”

They continued to say: “From a technological and commercial perspective, they provide an ideal opportunity for…establishing the feasibility of asteroid mining technologies for future commercial applications.”

In a separate study, published in 2021, researchers identified which of the 20,000-plus known Near-Earth asteroids would be most suitable for water and non-water resource mining, enabling “otherwise unaffordable missions”.

Ed Bloomer, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, says objects like minimoons and quasi-moons could be interesting targets as “proof of concept.”

“The closer the thing is, generally speaking, the easier and the more promising that might be — even just as a test bed for technology,” he explains, comparing it to doing a “pre-driving test by driving around the car park.”

But when it comes to mining on a commercial level, Bloomer believes we are a long way off.

“At the moment, you'd have to invest a lot to get a tiny, tiny, tiny return,” Bloomer says.

And it is not just the cost, but the leap in technology that would be required.

“We’ve sent things to asteroids. We’ve sent things to comets. We’ve even had sample returns. In terms of actual mining itself, as opposed to just grabbing the material, that’s really difficult. We have never done that,” Bloomer adds.

Does he see it happening in his lifetime? “There’s so many challenges. I’m not sure I would bet on it,” Bloomer says.

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