Where Are My Asteroid Mines?

Bored with low Earth orbit

Last week, standing not too far from Kennedy Space Center, I told a crowd of space leaders something that’s been weighing on me: I’m bored by the space program. By that, I mean I’m bored with low Earth orbit.

Thirty years ago, I walked into my new NASA job and declared that we had to darken the skies with small affordable satellites, commoditize launch, and get the government out of Earth orbit. The agency and the private sector succeeded in doing this, but then, we stopped.

SpaceX solved cheap launch, and still, the entire commercial space economy is largely one thing: communications (along with some imagery and positioning services). We keep launching more satellites, with better bandwidth and the same business model. A “single note band,” as I call it. We have the physics figured out. We have the technology. We have the capital. Yet somehow, in 2025, there’s virtually no manufacturing happening in space. No asteroid mining. No wealth being extracted from the solar system and brought back to Earth.

We haven’t seen doodly squat from space!

The question nobody’s asking is simple, but it’s an important one. What do we want to do in space?

• Consider the platinum group metals: platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium, ruthenium. A $40B+ annual market at ~$50,000/kilogram, the PGMs mostly come from one place: South Africa, which controls ~75% of global reserves.
• There are obvious problems here: depths often exceed 3,000 meters, operations are 60% loss-making, and the number of operational shafts has collapsed from 81 to 53 in the last two decades. Plus, it’s a geopolitical vulnerability dressed up as a mining operation.
• Now, consider near-Earth asteroids. When the solar system formed, heavy metals sank to planetary cores. On Earth, platinum lies thousands of feet down. But asteroids are unformed planets — same composition, with PGMs accessible at the surface.
• It requires less energy to reach some of these asteroids than the Moon. With missions like OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2, we have proved that the technical concept works.

Commercial asteroid mining is viable. Hard? Sure. Full of challenges? You bet. But we can do it.

The ISS legacy, and the manufacturing opportunity ahead of us

The ISS has operated flawlessly, despite Americans and Russians sharing a tin can in space for a quarter-century while their militaries were pointing weapons at each other. And the ISS has shown us something fundamental: that the absence of gravity enables manufacturing that’s physically impossible on Earth.

• We’ve spent 25 years proving that microgravity eliminates the physics constraints that plague terrestrial production. No sedimentation, no convection, no buoyancy-driven separation…just perfect crystallization.
• We’ve run hundreds semiconductor experiments, and produced six-inch sub-2nm gallium arsenide wafers with crystalline perfection impossible on Earth, enabling defense applications previously thought theoretical.
• ZBLAN optical fiber manufactured in space transmits 10-100× better than terrestrial silica (and it would sell at a significant premium).
• Merck crystallized Keytruda in space. Varda has flown three missions returning pharmaceutical crystals to Earth, with mission costs dropping from $12M to a projected $2.5M through capsule reuse.
• Spaceplanes offers an alternative: gentle Earth return with negligible G-forces, enabling a quieter microgravity laboratory.

The physics work, and the economics can pencil. And that’s why I think that the ISS needs to come down soon — not because it failed, but because it succeeded so completely that we’ve become complacent. We use it as an excuse to avoid building the distributed commercial platforms that should replace it. We’ve grown dependent on a government lab rather than investing in an Earth-returning economy.

Reaching, not Incrementing

I’d like to congratulate my successor, Jared Isaacman, on his renomination as NASA Administrator. Jared gets what needs to happen. Commercial operators need to take over LEO. NASA needs to facilitate that transition, then go beyond it.

To this, I add: it’s time to diversify beyond a services-based LEO economy! We need serious commercial efforts to make and return products from space.

The infrastructure is already coming together. More capsules are returning to Earth. And the downmass bottleneck (9-12 metric tons annually with Dragon) will ease as reentry technologies proliferate.

Here’s what I believe needs to happen: An eight-year sprint from 2025 to 2033.

Not 15 years of planning or 20 years of incremental progress. Eight years.

Why do I know that eight years can work?

• In 1955, Eisenhower asked for an ICBM in eight years. We delivered Delta, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman.
• In 1961, JFK asked for the Moon in eight years. We landed and returned safely.
• Both efforts produced cascading technologies (e.g. semiconductors), materials, and manufacturing processes that became foundational to the American economy.

America does best when it reaches, not increments. We need to reach again. Out of Earth orbit. Towards asteroids. Towards manufacturing. Towards a space-faring future and Earth-returning economy.