AstroForge Raises $40M to Mine Asteroids for Platinum

AstroForge (portfolio) raised $40M to finish building a spacecraft in the next few months to rideshare on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission. “We are still very much on track to return the first amount of platinum back to Earth before the end of this decade.”

All other companies with such aspirations have failed, which always gives investors pause. But a lot has changed in the space industry since those failures, and these launches can now happen at less than a tenth of the prior cost. A National Academy of Science paper argued that the metals needed for batteries and renewable energy infrastructure could start to go up in price, “potentially delaying the clean energy transition“ and that demand for metals will force mining companies to dig in places where such metals aren’t as readily available, which comes with significant economic and environmental costs.

Asteroids in our solar system however, are full of metals needed by industry on earth, and in higher concentrations, and thus potentially easier to mine. Geopolitics are also a factor as China controls most of the platinum mines on earth.

[SpaceNews, Payload Space, Ars Technica, AstroForge Blog]