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Why asteroid mining will never underwrite a gold rush
By Lachlan Brown
Space Daily, Singapore
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Every few years asteroid mining returns to the headlines as a trillion-dollar gold rush waiting to happen, usually attached to a single staggering number about how much some metal-rich rock is theoretically worth. It is a genuinely exciting idea. It is also one where the economics tend to run in the opposite direction to the pitch.
I am a writer with a long interest in this beat, not an engineer or an economist, so take this as a careful reading of the material rather than expert testimony. The short version is that the case for asteroid mining is real, but almost nothing like the version that gets sold.
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This has been tried before, with serious money behind it. In the 2010s two well-funded companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, set out to mine asteroids and drew backing from high-profile investors.
Neither mined anything. As CNBC reported, both ran short of the money needed to cover enormous development costs and were absorbed by other companies by 2018 and 2019, one of them pivoting to blockchain. The lesson was not that the resources are not there. It was that the timelines are long, the capital required is vast, and investors ran out of patience long before anyone reached an asteroid. ...
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