Asteroid mining

node

The oldest and least substantiated of the proposed space industries. Its promotional form quotes the notional metal content of a single asteroid at figures in the quintillions of dollars, which is a category error: the valuation multiplies mass by a terrestrial spot price that would not survive the delivery of that mass. Two companies raised significant capital on the proposition in the 2010s — Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries — and both were sold for their engineering assets without ever prospecting an asteroid. A later attempt, AstroForge, flew a demonstration payload in 2023 and a deep-space spacecraft named Odin in February 2025 with which contact was not successfully established. The engineering case for extracting water rather than metals, to make propellant in space and avoid lifting it from Earth, is more coherent but depends on a cislunar market for propellant that does not yet exist. The honest present position is that no material has been commercially extracted from any asteroid, no customer has contracted for any, and the sample-return missions that have visited asteroids — scientific missions returning grams — are the entire extent of demonstrated capability. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.