Karman+

Karman+ intends to send a small spacecraft to a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid, land on it, dig, and bring back kilograms of material. The product is water: extracted from the asteroid, used as propellant directly or split into hydrogen and oxygen, and sold to spacecraft already in orbit that would otherwise need their fuel launched from the bottom of Earth's gravity well.

The company's argument is about cost rather than technology. Missions of this kind have been flagship science programmes costing around a billion dollars, and Karman+ contends that autonomous optical navigation plus modified commercial components brings a private, repeatable version in under ten million. Nothing about the destination is novel. The claim is entirely about the price.

Nothing has been built or flown. There is no hardware in space, no customer, no revenue and no contract, and every hard step is still ahead. Excavation in near-zero gravity has never been attempted: Hayabusa, Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx all made brief touch-and-go grabs measured in grams, and Bennu's surface proved so loose it nearly swallowed the OSIRIS-REx sampler. Extracting water from carbonaceous regolith, storing it for months in deep space and transferring it to a customer are unproven at any scale. The spiral escape from low orbit under solar electric power also means months crossing the Van Allen belts, a radiation problem for exactly the commercial avionics the cost argument rests on. The first mission has already slipped a year while the company's own website still advertises 2026. Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries both raised serious money on a similar premise and were absorbed without mining anything.