Six years ago, sci-fi author Daniel Suarez published Delta V, a novel about a group of commercial pioneers going to space to mine asteroids to transform humanity from an Earth-bound species to a space-faring one. And while the idea has captivated writers of futuristic fiction for decades, it’s now becoming a reality, and a potentially highly valuable business proposition.
The rise of commercial space companies driving down the costs of launch and hardware is fuelling a new industrial revolution in near-Earth orbit, with satellite operators making up more than 70% of a market that’s expected to be worth $1.8tn by 2035.
It’s companies like these that will become the obvious first customers for Karman+ — an asteroid mining startup founded by two entrepreneurs who are bold enough to take a vision from the pages of sci-fi, and chart a viable path to building a significant business around it. It plans to launch technology into space that can land on asteroids, and then construct unmanned and autonomous mining stations to extract valuable resources, before sending them back to earth’s orbit.
It could also become a key player as humanity prepares to explore deeper into our solar system, by providing both satellites and spaceships with fuel and other raw materials extracted in space. If it succeeds in doing so, it will enable a new space economy that’s more cost efficient — most importantly — less damaging to our planet than one that’s powered by resources found on Earth.
The “Delta V” early opportunity
As well as giving the title to Suarez’s novel, delta V is a term used in physics to describe a change in velocity of an object that, in the context of space exploration, serves as a measure of how much effort is required to maneuver or change the trajectory of a craft.
By extracting fuel sources from asteroids, and delivering them back into near-earth orbit, Karman+ can begin generating significant revenues by offering “delta V as a service” to satellite operators, allowing them to more affordably and sustainably maneuver.
Satellites are legally required to de-orbit when they run out of fuel, and need resupplying with propellant or an external “nudge” to extend their lifespan. When we’re talking about some of the most valuable satellites, which can cost up to $500m to build and launch, extending their effective lifespan by even a few more years represents a big opportunity, with the market for satellite refueling set to exceed $4bn per year by 2030, according to Karman+’s calculations.
To serve this need, Karman+’s autonomous mining stations will extract valuable resources found in asteroid regolith — the loose surface layer that contains things like metals, minerals and frozen water — and send loaded “tugs” back to earth’s near-orbit, processing the raw materials on the way.
Providing spacecraft with fuel and materials from asteroids, rather than sending them into orbit from here, will require far less energy than it takes to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, while also minimising the environmental impact of extracting resources from our own planet.
The interplanetary gas station
These kinds of savings will grow by orders of magnitude as Karman+ scales up the quantities of matter it can bring back to orbit from asteroids. Larger payloads will make its refuelling platform useful to companies and space agencies planning missions to the moon, Mars, or further afield.
There are some early-stage in-orbit refuelling projects currently in development, but these tend to be associated with military and defence use, and aren’t available for many commercial applications to use. If Karman+ can succeed in scaling up its mining, processing, and delivery platform, there are parallels here with the early oil and gas industry, when JD Rockerfeller’s Standard Oil put a gas station in every town, enabling the mass produced car industry to take off.
Hacker mindset
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have shown that, when you take the hacker mindset and apply it to space, you can rapidly improve on legacy technology that’s been used by national space agencies for decades. We’ve seen this with innovations like the SpaceX Raptor engine — which is more powerful than NASA equivalents while also significantly bringing down launch costs — but there’s still a lot of room to innovate in the surrounding ecosystem.
As Karman+ builds its mining and tug technology, it will develop proprietary components that it can also provide to other space companies. It’s an attractive market to disrupt for the entrepreneurially minded because existing space-ready equipment, which has to be highly specialised to operate in a vacuum, tends to be highly expensive due to low sales volumes and generally suffers from innovation inertia.
Why this team can do it
All of the above is clearly going to take some impressive feats of technical skill and company building to achieve. Karman+ has assembled a team of scientists and engineers with experience from across the space industry, coming from the likes of NASA, Airbus, Lockheed Martin and SpaceX, as well as other innovative young space companies like Blue Canyon Technologies.
This mix of industry and startup experience is harnessed by two founders with enough guts to go after such an ambitious mission, and enough scar tissue to know what it takes to actually scale a company.
Karman+ CEO Teun van den Dries previously cofounded GeoPhy — an AI analytics platform for the real estate market that relied on satellite data which he sold to Walker & Dunlop in 2022. This time he wants to go bigger, and is now building a company with a mission to break the “planetary boundary” paradigm — the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate on Earth — by moving manufacturing and resource extraction off-planet.
He’s joined by former GeoPhy senior data scientist Daynan Crull, who’s also worked on complex data and policy problems for the World Bank and the city of New York, where he worked on the Hurricane Sandy recovery effort.
Like the early internet
I like that Teun and Daynan are healthily skeptical about their enormous undertaking.
They have disassembled the sci-fi vision behind Karman+ into byte sized steps, led from first principles, asking “can this actually be done?” at every step of the way.
By harnessing lessons learnt from recent academic and commercial space missions, making use of advances in AI to take on big engineering challenges around building autonomous systems, and building a stellar team, the answers to this core question are increasingly “yes”.
There are other companies trying to build companies around mining in space, many targeting resource extraction on the Moon, which will require far more energy expenditure to exit lunar gravity. Others are looking at asteroid mining purely for bringing valuables back to Earth. By building an asteroid resource extraction platform for in-space use cases, Karman+ will be closer to its in-orbit customers and able to provide a more feasible service, sooner.
There are parallels here too with the early internet, when in the 90s startups had to raise millions of dollars to buy Sun servers and Oracle databases, just to get a simple web shop online. Compare this to the fractional cost of cloud computing today, that’s allowed smaller players to scale digital products for $20/month, instead of $2m up front.
By allowing companies to access what they need in orbit, Karman+ is building the enabling layer for the space industry to be built on. Plural is proud to be backing a company with ambition on this scale, that’s inspired by the kinds of sci-fi ideas found in Suarez’s novel Delta V, but made viable by the “delta V as a service” business model that has real value for a wave of new businesses here on Earth.
PS: Thanks, Salar for nudging Teun and me to have a call back in August.