Space Mining’s Best Prospect Is VC Money, Not Asteroid Gold

A small slice of Piguem Nonralta sits on Matt Gialich’s desk. The metallic ball, roughly the size of a doughnut hole, was discovered in Argentina in 1576 when Spanish colonizers went searching for iron ore and stumbled on the scattered remnants of a 4,000-year-old meteor shower. Piguem Nonralta, the name the Indigenous population gave to the asteroid craters, roughly translates to “field of heaven.” Gialich, the 37-year-old entrepreneur at the helm of a startup seeking to mine asteroids, keeps the ancient nugget at his office in Pasadena, California, as a reminder of his company’s celestial ambitions.

“These are very, very lucrative sources of ore,” Gialich says, holding the orbital tchotchke to eye level. The meteors contain iron and traces of elements such as iridium, one of the rarest minerals in the Earth’s crust. His company, AstroForge Inc., is among several startups that have studied the metallic composition of fallen asteroids and now want to mine them in outer space.