The Space Gold Rush: Commercial Endeavors, Great-Power Competition and Resource Security
· By Diego Guerra ·
The next gold rush may not happen on Earth. A growing number of private companies is betting that resources in space, from water on the Moon to metals on asteroids, could power a future, off-planet economy while also supporting industries back on Earth. But if space resources do become valuable and strategically relevant, a fundamental question follows: How to ensure that a single actor cannot disrupt or control access to them?
Commercial Space Endeavors
The exploitation of space resources has been on humankind’s bucket list since shortly after exploration of the final frontier began. Recent years, however, have seen a flourishing of daring private ventures that spearhead technologies and business cases revolving around the extracting, processing, and using, on Earth or in space, resources such as rare earth elements, helium-3, regolith and any water found on the Moon. Other resources that sparked similar initiatives include valuable metals and water discovered on asteroids, and solar power that can be harnessed in Earth orbit for space-based AI data centers. Companies involved in these ventures have benefited from dramatically lower costs of accessing space in recent decades, down from $50,000 to less than $2,000 per kilogram for low earth orbit. These firms have also gained from expanding infrastructure and national legislation supporting space activities, and from the potential growth of a sizable space-based economy. For example, the lunar economy alone could be worth $127 billion by 2050.
No company has yet to demonstrate successful space resource extraction, let alone profit from it, and some question if space resources will ever be economically and strategically relevant to Earth. But the race is on. One could broadly categorize space resource exploitation in two groups: Space Resources for Earth Economy, and Space Resources for the In-Space Economy.
Space Resources for Earth Economy are extracted from space with the intent of bringing them to Earth for terrestrial industries and markets. Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are fundamental for manufacturing almost every high-tech product with applications ranging from consumer electronics to defense. They are, despite their name, abundant on Earth, but their extraction and processing are difficult and costly given their dispersed nature (the real reason for their moniker), with significant environmental and social impact, and often low economic profits. REE extraction and processing sites on Earth are located in just a few regions. China had 70% of the world's REE production in 2024, far ahead of the United States (12%), Myanmar (8%) and Australia (3%). This adds a geopolitical layer of complexity to economic considerations, heightening interest in the Moon. Mining REEs there overcomes geographical limitations and direct environmental burden on Earth.
Helium-3 is an isotope of helium that, unlike RREs, has very limited quantities on Earth, but it is expected to be abundant on the Moon and could serve as fuel for advanced fusion reactors if a commercially viable fusion system were developed. Unlike helium-3, Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) already have a current business case on Earth: They are strategically and economically valuable, with market prices often exceeding thousands of dollars per ounce (tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram), and demand for them currently exceeds supply. Thus, it comes down to whether PGMs can be mined on asteroids and brought back to Earth with a price point that is competitive on the market with respect to PGM mined on Earth. The same holds true for exploiting solar power for space-based AI data centers to support Earth business: High demand for more energy-efficient centers exists, which makes for a strong business case if the cost of space operations can be contained.
Space Resources for the In-Space Economy are resources that are extracted and used entirely beyond Earth. In-situ space resource utilization refers to the extraction, processing, and usage of materials completely on site. Examples include building and supplying a lunar base or servicing orbiting spacecraft. The situation is somewhat the opposite compared to space resources for the Earth economy: Using materials obtained directly in space is expected to be far cheaper than launching them from Earth. However, the needed sizable in-space market, which would support a substantial lunar economy or in-space servicing, does not exist yet.
But that has not stopped companies from betting that one will soon emerge. In-situ processing of lunar regolith could generate oxygen, water, construction materials, and fuel needed for activities on the Moon. Compact nuclear reactors there could also provide reliable energy sources for lunar surface operations, an idea that the Chinese, Russian and U.S. governments are already pursuing. Further afield, mining water on asteroids could produce oxygen and hydrogen to make and supply propellant to spacecraft already in space.
Great-Power Competition in Space
Throughout human history, exploitation has often followed exploration. The desire to open new navigation routes or access untapped resources in the continuous struggle among civilizations to secure energy and raw materials to ensure economic prosperity, societal stability, and military supremacy often drove exploration. Profitability subsequently enabled self-sustaining, economic exploitation.
Private entities have played a prominent role in both processes for centuries. Joint-stock companies, for example, emerged 500 years ago during Europe’s “Age of Exploration”, when private investors pooled capital to finance exploration and trade ventures. This business model allowed for risk- and profit-sharing and advanced national interests to create empires.
The Great-Power Competition, the strategic competition between major powers, especially in the space domain with a new race to the Moon, is on the news headlines again after more than thirty years of post-cold war transition. Now, the United States and China compete in a modern twist on the cold-war of the past century with a strong economic dimension hotter than ever between the two powers. Aggressive tariffs levied by the United States in 2025 were promptly reciprocated by China with restrictions on critical material exports to the U.S. Moreover, economic “battlefields“ also encompass the increasing development of strong economic ties between China and many countries in Africa, South America, and Central Asia, some of them rich in natural resources.
The role of private space companies in this rivalry is of growing significance as commercial crewed and uncrewed lunar landers, rovers, and asteroid mining spacecraft increasingly take the first steps toward making private space mining possible. Adding complexity to this post-cold war geopolitical jigsaw, Middle-powers, too, are becoming involved as they establish their own space programs. Brazil, India, and UAE have done so, as have other Middle East and African nations.
Space Resource Governance
In 1959, 12 nations were the initial signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, an agreement to prevent territorial claims on the continent despite its previous legal classification as terra nullius (nobody’s land). The term was used to describe territory not under the sovereignty of any state, and it was famously applied to justify colonial occupation of inhabited lands. The signatories to the Antarctic Treaty were convinced that the continent lacked significant, profitable natural resources and concluded that no fight over snow and ice was worthwhile. Moreover, with the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection, commercial mining and oil exploration were banned for 50 years until further revision. Deep sea mining in international waters is also currently heavily restrained despite the abundance of polymetallic nodules, which are crucial for green energy technologies. The International Seabed Authority established in 1994 as part of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, has granted exploration licenses since its inception but no actual mining licenses so far due to environmental concerns.
Similar efforts have been undertaken to protect space. The widely adopted 1967 Outer Space Treaty defined outer space, the Moon, and other celestial bodies as “the province of all mankind”, stipulating that they are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”. But the pact neither addressed nor prevented for-profit national or private exploitation of space resources. The United States, in fact, is among the countries that rejected any subsequent language that hinted at limiting this kind of activity as introduced, for instance, in the largely abandoned 1979 Moon Treaty. The treaty defined the Moon and its natural resources as “common heritage of mankind”. The United States, a signatory of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty but not of the Moon Treaty, disputed this last definition and, with a presidential executive order about space resources in 2020, stated that “does not view it (space) as a global commons” and “encourages international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law” in order to avoid the interpretation that space powers must share the economic profits. Moreover, the legal basis for private space resource exploitation was already provided in the U.S. with the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 that grants U.S. citizens the right of commercial exploration and commercial recovery of space resources, but no territorial claims in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty. Other nations, such as Japan, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates, have pursued similar national legislation.
Space Blockades: A Moot Point?
One question arises: Is there ever going to be the need and the means to protect free access to space resources if they achieve the size and the strategic importance to influence great power military and economic competition on Earth? The vastness of space and the complexity of orbital dynamics itself could render the question purely hypothetical since it may prevent any malicious disruption of extraterrestrial exploitation of resources, at least in the terrestrial sense of blockading land corridors and sea lanes, as practiced on Earth for several centuries. The volume of space between Earth and the Moon alone is more than 1,000 times greater than the space between Earth and geostationary Earth orbits. For activities further out such as asteroid mining, even greater volumes of space, far longer distances, and more significantly spread-out resources are involved.
Despite the protection seemingly afforded by the vastness of space and the complexity of orbital dynamics, there are vulnerabilities represented by critical nodes such as ground-based and space-based infrastructure that enable spacecraft telecommunications, navigation, control, landing, and lift off. Also, space-based or Earth-based points of collections, storage, processing, and return of space resources that were originally spread out before mining. Moreover, the clustering of lunar mining activities in specific regions that are expected to be resource-rich, like the south poles, further aggravate these types of concerns.
Commercial Pluralism as Space Resource Security Architecture
So, how to prevent, or we may say deter, an adversarial power or malicious actor from disrupting free access to space resources if a need to do so arises? Deterrence theory may offer an answer: Deterrence by denial of benefits undermines an adversary's belief in its success, ultimately making a planned action impractical or likely to yield only minimal results. Such deterrence by denial works by increasing the resilience of a system or an infrastructure through disaggregation, distribution, diversification, proliferation, and rapid reconstitutions. We can recognize how a heterogeneous ecosystem of several commercial ventures would implicitly implement such tenets through their own fleets of low-cost and easily replaceable spacecraft operating at a fast pace as dictated by commercial operations. Diverse technical approaches, operations, infrastructure, and locations would also create natural redundancy and dispersion, making single disruptions unlikely to affect an entire system.
Competitive, decentralized commercial space activities, therefore, inherently reflect the structural resilience underpinning denial-based deterrence. Commercial pluralism should consequently be regarded as part of the security architecture and prioritized in space resource development and security policy. In this sense, the structure of the commercial space ecosystem itself may become a key enabler of secure and sustained access to space resources.