Karman+

We want to provide abundant energy and resources that are carbon neutral and sustainable by mining near-earth asteroids. We are developing the technology to survey, prospect and mine near earth asteroids.

Created: 2022-09-13

Updated: 2024-02-29

Company - Karman+

Founded
Country: 2021; USA,Netherlands

Funding: $26M

Website: Karman Plus

Social

Product/Service

Classification: Space Resources

Category: Resources - Asteroid Mining
Space Mining

Fields: Asteroids

Status: Development

First launch: 2026

Our initial market is not platinum metals or rare earth minerals. We are starting with water, which is essential for space propulsion and drives the flywheel for reusability.

We developed a meta-survey that brings disparate surveys and observations together. Combined with advanced statistical inference techniques, we have created a probabilistic model of all near earth asteroids.

Advances in remote sensing, autonomy, dynamic simulations, launch services and satellite development show a very clear inflection point. We have moved from ‘this is technically feasible’ to ‘sustained market demand’.

High Frontier

As of early 2024, currently developing a fully-funded sample-gathering mission, named High Frontier, to an easily-accessible carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid. Expected to launch in 2026, the fundamental objective of this mission is to land on a target asteroid and retrieve a multi-kilogram scale sample from the asteroid’s surface, thus demonstrating our extraction technology developed in-house.

In 2026, Karman+ will be flying ‘High Frontier’, our first mission to a near-Earth asteroid. We are focused on carbonaceous asteroids, both for their water content as well as for their physical composition. Our primary mission goal is to explore and test our excavation equipment and validate the feasibility of asteroid mining at scale.

Product/Service

Classification: Space Utilities

Category: Space Solar Power
Power Beaming

Fields: Space Solar Power

Status: Development

First launch: Not announced

The core idea behind space-based solar power is to build massive power stations in orbit, leveraging the fact that solar power in space is available permanently (no day-night cycle, clouds or shadow reducing solar yield) at a higher intensity than available on Earth.
Power is harvested continuously and beamed down to Earth using microwave power, which would give us GW-scale carbon-neutral baseload power.

The original idea, like so many others that are currently in development, stems from Isaac Asimov's work 'Reason' which was published as a short story in 1941. Subsequent work moved this idea from science fiction concept into the engineering realm, starting with a patent issued to Peter Glaser in 1968 and the inclusion of space-based power plants in the visionary architecture of Gerard O'Neill's High Frontier.

The last 20 years has seen a number of different ideas and archetypes in development, generally focused on reducing the upmass required as the primary bottleneck to close the business case for this idea.

While launch cost has come down, we believe the bigger opportunity is to leverage the appropriate material that is already available in space. Using space resources will allow us to reduce upmass by an order of magnitude, reduce complexity and allow for scale while avoiding the environmental impact of launching everything from Earth.

Created: 2024-02-29

Updated: 2024-03-02

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