High Frontier: a Fully-Funded Private Excavation Mission to a Near-Earth Asteroid

Karman+ is a U.S, Colorado-based startup that seeks to mine space resources from near-Earth asteroids to provide abundant, sustainable energy and resources in space and for Earth. Asteroids can contribute substantially to resource availability while also reducing harmful externalities, although uncertainties remain related to asteroid material characteristics and the cost effectiveness of deep space mining. We stand convicted that these uncertainties are not obstacles to asteroid mining but do require bold efforts to address. Our first mission, High Frontier, addresses these challenges head on. The mission is already fully funded and targets a late 2026 launch with the following objectives:

• Rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid;
• Capture regolith from the surface at kilogram scale;
• Maintain a total mission cost (s/c, operations, launch, R&D, etc) in the range of $20-30 million; and
• Provide scientific data on the asteroid, including surface imaging and select physical measurements.

This is a technical demonstration mission and its objectives focus on commercial viability. Namely, with High Frontier we seek to address the cost-effectiveness of deep space mining missions as well as the scalability of regolith excavation. We use the term excavation with particular emphasis given the distinction of kilogram-scale capture in contrast with small-scale scientific sampling.

Our effort builds on collaboration with the scientific community as well as lessons learned and data captured from previous space missions, including: asteroid interaction missions such as OSIRIS-REx (NASA), Hayabusa 1 and 2 (JAXA), DART (NASA), Lucy (NASA), small-sat deep space missions like CAPSTONE (NASA), survey missions such as Gaia and Euclid (ESA), and the growing number of public and private lunar missions.

For our asteroid mining operations to reach eventual profitability, our target asteroids must be easily reachable both in terms of delta-V and time of flight so as to minimize propellant mass and spacecraft mass, size, and complexity. While there are a large number of known NEAs, the number of them that meets our ideal criteria is small. Most of these are also very small, with diameters estimated in tens of meters – a size class that has never been visited before. Can we expect regolith on the surface of such asteroids, and if so, how much of it? If the asteroid is a solid monolith, what is its tensile strength and density? Clearly, these are important questions when considering landing operations and, even more so, for designing our sample extraction mechanism. Additionally, the small size of most of these asteroids makes them very difficult to observe, which leads to a lack of available data; in particular there are few NEAs on our list which have spectra, let alone which are confirmed to be carbonaceous by their spectra. Some of these are even classified to different taxonomies by different studies, which compounds the uncertainty. Nonetheless, a number of interesting and potentially suitable asteroids do exist, some of which we will briefly discuss.

In this talk, we will detail our overall concept for High Frontier, our target selection approach and potential target asteroids in addition to the scientific challenges we currently face, including avenues for possible research, with the aim of communicating our intent for broader awareness among both industry and the scientific community for potential collaboration, partnerships, and avenues for instrumentation and other spacecraft technology both for High Frontier and beyond.