Resources Companies

Karman+

Amsterdam, Netherlands commercial

Karman+ is an asteroid prospecting and resource extraction startup with operations in Amsterdam and Denver, founded in 2021 by Teun van den Dries. The company is developing small spacecraft designed to rendezvous with near-Earth asteroids and extract water ice and volatiles for use as in-space propellant, fundamentally aiming to create a propellant-supply economy for cislunar and deeper-space missions. Karman+ has announced pre-Series A funding rounds led by investors focused on deep-tech and space resources, and has publicly targeted a prospecting demonstration mission later in the 2020s. The company's approach differs from earlier asteroid-mining entrants (Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries) in its focus on near-term commercial propellant rather than precious metals, and on the sustainability of using space resources rather than launching everything from Earth. The broader market thesis tracks with NASA's Artemis architecture and an emerging cislunar economy that requires refueling services. Karman+ joins a small cohort of active asteroid resource companies including AstroForge, TransAstra, and Cosmic Shielding.

Shackleton Energy Company was an American space-resources startup founded in 2007 and based in Del Valle, Texas (near Austin), by cave-diving engineer and Stone Aerospace founder Bill Stone, together with Dale Tietz and Jim Keravala. The company's business plan centred on mining water ice believed to exist in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's south pole — a region named for Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — and processing it into hydrogen/oxygen rocket propellant to be sold from propellant depots in low Earth orbit and on the lunar surface, reducing the cost of sending spacecraft beyond LEO. Shackleton Energy proposed a multi-stage development plan involving robotic prospecting missions, habitat and mining equipment deployment, and eventually crewed lunar polar operations, but it never conducted any hardware missions. The company incorporated independently in March 2011 and launched a crowdfunding campaign that November seeking $1.2 million; the campaign raised less than $6,000, under 1% of its target. A further funding round planned for early 2013 was not secured, and the company has had no public milestones or news coverage since the mid-2010s. Shackleton Energy Company is defunct; it never built or flew any mining or propellant-production hardware, and existed only at the concept and business-planning stage.