Origin Space

Origin Space (源星科技) is a Nanjing-based commercial space resources company founded in 2017, operating as China's first and most advanced private asteroid mining startup — pursuing in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) from near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) through a staged technology development roadmap progressing from orbital prospecting to robotic extraction to propellant production.

The company's technology demonstration program began with the NEO-1 (Near-Earth Object-1) spacecraft, launched in November 2021 aboard a Long March 6 rocket as a rideshare payload. NEO-1 was a 30-kilogram technology demonstrator carrying experimental asteroid detection sensors — multispectral imagers and a laser rangefinder — designed to validate proximity operations sensing and autonomous navigation algorithms in the orbital environment. While NEO-1 did not fly to an asteroid, it demonstrated key enabling subsystems for future prospecting missions in low Earth orbit conditions.

Origin Space's roadmap envisions NEO-2 and subsequent spacecraft conducting actual near-Earth asteroid flybys to characterize composition using spectroscopy (identifying carbon-rich C-type asteroids for volatile water-ice resources versus metallic M-type asteroids for platinum-group metals and nickel-iron), followed by a lander/sampler mission and eventually robotic mining systems. The company focuses on C-type carbonaceous asteroids as priority targets for oxygen and hydrogen extraction (splitting water-ice via electrolysis) to produce propellant usable as on-orbit refueling depots — a more near-term economic case than rare metal extraction, which requires Earth-return logistics currently beyond the company's planned architecture.

Origin Space is backed by Chinese venture capital and operates within the regulatory environment created by China's nascent commercial space policy framework. The Chinese government has signaled space resource ownership rights will be addressed in forthcoming legislation, analogous to the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (2015) that granted US companies rights to extracted space resources.

Competitors in the asteroid mining sector include AstroForge (California, focused on metallic asteroid refining), TransAstra (NASA contracts for solar-thermal extraction), Karman+ (formerly Deep Space Industries assets), and Planetary Resources' former intellectual property now held by ConsenSys. The entire sector operates on long-time-horizon investment theses requiring decades before resource return economics are demonstrable at commercial scale.