The Lunar Mining Game: Why Big Mining Corporations, Not Startups, May Own the Moon

When we talk about space startups rushing to the moon, the narrative feels inspirational—until you hit the hard reality. Multiple commercial landers touched down on the lunar surface in 2025, marking a milestone for humanity. Yet the real challenge isn’t getting there; it’s what happens after you land.

The $20 Billion Question

The space mining market is projected to hit US$20 billion by 2035, attracting massive venture capital and government backing through NASA’s Artemis initiative and other programs. Everyone’s chasing the same prizes: water ice locked in shadowed craters, regolith for construction, and helium-3 for potential fusion energy. Sounds like a gold rush, right?

But here’s where the story takes a different turn.

Why Startups Are Getting Left Behind

Stirling Forbes, CEO of Forbes-Space, a consultancy working with both space ventures and traditional mining firms, put it bluntly: “Space startups excel at getting there. But once you land, the hard part is mining—and that’s where most space companies have zero experience.”

The barrier isn’t technical brilliance or innovation speed. It’s capital and operational depth. Lunar extraction requires hundreds of millions in upfront investment with years of operation before profitability kicks in. That’s the exact opposite of venture capital’s playbook. Traditional mining companies, by contrast, operate under these conditions routinely.

Traditional Miners Already Have the Playbook

Look at Rio Tinto. The mining giant operates autonomous 200-metric-ton haul trucks in Australia’s Pilbara region—controlled remotely from 1,500 kilometers away using AI-driven drill systems and robotic material handling. The challenges they solve daily mirror what lunar operations will demand: remote management, automated extraction, and processing under hostile conditions.

When Rio Tinto or similar majors apply this expertise to the moon copy paste of their terrestrial operations, they’re not learning from scratch. They’re adapting proven systems.

The Logistics Edge

The moon sits just three days from Earth—a massive advantage. Equipment failures? Send a repair mission in weeks. Compare that to asteroid mining, where the nearest targets take months to reach. That’s not a small difference; it’s the difference between manageable and prohibitively complex.

Add NASA and international partners actively building power infrastructure, communications networks, and landing facilities on the lunar surface, and you’ve got an ecosystem forming around the moon—not asteroids. Startups would need to build all this independently, which defeats their speed advantage.

Immediate Revenue Streams

Water ice and other lunar resources have ready customers: space agencies converting them into rocket propellant for Mars missions and deep-space exploration. It’s not speculative—the demand exists now.

What Investors Should Watch

Forbes advises tracking investments by traditional mining corporations into space technology partnerships and collaborations. These moves signal serious positioning, and early partnerships will likely shape regulations and operational standards for decades.

“The space mining revolution is coming, but it won’t look like the investment community expects,” Forbes concluded. “It will be led by companies that understand both space above and the ground beneath our feet.”

The startup narrative is compelling. But when billions deploy and decades of experience matter, the established players typically win.