Karman+

Karman+ is a Denver-based asteroid mining startup founded by Daynan Crull and Teun van den Dries. The company is developing autonomous spacecraft technology to extract raw materials from near-Earth asteroids and deliver them directly into cislunar space and Earth orbit — eliminating the need to launch materials up from Earth's gravity well.

The company's core mission is to make it cheaper and cleaner to manufacture goods in orbit than to launch them from Earth's surface. Karman+ targets an approximately 1,000x reduction in cost-per-kilogram of asteroid material compared to traditional space agency missions, aiming to deliver consumables such as water, fuel, structural components, and radiation shielding at prices 10x cheaper than Earth-based launches.

Karman+ achieves this through a combination of autonomous optical navigation, modified off-the-shelf hardware, and a touch-and-go (TAG) asteroid interaction architecture inspired by NASA's OSIRIS-REx and JAXA's Hayabusa2 missions. The company raised $20 million in February 2025 in a round led by European venture capital firms Hummingbird and Plural.

The company's first mission, High Frontier Mission 1, is scheduled to launch in early 2027 on a SpaceX Transporter 19 rideshare. It will rendezvous with an uncharacterized near-Earth asteroid and demonstrate regolith capture at kilogram scale — a critical step toward commercial asteroid resource extraction.