Origin Space起源太空

Origin Space is China's asteroid mining company, which in practice makes it a prospecting company. Founded in 2019 by Su Meng, a Harvard-trained astrophysicist, it flew two spacecraft in a ten-week window in 2021: NEO-01, a thirty-kilogram craft that tested net capture of debris, and Yangwang-1, the country's first commercial space telescope, hunting asteroids in visible and ultraviolet light. Both were built by a state contractor rather than in-house.

The bet is patient. Asteroid mining is decades away, so the durable near-term asset is the map: a database of near-Earth asteroid resources assembled from inexpensive telescopes, with capture demonstrations sold as verification work along the way.

Patience has been tested. The replacement telescope, Yangwang-2, was destroyed in a rocket failure in December 2024, the first new spacecraft the company had launched in three years, and no reflight has been announced. A modest funding round in 2024 shows the company alive, but English-language coverage stopped years ago, the website resists access from abroad, and the flight cadence currently rounds to zero.