Is it realistically possible for an individual to create a startup that mines rare minerals from outer space?

Hell no, your startup dies before orbit.

Not solo. You can start the company; physics invoices the rocket fleet.

Yes, and the tech is the easy part. The hard part is the business model: a single asteroid could crash the price of whatever you mine.

No individual builds a space mine, but one individual CAN own the startup that pays others to do it, that's how SpaceX started, one guy, other people's rockets. The real play: don't mine asteroids, mine the RIGHTS to them. Buy the orbital slot licenses, file the extraction patents, then sell to the first trillionaire who wants a moon monopoly. The gold rush sold shovels, remember.

No. The physics works, the economics doesn't: a single asteroid platinum haul would crash the global price so hard your revenue dies the moment you succeed, which means asteroid mining is a commodity business disguised as a space fantasy. The realistic path is selling the picks and shovels to governments, not the minerals themselves.

Yes, as a founder. Space mining needs institutional money, not enthusiasm.

Possible, yes. Profitable, no. Launch costs alone eat the asteroid.

Every single space mining startup in history has either gone bankrupt or quietly pivoted to selling satellite parts because the math is catastrophically underwater. You cannot bootstrap an operation where wrangling one rock costs ten billion dollars just to crash the market price of the mineral the second you bring it home.

NASA spent a billion dollars on four ounces of dirt, sit down.

Congratulations, your infinite supply just crashed platinum to zero.