Space Resources promotes Space Ventures Investors Ltd.
Space Resources promotes Space Ventures Investors Ltd.
Last reviewed: August 2026. Dates move — always confirm on the organiser's website before booking travel.
Space resources is a small enough field that the entire serious community fits into a handful of rooms each year. If you are raising money, hiring, looking for a technical partner or trying to work out which companies are real, attending two or three of these events will teach you more than a year of reading press releases.
This page separates events into four kinds, because they serve different purposes and attract different people:
The single most important gathering in the field, and the one to attend if you attend only one. Organised by ESRIC in collaboration with ESA, the Luxembourg Space Agency and LIST, it runs over several days in Luxembourg and covers the whole spectrum: prospecting and extraction, in-space utilisation architectures, enabling technologies, and the economic, legal and regulatory questions.
The 2026 edition ran from 4 to 7 May and drew more than 490 registered participants from 35 countries — the largest yet — marking ESRIC's fifth anniversary and ten years of the SpaceResources.lu initiative. The programme includes a Professional Course and an Early Career Symposium alongside the main track, which makes it unusually accessible if you are new to the field.
Typical timing: spring, usually April or May.
spaceresourcesweek.lu
A global awareness campaign, co-founded in Luxembourg and endorsed by the United Nations, held each year on 30 June — the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska event. It is public-facing rather than technical, with events run by schools, observatories and museums around the world, and a live broadcast programme. If you want to explain asteroid resources to people outside the industry, this is the hook.
The long-running technical meeting where ISRU engineers present work in progress. Less polished than the big conferences and considerably more useful if you want to understand whether a given extraction process actually works. Traditionally held in Colorado in association with the Colorado School of Mines, which also runs the world's first graduate programme in space resources.
An annual European meeting on lunar science and exploration, hosted in a different European city each year. Strong on remote sensing, regolith science and mission planning — in other words, the evidence base underneath any claim about where the water and metals are.
Topic-focused virtual workshops run under NASA's lunar science programme, often addressing a single question such as volatiles in permanently shadowed regions or regolith handling. Free, online, and technically dense — the cheapest way to hear the current state of the argument.
| Event | When & where | Why it matters for space resources |
|---|---|---|
| Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) | March, The Woodlands, Texas | The largest planetary science meeting in the world. New lunar and asteroid data, mission results and resource-relevant remote sensing are presented here first. Abstracts are public and free to read — a genuinely underused research resource for investors. |
| International Astronautical Congress (IAC) | Autumn, city rotates annually | The industry's global meeting. Space resources has its own technical sessions, and the exhibition floor is where agencies, primes and start-ups actually meet. |
| European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) | September, Europe | The European counterpart to LPSC, with strong asteroid and small-body sessions. |
| ASCEND | Summer, United States | AIAA's cross-sector event with a consistent focus on the cislunar economy and off-world infrastructure. |
| Space Symposium | April, Colorado Springs | Policy, procurement and defence. Where American programme direction becomes visible before it is formally announced. |
An open competition to demonstrate innovative approaches to prospecting for resources on the Moon, run by ESA with the Luxembourg Space Agency and ESRIC. Earlier editions ran field tests in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, with the winning team earning a development contract with ESA. ESA has indicated it aims to run a challenge approximately every three years, with entries submitted through the Open Space Innovation Platform.
It is open to everyone from engineering students to established start-ups, which makes it one of the few genuinely accessible entry points into the sector.
The programmes behind these deadlines are explained on our Public Funding page.
Conferences are scheduled; launches are not. But for anyone following this sector, the landing attempts are the events that actually move valuations. A successful soft landing validates a delivery business; a failure resets a company's timeline by a year or more and, in a listed company, does so within a single trading session.
Worth tracking:
We track lunar landing sites and outcomes through the Lunar Resources Registry, and listed-company reactions through Space Stocks and Space Funds.
Running or attending something we should list? We are happy to include serious space resources events — conferences, workshops, challenges and funding calls. Get in contact through our About Us page and we will add it.