research · 2 March 2026
The Ground Floor of the Launch Economy
1.4 million people are displaced by rare earth mining every year, and 41% of operations have no environmental review. The satellites do not launch themselves.
By EOSYN Space Research
A satellite constellation begins in a pit.
Rare earth elements — neodymium, dysprosium, terbium — sit inside the magnets, actuators, and sensors of nearly every spacecraft flying today. Extracting them displaces an estimated 1.4 million people each year. In 41% of operations, no environmental review was ever filed.
No review means no baseline, no monitoring, no liability, and no one whose job it is to answer for the tailings pond upstream of a village.
**Why an aerospace organisation is writing this**
Because the sector that talks most fluently about planetary stewardship has the least appetite for reading its own supply chain. You cannot photograph the Earth for a living and decline to look at the hole you dug in it.
**The Mining & Climate Academy**
Our Academy teaches the extraction side of aerospace to the people who will build the next generation of it. Materials science, environmental review procedure, community consent, and how to read a mining licence. Graduates leave able to ask a supplier a question that a supplier cannot deflect.