The U.S. military needs tungsten, but pristine NASA site may stand in the way | Scientific American
August 3, 2026<br>3 min read<br>Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm<br>The U.S. military needs tungsten, but pristine NASA site may stand in the way
A unique landform is vital for calibrating NASA’s satellites, but it’s likely sitting atop a vast deposit of this heavy metal, which is crucial for making munitions
By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron
In this handout released by the U.S. Navy, the USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer, fires a Tomahawk land-attack missile in support of Operation Epic Fury white at sea on March 1, 2026.
U.S. Navy via Getty Images
Join Our Community of Science Lovers!<br>Sign Up for Our Free Daily NewsletterEnter your email<br>I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes.<br>Sign Up
The U.S. military is hungry for a domestic supply of tungsten, a critical mineral used to make weapons—but a NASA facility effectively blocks mining of a vast deposit of the heavy metal in Nevada, according to a Financial Times report.<br>The deposit is located in an area of the Great Basin Desert in eastern Nevada and could contain almost two million metric tons of tungsten. Mining company 3 Proton Lithium (3PL) wants to develop the site, but around a third of it is located in lands reserved for NASA to use for calibrating Earth-observing satellites. The pristine wilderness allows the space agency to fine-tune instruments onboard these spacecraft to ensure they make accurate measurements.<br>NASA has used the area, known as Railroad Valley, for this purpose for at least 33 years. And in 2023 the Bureau of Land Management formally granted NASA exclusive use of the about 92 square kilometers (22,634 acres)—blocking any other public or private use.<br>On supporting science journalism<br>If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<br>At the time NASA described Railroad Valley as “uniquely suited” for its purposes because of a dry lake bed that was “large, flat, free of vegetation, of a consistent surface color, undisturbed, easy to access, and with good visibility from space.”<br>The dry lake bed of Railroad Valley in Nevada.
NASA
The largely featureless landscape is crucial because NASA technicians know exactly how much reflected light satellites’ optical instruments should see in the area. Among the missions that use the land are Landsat, which monitors Earth’s land and water resources; Suomi NPP, a weather and climate observation platform; and the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), which maps the composition of arid dust that blows around the planet.<br>This is not the first time 3PL has tried to exploit this land: a previously found lithium deposit set up a possible conflict with the space agency in 2023—and NASA won. In a statement about the new deposit that was released on Monday, 3PL said it has estimated that its claim contains 31 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent; if confirmed, that would make it among the largest lithium resources in North America. The site also includes large amounts of boron and potash, 3PL said. The latter is a salt that is often used to make fertilizer, which the U.S. almost exclusively imports.<br>“We now have a measured, world-class deposit of multiple critical minerals in one basin, and the one discovery that surprised even us is tungsten,” said 3PL chairman and chief financial officer Kevin Moore in the statement. “This is a metal the United States stopped mining a decade ago and now imports while China controls and manipulates the global market. To find more of it here than anywhere, alongside large, measured lithium, potash, and boron at world-class grade, is not a mining story. It is a national security story."<br>Tungsten’s usefulness stems from its resilience to heat: it has the highest melting and boiling point under typical conditions of any element, which made it perfect for use in older generations of light bulbs. It also has the highest tensile strength of any metal and is denser than lead; these qualities make it ideal an ideal material for making weapons. The need for tungsten has become even more pressing because of the ongoing war with Iran, which has seen the U.S. fire off large amounts of munitions that contain the metal, such as Tomahawk missiles.<br>Despite its importance to the military, the U.S. has long lagged in production of the material. A February report from the U.S. Geological Survey showed that...