Nonparametric density estimation is studied for spherical data that may arise in many scientific and practical fields. In particular, nonparametric mixture models based on likelihood maximization are used. A nonparametric mixture has component distributions mixed together with a mixing distribution that is completely unspecified and needs to be determined from data. For mixture components, a two-parameter distribution family can be used, with one parameter as the mixing variable and the other to control the smoothness of the density estimator. For example, the popular von Mises-Fisher distributions can be readily used for this purpose. Numerical studies with various spherical data sets show that the resultant mixture-based density estimators are strong competitors with the best of the other density estimators.