Asteroid-mining startup AstroForge plans to make history next year.
The California company announced Tuesday (Aug. 20) that it aims to launch its third mission in 2025, as a ridealong to Houston company Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 moon mission. That launch will send AstroForge’s 440-pound (200 kilogram) Vestri probe to dock with a metallic near-Earth asteroid — an unprecedented leap for a commercial spacecraft.
“If successful, this mission will be the first private mission to land on another body outside our Earth-moon system and will bring us closer to realizing our mission to make extraterrestrial resources accessible to all humanity, ” wrote AstroForge in an update. Tuesday.
The same update revealed that AstroForge has raised another $40 million from investors, bringing its total funding haul to date to $55 million.
AstroForge was founded in January 2022 and came out of stealth mode four months later. The company plans to extract resources from asteroids, “to unlock a cost-effective and sustainable mining solution that increases resources and safeguards the future of our planet,” as it wrote in an update on Tuesday.
AstroForge plans to focus on metals — a different tack than some previous off-Earth mining startups have taken, which aim to go after asteroid water. Water can be split into its components hydrogen and oxygen, the main components of rocket fuel. Mining it in space could thus help establish “gas stations” for spacecraft, fueling their journeys deep into the final frontier cheaply and efficiently.
That could still happen, but new players would likely have to emerge to do so; high-profile companies looking at asteroid water are no longer actively pursuing it.
AstroForge already has one mission under its belt, sending its toaster-sized Brokkr-1 probe to orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in April 2023. The main goal is to demonstrate the technology of the company’s refinery in space, but that never happened; Mission team members were unable to activate Brokkr-1’s refinery payload as planned.
AstroForge’s second mission, called Odin, is scheduled to launch later this year, as the second payload to Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 moon mission. Odin will pave the way for Vestri, collecting images of the asteroid that Vestri will pass through. (AstroForge has not yet announced the identity of the target space rock.)
Odin’s road to the pad was a bit bumpy, however. This past March, the vehicle originally scheduled to fly on the mission failed a vibration test, designed to ensure a spacecraft can survive the rigors of launch. In April, AstroForge decided to use the planned Vestri vehicle for Odin, which required “accelerated development,” as the company wrote in an update last month.
The new Odin vehicle, which weighs around 220 pounds (100 kg), is entirely manufactured in-house, whereas the one that failed the vibration test was made up of parts supplied by third parties, apart from its science cargo, according to AstroForge.
That change is not just a one-time thing; Vestri “will be developed entirely in-house from the ground up,” AstroForge wrote in Tuesday’s update. Vestri’s “insights and characterization of the composition of our target asteroid will allow us to capture the quality and quantity of essential elements found in the asteroid.”
Actual mining activity will likely follow, with a series of missions to come.
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