| AstroForge | |
| Type: | Private |
| Industry: | Aerospace |
| Foundation: | January 10, 2022 |
| Founder: | Matt Gialich Jose Acain |
| Location City: | Huntington Beach, California |
| Location Country: | United States |
AstroForge is an American aerospace company founded by Matthew Gialich and Jose Acain on January 10, 2022, located in Huntington Beach, California. AstroForge is attempting to be the first commercial company to develop asteroid mining technologies.[1] [2] As of 2024, no commercialized efforts at asteroid mining have yet to be successful, but a number of asteroid sample-return missions have been completed by government organizations.[3]
Founded on January 10, 2022, AstroForge announced its ambition to become the world's first-ever asteroid mining company on May 26 of the same year. AstroForge spent several months raising about $13 million in seed funding, and developing technologies aimed to process asteroid materials.[4] The company currently has over twenty employees.[5] In April 2023, AstroForge completed its first mission on the path to commercialized asteroid mining. Launched via the SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on its Transporter-7 rideshare mission and built by the aerospace company OrbAstro, the AstroForge 6U cubesat called Brokkr-1 was sent into Low Earth Orbit to test asteroid material refinement technologies.[6] The aim was to separate precious metals like platinum from general materials like iron. However, problems communicating with the spacecraft kept the company from conducting the refinery demonstration. [7] [8] On October 18, 2023, AstroForge completed a successful test of the flight propulsion system for their next mission, Odin.[9]
AstroForge's ultimate goal in the field of asteroid mining is the extraction, refinement, and sale of platinum-group metals (PGMs) located within M-type asteroids near to Earth. These asteroids are expected to be quite small in comparison to main belt asteroids, being anywhere from around 20 to 300 meters in diameter. M-type asteroids are also believed to account for about 3-5% of all Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), meaning they're quite rare. AstroForge is currently considering five different asteroids that fit these qualifications as potential mining targets in future operations. Many past companies that were involved with space resources industries had an interest in extracting water ice within asteroids and splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen to create interplanetary fuel depots, but AstroForge is not interested in this concept due to the lack of a current market for interplanetary fuel depots, instead focusing on the extraction of high-demand precious metals. Although there have been a number of robotic missions that have returned asteroid material to Earth (JAXA's Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 probes along with NASA's Osiris-REx probe), the process has yet to be commercialized, or completed on an M-type asteroid given that the past research targets of JAXA and NASA were C-type asteroids.[10]
Brokkr-1 is AstroForge's first orbital spacecraft and it consists of a 6U cubesat built by the British satellite manufacturer, OrbAstro. Its main purpose is to demonstrate technology to extract metals from asteroid materials. The payload, which occupies roughly two-thirds of the cubesat volume, will attempt to vaporize “asteroid-like” material carried inside and sort out metals from other constituents.[11] The satellite was launched to Low Earth orbit on April 15, 2023, via a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, as part of the Transporter-7 rideshare mission.[12] AstroForge acquired the first signals less than one month after the launch, but was faced with the issue that the magnetic field generated by the internal refinery system was interfering with the spacecraft autonomous attitude control. This problem slowed down considerably the process of correctly aligning the spacecraft antenna and deploying the solar panels, leading to the spacecraft being fully commissioned only on 8 November 2023. According to the company estimates, this leaves approximately three months to complete the technology demonstration before losing control of the spacecraft completely.[13]
AstroForge's second demonstration spacecraft, initially designated Brokkr-2 and later renamed Odin, was also built by OrbAstro but uses a larger 100-kilogram satellite bus. Odin's mission is to perform a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid and determine if the asteroid is metallic.[11] The spacecraft will be launched into a heliocentric orbit as a rideshare payload of the IM-2 lunar mission, which is scheduled to take off in December of 2024.[13] Its spacecraft bus was completely rebuilt in house mostly from scratch after the spacecraft failed vibration testing.[14]
The third demonstration spacecraft, Vestri, will return to the same targeted metallic asteroid and land/dock with it.[15]