California-based startup AstroForge has set itself the task of expanding opportunities for the commercialization of mining in space. The company plans to carry out the first private mission to land on a space object beyond lunar orbit.
AstroForge is an aerospace company based in Huntington Beach, California, and was founded by Matthew Gialich and Jose Acain on January 10, 2022. The company is working on developing asteroid mining technologies, aiming to become the first commercial entity to do so. As of 2024, no commercial asteroid mining efforts have been successful, although several government-led missions have successfully returned asteroid samples.
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. The company currently has over twenty employees. 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 Orbitto test asteroid material refinement technologies.
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. On October 18, 2023, AstroForge completed a successful test of the flight propulsion system for their next mission, Odin.
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.
It is planned to dock the Vestri spacecraft with a near-Earth asteroid. What kind of celestial body we are talking about is not specified. To achieve this goal, the startup has raised $40 million in funding, and the budget for the mission will be $55 million.
At the moment, AstroForge is working on obtaining metals from space to replenish critical earth resources. This list includes cobalt, nickel and platinum group metals. All of them are found in asteroids, which often fly relatively close to the Earth. The third demonstration spacecraft, Vestri, will return to the same targeted metallic asteroid and land/dock with it.
Vestri will be launched aboard the IM-3 from Intuitive Machines. The launch of the mission is scheduled for October 2025. On the way to the Moon, the module will separate in space and continue on its way to the target asteroid in order to study its composition. AstroForge aims to extract and purify one to two tons of material and return it to Earth.
