Asteroid mining startup AstroForge will head into space twice this year as it tries to do what no other company has done before: unlock the potentially limitless value of precious minerals in deep space.
When TechCrunch covered AstroForge’s seed round last April, we noted that the company was planning a demonstration mission sometime this year. Today, AstroForge released more details about that mission, plus announced an additional mission later in the year that will take the company to a target asteroid for observation.
AstroForge’s refinery operating in the simulated vacuum of space. Image credits: AstroForge/Ed Carreon
The first mission will launch in April aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare launch. The 6U CubeSat, which is being provided by space technology company OrbAstro, will be preloaded with “asteroid-like material” to demonstrate AstroForge’s zero-gravity refining and extraction capabilities. The second mission will take the company into deep space to collect data on the surface of an asteroid the company hopes to mine later in the decade.
“We need to find some way to take the regolith from the asteroid and process it in our refinery, and we believe we’ve solved that for our target asteroid,” CEO Matt Gialich said in an interview with TechCrunch.
He said the company is working with advisers from universities, NASA and the nonprofit research organization Planetary Science Institute to help identify the most promising asteroids for exploitation. The company also recently published a paper with the Colorado School of Mines estimating the metal content of asteroids that could be mined and sold as commodities on Earth or used in space.
That paper notes that “the textures of metal-rich asteroid surfaces remain to be explored,” and Gialich confirmed that the second mission will be to study the target asteroid’s surface using high-resolution images. He declined to provide much more information about the asteroid, other than that it’s closer to home than, say, a rock in the asteroid belt that’s between Mars and Jupiter.
“The asteroid belts, they’re far away, they’ll take us like 14-year round trips,” he said. “It’s something that’s much more suited to research and exploration. […] It’s not a viable business case for us.”
Instead, the company will hitchhike to lunar orbit with Houston-based Intuitive Machines before moving on to deep space. AstroForge’s spacecraft, again supplied by OrbAstro, will embark on a much shorter 11-month journey to the target asteroid.
AstroForge is actively planning its third asteroid landing mission and the fourth mission, which will be the company’s first refining mission to return platinum to Earth.
Add Comment