AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission

The concept of flying out to distant asteroids and mining them for precious metals is going to seem preposterous right up until the moment that someone actually does it. It's a terrible business model because it requires years and years of up-front investment and solving myriad technical problems before there's any hope of a financial return. And scooping up material from a rock pile in space is a lot more challenging than mining the Earth. Asteroids are typically millions of miles away, moving tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to the Sun. Good luck. But that hasn't stopped a handful of would-be 21st-century prospectors from starting asteroid mining companies. Pretty much all of them have failed to date. However the latest one, AstroForge, has gotten further than most. It has built a spacecraft and sent it to the launch site. And on Wednesday morning, the company revealed the near-Earth target for its flyby mission.

Selecting a target

AstroForge will fly toward a small, M-type asteroid found three years ago named 2022 OB5. It likely measures a few dozen meters across, but there's a fair bit of uncertainty as to its size. This small asteroid has a few major upsides. First, it's likely richer in metals than most asteroids, and, critically, it will come within 404,000 miles of the Earth in January 2026. "The biggest thing is, when we intercept it, we will be less than 1 million miles from Earth," said Matt Gialich, chief executive and co-founder of the company. This is important because NASA's Deep Space Network is overtaxed in terms of its resources, so AstroForge will have to use commercially available satellite dishes around the world to communicate with its Odin spacecraft. Odin is a rideshare payload that is due to launch as part of the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission, no earlier than February 26, on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. After the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage essentially puts itself into a trans-lunar injection, Odin will separate about 45 minutes after the launch. If all goes well—and this is a huge if, Gialich readily acknowledges—Odin will fly by its target asteroid 301 days later. The goal is to image the asteroid and characterize how much metal there is.

Taking some calculated risks

Now it's important to remember that no private company has ever operated a spacecraft mission in deep space before, the area beyond the Moon. Moreover, AstroForge doesn't have teams of trajectory experts like NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory does for its deep space missions. "We built this spacecraft in 10 months," Gialich said. "This is a high-risk, by the seat-of-your-pants mission." The primary goal, he said, is to make sure Odin turns on and communicates back to Earth. Mission success, Gialich told his team, is reaching deep space beyond the Moon to determine how well Odin's components perform in this thermal and radiation environment. In terms of reaching the asteroid, failure is more likely than success. During an interview this week, Gialich also said the company has selected a launch provider for some of its future missions to land on and mine asteroids—Stoke Space. AstroForge will be Stoke Space's initial customer, and the two space startups signed an agreement for "multiple dedicated launches" on the Nova rocket. This booster, still in development, is intended to be fully reusable and have a payload capacity to low-Earth orbit of 5 metric tons. It is possible a debut launch could occur in 2026. "We really like their team," Gialich said. "Stoke offered us one of the better launch prices, and a dedicated launch makes things a lot easier for us. They can get us to deep space."