WASHINGTON — Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has completed assembly of its latest spacecraft for launch later this year, incorporating lessons from a failed mission last year.
The company announced on June 4 that it had completed assembly of its DeepSpace-2 spacecraft, which will now undergo environmental testing. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch later this year carrying Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 lunar lander mission as a rideshare payload on a Falcon 9 rocket.
DeepSpace-2 will fly by a near-Earth asteroid, although the company said the destination will depend on when the mission launches.
“We have a series of asteroids that, depending on launch day, we’ll go to,” Astroforge Chief Executive Matt Zialich said in an interview. “We’ll pick a target a few days before launch, once we’re on the pad.”
The spacecraft will travel for two to nine months to its destination, taking pictures with two high-resolution cameras. However, the main purpose of the mission is to demonstrate the performance of the spacecraft, which is intended to be part of a series of low-cost spacecraft that the company will use for asteroid prospecting.
He said, “I want to show the world that we can reach an asteroid.” “We have to show that we can operate in interplanetary space.”
As the name suggests, DeepSpace-2 is the company’s second interplanetary mission. Its first, Odin, launched last year as a rideshare payload on the IM-2 mission but malfunctioned shortly after deployment. The company concluded that the spacecraft’s solar arrays failed to deploy properly, causing it to lose power.
AstroForge applied those lessons to the design of DeepSpace-2. “We’ve built a whole bunch of contingencies into the spacecraft so we don’t have the same problem as last time,” he said. The solar arrays are designed to provide power even when not deployed, and the spacecraft can complete its entire mission only if only one of the two arrays is fully deployed.
The company also conducted more pre-flight testing. “We went so fast with Odin that it was such a miracle we even got on the rocket,” he said. “Lessons are tested early and tested again and again.”
DeepSpace-2 is the first flight of a new modular spacecraft platform developed by the company that will be able to carry up to 50 kilograms of payload on subsequent missions. The company aims to create a spacecraft that can be built at a low cost for its asteroid-mining plans as well as scientific missions.
Zialich said the spacecraft cost “just” less than $5 million, while the total cost of the DeepSpace-2 mission was less than $10.5 million.
“If this thing works, it’s a revolution in the way we explore the universe. That’s the goal we want to take as a company. We want to change the way we think about interplanetary space travel.”
The company’s long-term ambitions include mining metallic asteroids, arguing in a statement that “the mineral wealth of the solar system will become increasingly important to humanity’s advanced future.”
AstroForge isn’t the only company interested in asteroid mining. Notably, SpaceX has included asteroid mining as one of its future markets in its initial public offering prospectus.
“We plan to advance asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, providing abundant raw materials for space-based industries and reducing the need for mass launches from Earth,” SpaceX said in the prospectus. The company did not disclose a timeline for the asteroid mining effort.
Zialich said he welcomes SpaceX’s interest in the topic.
“What is the ultimate pinnacle commercial case for space? It’s to go to the universe,” he said. “Anybody who wants to think about how we change society has to think about asteroid mining.”
“We’re probably the only crazy people who go after it,” he said of his company’s asteroid-mining plans. “Now, I think Elon [Musk] Jumping on him means there are probably two crazy people going after him.”
