Asteroid Mining Startup Loses Its Spacecraft Somewhere Beyond the Moon:
A privately built spacecraft is tumbling aimlessly in deep space, with little hope of being able to contact its home planet. Odin is around 270,000 miles (434,522 kilometers) away from Earth, on a silent journey that's going nowhere fast.
California-based startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on February 26 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The probe was headed toward a small asteroid to scan it for valuable metals, in service of the company's ambitious goal of mining asteroids for profit. AstroForge was also hoping to become the first company to launch a commercial mission to deep space with its in-house spacecraft, a dream that fell apart shortly after launch.
After Odin separated from the rocket, the company's primary ground station in Australia suffered major technical issues due to a power amplifier breaking, delaying AstroForge's first planned attempt to contact the spacecraft, the company revealed in an update on Thursday. The mission went downhill from there, as several attempts to communicate with Odin failed and the spacecraft's whereabouts were unknown. "I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission," AstroForge founder Matt Gialich said in a video update shared on X.
AstroForge is working on developing technologies for mining precious metals from asteroids millions of miles away. The company launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine asteroid material in orbit. Its initial task also did not go as planned, as the company struggled to communicate with its satellite.
For its second mission, AstroForge opted to build its spacecraft in-house to avoid some of the problems encountered during its first mission, Gialich told Gizmodo in an interview last year. AstroForge built the $3.5 million spacecraft in less than ten months. "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?" Gialich is quoted as saying in AstroForge's recent update. "At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."
And try they did. "With continued attempts to command Odin over 18 hours per day, we were seeing no additional signs of commands received, preventing us from establishing communications," AstroForge wrote in the update. "We employed more sensitive spectrum recorders and reached out to additional dishes to make sure we weren't just missing Odin's faint calls home, but to no avail."
The team also reached out to observatories and amateur astronomers to try to track Odin, but the spacecraft was too faint to spot with smaller telescopes. "Wish we would have made it all the way – But the fact that we made it to the rocket, deployed, and made contact on a spacecraft we built in 10 months is amazing," Gialich wrote Thursday on X.
AstroForge is still planning on launching its third mission, Vestri. The spacecraft is designed to travel to the company's target near-Earth asteroid and dock with the body in space. The Vestri spacecraft will also be developed in-house, and is scheduled for launch in late 2025, hitching a ride with Intuitive Machines' third mission to the Moon. "This is a new frontier, and we got another shot at it with Vestri," Gialich added.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @10:08AM (10 children)
> For its second mission, AstroForge opted to build its spacecraft in-house to avoid some of the problems encountered during its first mission, Gialich told Gizmodo in an interview last year. AstroForge built the $3.5 million spacecraft in less than ten months. "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?"
I don't like to complain about progress, and things go wrong from time to time. Still, Complaining about how others did, insisting you can do it cheaper/better, and then it just breaks and you're left with nothing? Not a good look.
"Apparently you can't."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kell on Sunday March 09, @11:23AM (4 children)
In fairness, they put their (and their investors') money where their mouths were. They took their shot. SpaceX's shit fails all the time because they move fast and break stuff. Same too with Boston Dynamics and other complex, risky, difficult engineering operations. If they have the resources lined up and the investors' blessings to iterate then they can learn and try again. If they don't have the resources to iterate, then they're cowboys who took a damn fool risk and deserve to never get funding again.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @12:32PM
Aren't these also the people who are absurdly secret about what they are doing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @05:34PM (2 children)
Sure, but don't throw shade at others saying you don't have the problems that they do, or that you can do it without XXX and then fail.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday March 10, @12:28PM (1 child)
Sorry, I disagree here. NASA can throw orders of magnitude more money at things like this than this group can. And take an order of magnitude more time to do so. AstroForge has failed once, but permanently. They may be fraudulent. They may be incompetent. But you won't know that from a single failure.
My view is that at least this group bends metal and launches stuff. That puts it ahead of almost everyone except a few nation states.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 11, @12:21PM
(Score: 2) by tekk on Sunday March 09, @04:32PM
I mean if their numbers are correct, they can afford to make a few hundred of these fuckups before the break-even point :)
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 09, @04:42PM (2 children)
Left with nothing? I'll note that SpaceX blew up their first three Falcon 1s with nothing to show for the effort - except that they worked out the problems that caused those failures and became the leading orbital launch provider in the world.
Now maybe AstroForge can't learn from its mistakes. But they won't get anywhere unless they do stuff that makes mistakes. What I can say is that the price is right for the mistakes they are making. $3.5 million is a good price range for stuff that doesn't have to work perfectly.
In comparison, NASA has spent over a billion on three spacecraft (what I found when I googled) for exploring asteriods: DART [wikipedia.org] ($330 million), Deep Impact [wikipedia.org] (also $330 million), and NEO Surveyor [wikipedia.org] ($500-600 million). It's not quite what Gialich claimed costwise, but he's spending two orders of magnitude less, quicker turnaround, and generating interesting results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @05:40PM (1 child)
> In comparison, NASA has spent...
and is NASA claiming to be faster, cheaper, better? No. This company is, however.
> SpaceX ...
The thing about SpaceX? They waited until they succeeded to claim that they're faster and cheaper. (Which they are.) They started doing it because they said that it was too expensive, and they were certain they could do better. Then they did. They didn't claim that they are doing so at the outset, nor that they would do it without fail, and then fail, fail fail.
The company in the article has things bass ackwards. They claim thay're cheaper and better without the problems of others, and then nothing but fail. Good job*. Really inspires confidence*. Maybe wait until you have something to show before shitting all over everyone else.
* sarcasm.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 10, @12:35PM
And so far, they are. Succeed or fail.
I think you should review [upenn.edu] Musk's statements around that time. And really, NASA doesn't do coffee for $3.5 million. I think there's room for those claims.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 09, @11:21PM
Real professional crew there, definitely not a bunch of tech-bro cowboys playing with other people's money. Where can I invest in their company?
(Score: 4, Informative) by BsAtHome on Sunday March 09, @10:58AM (3 children)
Mining in space is a dream and folly. Destroying space and earth to get a few trinkets and collect some printed numbers on paper.
...sigh...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 09, @04:47PM (1 child)
They're doing their work in space. How does Earth get into the picture to be destroyed? As to "destroying space", there wasn't anything up there to destroy in the first place. No indigenous people to oppress, no environment to degrade. Just dead objects that you'd never would know existed, if it weren't for the trinkets that gave you that knowledge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Sunday March 09, @06:53PM
> As to "destroying space"
Quite. In fact I would even go further to say that
1. Life is a special and wonderful thing
2. Our only knowledge of advanced lifeforms (e.g. plants, mammals) is on earth.
3. We have a moral duty to build out infrastructure in space to spread life to the universe.
So we should absolutely "destroy" space.
(Score: 1) by cblood on Sunday March 09, @10:04PM
Respectfully disagree. Asteroids have remarkably large amounts of heavy metals including gold, tungsten, and silver. Enough to make these common metals. That would be a good thing. Once you escape the atmosphere, the entire retrieval operation can be solar powered. The amount of mining avoided on earth once all the metal prices crash is a good thing. This will happen sooner or later.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09, @11:29AM (1 child)
The ones that NASA built with taxpayer money?
The same institution the current administration wants to destroy?
If you look at the history of the Deep Space Network, it started with
an amazing bit of 1960 communications engineering
Redundant, and EXPENSIVE
You don't build systems like that on the cheap.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 09, @04:49PM
Unless, of course, you do. Just because NASA hasn't tried to do it on the cheap (ever), doesn't mean it's impossible.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Sunday March 09, @11:30AM (2 children)
Mining asteroids for gold?
Well, that's obviously establishing a new record level of "gold fever"!
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday March 09, @01:54PM (1 child)
In any gold fever, selling pickaxes is the best profit business.
Even cryptocurrencies are perfect example of that lottery of winners and losers, much more gain in selling mining rigs than in mining minus energy costs.
This asteroid mining craft is no different model of such scam. They just underestimated the expert level necessary for real working space tech.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 10, @02:54PM
In order to have gold fever, you need to have gold first. And there were other winners in the gold rushes than just the pick ax sellers.
Finally, keep in mind that there will be low Earth orbit (LEO) demand for literally anything you can pry off an asteroid because presently it costs $1000 or more just to launch any mass into LEO (the most minimal persistent presence in space). If they can come up with LOX or reasonable quality iron or aluminum alloy, and put it in LEO, they can still make reasonable income, supporting both orbital manufacturing and in orbit fueling (neither which need be in LEO BTW).
First, they need to demonstrate that they can find and extract stuff. Then it takes things of considerable value to mass, like gold, if one ships directly to Earth's surface. The economics are better for shipping stuff for use in cislunar space (the Moon and everything within lunar orbit). So this need not be a scam and there's long term potential here.