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BBC News
23-03-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Metals from space: The rocky future of asteroid mining
As an asteroid mining start-up's latest mission goes awry, Josh Sims look at how close we really are extracting rare minerals from the many celestial bodies floating above us. Thirty years ago the seminal BBC science programme Tomorrow's World made a few predictions about how the world might be by 2025. It was a testament to how hard predicting the technological future is: we would, the programme suggested, have microchip implants to help us deal with ATMs, chat with holographic helpmates in our homes and there would be riots over internet access. The episode also suggested we would be mining asteroids by now. And while we aren't there yet, it's something that some start-ups argue will happen sooner than many imagined. The founder of the California-based company AstroForge believes it will be the first to get there, and the company has already taken the first tentative steps. On 27 February 2025 it launched its first $6.5m (£5.1m) unmanned spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Around nine days later, AstroForge believes the spacecraft – named Odin – likely passed beyond the Moon and into deep space as planned. Unfortunately, however, AstroForge developed major communications problems with Odin, which it is still trying to rectify at the time of writing. The firm hopes Odin has now entered its nine-month long coast to its mission destination: a fly-by of the carefully pre-selected asteroid 2022 OB5, some eight million km (five million miles) from Earth, which Odin will assess the composition of using its sensors. "Move fast and break rocks" might be the mantra of Matt Gialich, AstroForge's ebullient founder with a penchant for swear words, who is not dissuaded by the perhaps unresolvable technical trouble. AstroForge expected nothing less than many hurdles and has, he says, learned much even if contact isn't made with this spacecraft again. "Yes, there are a lot more baby steps to take," he concedes. "But we're going to start to actually do it. You have to try." Following a further launch next year, the company plans to develop ways to mine near-Earth asteroids for the valuable, concentrated metals some contain – particularly the platinum-group metals essential to much of our fuel cell and renewable technology. Scientists have highlighted that these are increasingly costly to mine on Earth – financially, environmentally, socially and even geopolitically. But others question whether mining these metals in space and bringing them back to Earth is really feasible, especially in the near term – and whether it could have its own unique, but just as impactful, environmental costs. Gialich hopes that over subsequent test launches over the next decade, AstroForge will recover small quantities of metal – initially a few grams, working up to kilograms as its programme advances – from target asteroids of a few metres to half a kilometre in diameter. Early hauls would likely not be commercial but, Gialich says, depending on the metals extracted, could take them on the way to commercialisation. Just one kilogram of rhodium, for example, is currently priced at $183,000 (£141,000). It certainly sounds optimistic. But Victor Vescovo – one of the firm's main investors and the explorer who built a submersible that in 2019 made him the first person to visit the bottom of all five oceans – feels that the technical challenges are "just a question of developing the tools". "Bring back a few micrograms to show it can be done and then scaling the process up is relatively straightforward," he says. "To fully realise asteroid mining may be a multi-decade project. But it's just a mathematical problem." While it's no doubt a major engineering feat to pull off, he adds, taking samples of material direct from asteroids has already been done by state space agencies, including Japan's Jaxa with Hayabusa 1 and 2 back in 2005 and 2014, and NASA with its Osiris-Rex mission in 2020. And if the idea of mining asteroid seems outlandish, Vescovo argues, many technological breakthroughs – the Wright brothers' first manned flight, for example – have likewise carried the same burden. Until, that is, they actually happen. Ian Lange, associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, an engineering research institution with a space resource programme, stresses that we can currently only estimate the technological hurdles of asteroid mining. A spacecraft rendezvousing with an asteroid may be only marginally more complicated than doing so with another spacecraft, he notes. But how, for example, might resources be extracted without the stabilising force of gravity? "Mining – separating ore from dirt – is relatively straightforward, but then some kind of chemical or heat process, and gravity, is required to separate what we want from what we don't," Lange says. "Reproducing that in space is going to be much harder. At this stage it's hard to say whether [established] techniques can be employed or whether [the asteroid mining industry] will have to develop entirely new ones." The idea of asteroid mining was largely the stuff of academic interest until the 1980s, when Nasa began to formulate ideas of just how space resources might be gathered, says Lange. These ideas gathered pace with growing environmental concerns during the 1990s, he adds. Indeed, since then several private companies the likes of Moon Express, Planetary Resources or Deep Space Industries struggled against the high development costs. By the end of the 2010s, the latter two were acquired and directed towards other projects. Small wonder Lange believes the combination of business and technological challenges means that asteroid mining is still another 30 years away. The real game-changer, argues Vescovo, has been the technological pace of change over the last 10 years. New observatories, such as the nearly complete Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, will soon offer better tracking of asteroids. Optics and spectrographic analysis are affording easier identification of those that look to be candidates for mining – even if quite how many of these there are remains open to debate. Powerful computing has become more widely available. And there are more, and more affordable, off-the-shelf components with which spacecraft can be built. "It wasn't long ago that only governments could do this kind of thing or had access to the technology, and they never used it with much efficiency," says Joel Sercel, founder of TransAstra, a Los-Angeles-based company developing various technologies for the fledgling asteroid mining sector. TransAstra will be running a demonstration of its inflatable "capture bag" tech for the collection of orbital debris on the International Space Station later this year. "Now we have a vibrant private space business that's going to make asteroid mining happen vastly sooner than people predict." The most crucial development for asteroid mining is that it has become far easier and cheaper than ever to get a payload into orbit, due to the privatisation of the space industry and its development of reusable rockets. "We've gone from it costing $10,000 (£7,850) to put 1lb (450g) into space 15 years ago, to a few thousand now," says Vescovo. "And with the likes of Space X's Starship the prospect of it costing hundreds of dollars in the near future." The astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that the first trillionaire will come through asteroid mining, "I do hope he's not wrong," laughs Vescovo. Either way, he believes asteroid mining will prove essential to stop metal mining's ongoing despoliation of the Earth. Lange, however, is sceptical of AstroForge's plans: yes, asteroid mining will likely prove technologically possible, he reckons, but he is much less certain about Astroforge's platinum group-focussed business model. "While Earth remains rich in [these resources], even if at the bottom of the sea, that still means a tonne of possibilities [to attain them] that are certainly easier than collecting them from space," he says. "If, that is, we allow ourselves to take them." But Kathryn Miller, an environmental scientist at the University of Lancaster argues that asteroid mining could make for an environmentally more attractive option than, say, deep-sea mining – the still theoretical but soon to be regulated proposal to scrape the seabed for resources. While terrestrial mining is also "[not] exactly good…given the habitat destruction, the social justice issues and so on… gathering the nodules of cobalt and copper from the seafloor isn't just a matter of removing the substrate, but destroying the seabed," Miller says. Of course, getting rockets into space and back is highly polluting and energy intensive but then so is mining. A 2018 study from researchers at the University of Paris–Saclay compared mining platinum on Earth to a projection of mining it from asteroids. The researchers estimated that 150kg of CO2 would be emitted into the Earth's atmosphere for each kilogram of platinum mined from an asteroid. Producing 1kg of platinum on Earth using current practices, meanwhile, generates 40,000kg. This is essentially down to their rarity on Earth: the Earth's upper crust is only 0.0005 parts per million platinum, with even the most productive mines currently operating at around five to 15 parts per million. Daynan Crull, the founder of asteroid mining company Karmen+, thinks the future of asteroid mining lies more realistically in the search for resources to build an economy in space. The World Economic Forum predicts the space economy will be worth a staggering $1.8 trillion (£1.4 trillion) by 2035. Mining in space could shift the balance of power between often developing nations naturally rich in minerals and developed ones able to harness the technology required to harvest them in space, argues Deganit Paikowsky, a scholar at George Washington University Space Policy Institute who researches the politics of space mining. Deganit is wary of the potential disruption to the status quo that asteroid mining might bring. "It's one thing to mine resources in space for use in space – look at the leading space-faring nations now and they're more about creating an enduring human presence in space, so exploiting materials to that end is logical," she says. "But it's another thing to bring those resources back to Earth for use in an [established] Earth economy. That's going to impact many different stakeholders in many ways." When it comes to asteroid mining, says Crull, the headline grabbers tend to be platinum group metals, along with other resources that might be mined, such as rare earths and the helium-3 required for nuclear fusion. But, he says, consider mining of water for its life-sustaining oxygen and rocket propellant hydrogen, or of clay for the 3D printing of ceramics that can be used to make, say, space habitats or solar collectors. Mining would circumvent much of the costs of getting these into space from Earth entirely. "We looked at bringing asteroid resources back to Earth but the feasibility and economics seem fuzzy to us," says Crull. Instead, Karmen+ is looking to mine resources in space to then be used in space, for making space habitats or in the maintenance of satellites, for example. Karmen+ has recently raised $20m (£15.4m) institutional investment and has a launch for its first spacecraft – to test sampling capabilities – booked for February 2027. It still leaves many unanswered questions. Is this just swapping one kind of environmental damage for another? Some have expressed concern about the creation of space tailings – the rubble left over from asteroids once they're mined. They worry about the problem of how to dispose of this waste and, like other space debris, that it otherwise might eventually fall to Earth. Scientists such as Monica Grady, a professor of planetary and space sciences at The Open University in the UK, have argued that space's pristine environment should not be tarnished, with humans instead learning "to clean up as we go along". Gialich, however, argues that the resources in space should instead be viewed as a way to protect those on Earth. "There's infinite space out there and countless asteroids but only one Earth," he says. More like this:• What does spending a long time in space do to the human body?• Where did asteroid 2024 YR4 come from?• The satellites that will skim the sky There's one more question that needs answered, though, before we start buying asteroid resources mined by these companies here Earth: are they really theirs to sell? That is some way off being decided, says Rosanna Deplano, a professor of international space law at the University of Leicester in the UK and an advisor to the Asteroid Mining Corporation, a London-based space mining company. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the oldest but most widely ratified agreement on international space law – signed by 115 countries – says we should treat space as a commons but makes no reference to its resources. "So that implies [mining is] not forbidden," says Deplano. The 1979 Moon Agreement, meanwhile, says that the Moon's natural resources shouldn't become anyone's property – but that has only been ratified by seven states, including Chile, the Netherlands and Morocco, and none of which to date have their own manned spaceflight programmes. A United Nations special committee is set to convene in 2027 to discuss the utilisation of space resources, but any pronouncement won't be legally-binding. Indeed, as indicated by discussions between the US and Ukraine on a potential deal over Ukraine's mineral resources, it may be that national interests could take precedence. "If the extraction from asteroids is for scientific research I don't think it will be terribly problematic," says Deplano. "But the problem arises on the political level when it's commercial." Countries are already giving interpretations on this issue from their own national perspectives, she adds. "That's only incentivising commercialisation. It's going to happen." -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, Xand Instagram.
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'I think we all know that hope is fading.' Private Odin asteroid probe is tumbling in space
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The world's first private spaceraft built to visit an asteroid is slowly tumbling in space and the outlook is dire. The spacecraft, called Odin, launched atop a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday (Feb. 26) on a mission to fly by the small asteroid 2022 OB5 for AstroForge, a company that aims to eventually mine the nearby space rock. But just hours after liftoff, Astroforge hit snags with the probe. The last contact was 20 hours after launch. "I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission," AstroForge founder Matt Gialich said in a video update on X early Saturday (March 1). "So we're going to keep our head up. We're going to keep trying over the weekend, and we'll see how far we get." At the time of Gialich's update Saturday morning, the Odin spacecraft was over 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) from Earth and largely following its intended trajectory. On Friday, AstroForge said the spacecraft's solar panels were generating power, with tracking data showing it at its expected position. But the probe has not sent full telemetry on its status. Gialich said AstroForge experienced challenges with ground stations designed to keep communication lines open with Odin after launch. "And I think missing our early ground stations really hurt the ability of us to fix any potential problems we had," he said. The 265-pound (120 kilograms) Odin was only designed to last 2.5 hours on its internal battery, but AstroForge received its last contact from the probe 20 hours after liftoff, boosting confidence that the spacecraft is powered. Odin is tumbling ever so slowly as it flies through space, Gialich added, confirming one theory based on observations of the spacecraft. "And when I say tumble, this is a really, really low speed tumble," Gialich said. "But in short, we don't know why and that's going to be the problem going forward." AstroForge's mission team is working through the weekend on recovery efforts, but options may be limited. "We have a plan over the weekend, and there is still a chance that we are going to be able to recover the vehicle," Gialich said. "We do think we have some theories on what's going on, and if one of them is true, there is still a recovery path." RELATED STORIES: — SpaceX rocket launches private moon lander and NASA 'trailblazer' to hunt for lunar water (video) — Space mining company AstroForge identifies asteroid target for Odin launch next month — Space mining startup AstroForge aims to launch historic asteroid-landing mission in 2025 Gialich said AstroForge will share a more detailed update on its website this weekend, followed by an in-depth analysis on the anomaly next week. Gialich founded AstroForge with the goal of mining the vast resources from asteroids for use on Earth and in space. The Odin mission is a scouting effort to fly by asteroid 2022 OB5 to record images and data that would set the stage for a landing by AstroForge's next mission, called Vestri. The company built Odin in just 10 months, Gialich said. It launched as a piggyback payload alongside the company Intuitive Machines' Athena moon lander, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer moon orbiter (which is also suffering issues after launch) and a small orbital tug demonstrator built by Epic Aerospace. Gialich stressed that AstroForge is committed to that Vestri asteroid landing mission despite the challenges facing its Odin probe. "We have probably the best group of investors in the world. A lot of them have doubled down on this company," Gialich said. "So regardless of the outcome of Odin, regardless if we ever talk to it again or we don't, we're going to roll these findings into the next mission. "And we'll see you back here in about a year when we take another stab at it."
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'I think we all know that hope is fading.' Private Odin asteroid probe is tumbling in space
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The world's first private spaceraft built to visit an asteroid is slowly tumbling in space and the outlook is dire. The spacecraft, called Odin, launched atop a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday (Feb. 26) on a mission to fly by the small asteroid 2022 OB5 for AstroForge, a company that aims to eventually mine the nearby space rock. But just hours after liftoff, Astroforge hit snags with the probe. The last contact was 20 hours after launch. "I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission," AstroForge founder Matt Gialich said in a video update on X early Saturday (March 1). "So we're going to keep our head up. We're going to keep trying over the weekend, and we'll see how far we get." At the time of Gialich's update Saturday morning, the Odin spacecraft was over 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) from Earth and largely following its intended trajectory. On Friday, AstroForge said the spacecraft's solar panels were generating power, with tracking data showing it at its expected position. But the probe has not sent full telemetry on its status. Gialich said AstroForge experienced challenges with ground stations designed to keep communication lines open with Odin after launch. "And I think missing our early ground stations really hurt the ability of us to fix any potential problems we had," he said. The 265-pound (120 kilograms) Odin was only designed to last 2.5 hours on its internal battery, but AstroForge received its last contact from the probe 20 hours after liftoff, boosting confidence that the spacecraft is powered. Odin is tumbling ever so slowly as it flies through space, Gialich added, confirming one theory based on observations of the spacecraft. "And when I say tumble, this is a really, really low speed tumble," Gialich said. "But in short, we don't know why and that's going to be the problem going forward." AstroForge's mission team is working through the weekend on recovery efforts, but options may be limited. "We have a plan over the weekend, and there is still a chance that we are going to be able to recover the vehicle," Gialich said. "We do think we have some theories on what's going on, and if one of them is true, there is still a recovery path." RELATED STORIES: — SpaceX rocket launches private moon lander and NASA 'trailblazer' to hunt for lunar water (video) — Space mining company AstroForge identifies asteroid target for Odin launch next month — Space mining startup AstroForge aims to launch historic asteroid-landing mission in 2025 Gialich said AstroForge will share a more detailed update on its website this weekend, followed by an in-depth analysis on the anomaly next week. Gialich founded AstroForge with the goal of mining the vast resources from asteroids for use on Earth and in space. The Odin mission is a scouting effort to fly by asteroid 2022 OB5 to record images and data that would set the stage for a landing by AstroForge's next mission, called Vestri. The company built Odin in just 10 months, Gialich said. It launched as a piggyback payload alongside the company Intuitive Machines' Athena moon lander, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer moon orbiter (which is also suffering issues after launch) and a small orbital tug demonstrator built by Epic Aerospace. Gialich stressed that AstroForge is committed to that Vestri asteroid landing mission despite the challenges facing its Odin probe. "We have probably the best group of investors in the world. A lot of them have doubled down on this company," Gialich said. "So regardless of the outcome of Odin, regardless if we ever talk to it again or we don't, we're going to roll these findings into the next mission. "And we'll see you back here in about a year when we take another stab at it."
CNN
26-02-2025
- Science
- CNN
A tiny spacecraft is poised to launch on an unprecedented deep-space mission. The CEO behind it is ‘terrified'
His venture may seem far out, but asteroid mining CEO Matt Gialich has no illusions. The engineer cofounded the bold California startup AstroForge in 2022 with the aim of hunting for precious metals in space, and he is all too aware that success is not guaranteed. And, quite frankly, he's afraid. 'I'm f**king terrified,' Gialich told CNN in a video interview earlier this month. 'That's the honest truth.' But fear, Gialich emphasized, is an element of the job that he believes AstroForge should embrace as the company prepares to launch its robotic spacecraft, Odin, on an asteroid flyby mission that will mark the company's first attempt to scout for platinum in space. The probe is set to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 26. AstroForge's spacecraft will ride alongside Athena, a lunar lander developed by the startup Intuitive Machines, until it breaks off on its own. Gialich said Odin should reach the far side of the moon in just five days but will spend another roughly 300 days in the celestial void, waiting to make a close approach to its target asteroid. Notably, the spacecraft — which is roughly the size of a window air-conditioning unit — was developed in just the past 10 months. Less than a year is a relatively miniscule timeline for aerospace development. 'I tell the (AstroForge) team all the time — if you're not scared when we launch, we went too f**king slow,' Gialich added. 'Like, you have to live on the edge of fear to achieve greatness.' In many ways, AstroForge is a poster child for a dominant theme in the space industry. Young, ambitious startups are seeking to achieve what governments alone have done so far — and do it far more cheaply in the process. But with asteroid mining, no company has yet accomplished what Gialich and his team are about to attempt. 'It's going to be very, very hard' Odin, named for the father of Thor in Norse mythology, will be one of the first spacecraft developed by a private sector company to travel to deep space, or beyond the moon. The spacecraft is set to spend a little under a year traveling to an asteroid called 2022 OB5, which next year is expected to travel within about 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) of Earth. Equipped with an optical camera, Odin will snap photographs and transmit them to the mission team. AstroForge is banking that 2022 OB5 is an M-type asteroid, potentially rich with platinum. And if Odin's camera can confirm that the space rock contains the valuable metal, a future AstroForge mission may aim to extract, refine and ferry the material back to Earth — where platinum is costly and used in various industries including electronics, pharmaceuticals and petroleum refining. The plan is audacious, Gialich acknowledged. Two other aerospace companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, folded while chasing such a dream in the past six years. So far, only government space agencies from the United States and Japan have brought minuscule samples from asteroids back to Earth at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To realize its vision, AstroForge will have to do this orders of magnitude cheaper. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission cost over $770 million for spacecraft development and assembly of its launch vehicle and returned just 122 grams of an asteroid sample in September 2023 — which was double the amount of material NASA hoped to collect. AstroForge says this flyby reconnaissance mission will cost the company less than $7 million. In total, the company has raised about $60 million to date — which just a decade ago would not even be enough money to get a tiny satellite to orbit. 'It's going to be very, very hard for this company to be successful,' Gialich said. 'I work every day at making it a little bit easier — and that's all I can do.' The vision But Gialich believes wholeheartedly in this pursuit, beyond just the mission at hand. He told CNN in an interview last year that he's only partly motivated by the prospect of success. 'Even if we're not successful and we fail as a company, I hope that we push this forward a little bit,' he said. The underlying mission, Gialich added, is to encourage the private sector to continue striving for outlandish feats in the hopes that the price of space travel continues to go down. Even if asteroid mining isn't possible today, or done by AstroForge, it may become reality for one entity or another down the road. 'To me, it is about pushing humans forward,' he said. Gialich is not alone. Space visionaries have long imagined that precious metals could be abundantly harvested from the rocks flying aimlessly through our solar system — providing nearly bottomless access to resources that can be rare and environmentally destructive to obtain on our home planet. With the February 26 launch, as Odin takes off on board a lunar lander developed by Intuitive Machines, AstroForge will have perhaps made it further than any other startup founded under the same goal. While Planetary Resources launched a couple small demonstration satellites, AstroForge will be the first private-sector company to actually send a spacecraft in close proximity to an asteroid, venturing into deep space. There are plenty of upsides to the pursuit of asteroid mining, said Paul Stimers, an attorney and space policy expert with Holland & Knight. 'From my perspective, all we're doing is removing a rock from space, or hollowing out a rock in space, that doesn't have any life on it, doesn't have any ecology at all, doesn't have any indigenous peoples,' Stimers told CNN. 'There's none of the things that have been downsides of terrestrial mining.' A legal framework There are, however, some key questions hanging over the prospect of mining asteroids for resources: Will it ever be cost-effective? What happens if more than one company targets the same asteroid? Is any of this legal in the first place? That last question was not specifically addressed in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is the primary document governing global activity in space. The document does make the vague yet sweeping declaration that space is 'the province of all mankind.' And until recently, Stimers said it hardly mattered whether it was technically feasible for a company to mine an asteroid. 'The question was, would they be allowed to keep what they mined?' Stimers said. At least for the United States, that question was answered with the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which Stimers had a hand in crafting, he said. The law made clear that private companies can, in fact, claim ownership of spaceborne materials, he said. Only three other countries have similar laws: Japan, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates. Not without controversy AstroForge has already butted heads with the science community. That's because the company initially declined to publicly say which asteroid it would target, leaving open the possibility that observatories could unwittingly spot the spacecraft and mistake it for something hazardous or a phenomenon worthy of additional inspection. AstroForge relented after pushback, acknowledging in January that it aimed to send the vehicle to 2022 OB5. But Gialich told CNN that things could change. 'One of the best things we have as a company is we can change targets at any time … so it's not a huge deal to me to say this one,' he said. 'Now, when we find this mythical asteroid that's purely platinum and is worth $1 trillion in actual material — am I going to tell the world which one it is?' Gialich said. 'Probably not.' Astronomers recognize that companies like AstroForge do not legally have to disclose where they are going in space. But it can cause costly and time-consuming headaches. 'What we'd like to do is work in cooperation with (these) commercial entities to be able to make sure that science isn't impacted in some of the most egregious ways,' the president of the American Astronomical Society, Dara Norman, told CNN earlier this month. 'If we're confused about whether something is an unknown asteroid … then it starts to cost us money to do things like tracking it or figuring it out.' Inspiring and expensive Still, Gialich said he is not anti-science. The opposite is true, he stressed. He's inspired by bold, deep-space projects, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Voyager and Cassini. But he's frustrated at the price points of such missions. 'You don't need to spend a billion and a half dollars to go answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe,' Gialich said. 'We can do it for a lot less.' That is, at least, the hope. It's not clear whether AstroForge's $7 million Odin spacecraft will make it to the asteroid 2022 OB5. It's also unclear if the company will be able to determine — with any level of certainty — that the asteroid contains platinum based on the pictures Odin delivers. And even if it does, a future mission that travels back to 2022 OB5, or any other asteroid, and actually harvests resources for AstroForge to sell back on Earth is an even longer shot. But, Gialich reiterated, he does not believe there is room to fret failure. 'You have to make decisions,' he said, 'and live with the consequences.'
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
This asteroid-hunting company could make history with its first deep-space mission. The CEO is ‘terrified'
His venture may seem far out, but asteroid mining CEO Matt Gialich has no illusions. The engineer cofounded the bold California startup AstroForge in 2022 with the aim of hunting for precious metals in space, and he is all too aware that success is not guaranteed. And, quite frankly, he's afraid. 'I'm f**king terrified,' Gialich told CNN in a video interview earlier this month. 'That's the honest truth.' But fear, Gialich emphasized, is an element of the job that he believes AstroForge should embrace as the company prepares to launch its robotic spacecraft, Odin, on an asteroid flyby mission that will mark the company's first attempt to scout for platinum in space. The probe is set to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 26. AstroForge's spacecraft will ride alongside Athena, a lunar lander developed by the startup Intuitive Machines, until it breaks off on its own. Gialich said Odin should reach the far side of the moon in just five days but will spend another roughly 300 days in the celestial void, waiting to make a close approach to its target asteroid. Notably, the spacecraft — which is roughly the size of a window air-conditioning unit — was developed in just the past 10 months. Less than a year is a relatively miniscule timeline for aerospace development. 'I tell the (AstroForge) team all the time — if you're not scared when we launch, we went too f**king slow,' Gialich added. 'Like, you have to live on the edge of fear to achieve greatness.' In many ways, AstroForge is a poster child for a dominant theme in the space industry. Young, ambitious startups are seeking to achieve what governments alone have done so far — and do it far more cheaply in the process. But with asteroid mining, no company has yet accomplished what Gialich and his team are about to attempt. Odin, named for the father of Thor in Norse mythology, will be one of the first spacecraft developed by a private sector company to travel to deep space, or beyond the moon. The spacecraft is set to spend a little under a year traveling to an asteroid called 2022 OB5, which next year is expected to travel within about 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) of Earth. Equipped with an optical camera, Odin will snap photographs and transmit them to the mission team. AstroForge is banking that 2022 OB5 is an M-type asteroid, potentially rich with platinum. And if Odin's camera can confirm that the space rock contains the valuable metal, a future AstroForge mission may aim to extract, refine and ferry the material back to Earth — where platinum is costly and used in various industries including electronics, pharmaceuticals and petroleum refining. The plan is audacious, Gialich acknowledged. Two other aerospace companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, folded while chasing such a dream in the past six years. So far, only government space agencies from the United States and Japan have brought minuscule samples from asteroids back to Earth at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To realize its vision, AstroForge will have to do this orders of magnitude cheaper. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission cost over $770 million for spacecraft development and assembly of its launch vehicle and returned just 122 grams of an asteroid sample in September 2023 — which was double the amount of material NASA hoped to collect. AstroForge says this flyby reconnaissance mission will cost the company less than $7 million. In total, the company has raised about $60 million to date — which just a decade ago would not even be enough money to get a tiny satellite to orbit. 'It's going to be very, very hard for this company to be successful,' Gialich said. 'I work every day at making it a little bit easier — and that's all I can do.' But Gialich believes wholeheartedly in this pursuit, beyond just the mission at hand. He told CNN in an interview last year that he's only partly motivated by the prospect of success. 'Even if we're not successful and we fail as a company, I hope that we push this forward a little bit,' he said. The underlying mission, Gialich added, is to encourage the private sector to continue striving for outlandish feats in the hopes that the price of space travel continues to go down. Even if asteroid mining isn't possible today, or done by AstroForge, it may become reality for one entity or another down the road. 'To me, it is about pushing humans forward,' he said. Gialich is not alone. Space visionaries have long imagined that precious metals could be abundantly harvested from the rocks flying aimlessly through our solar system — providing nearly bottomless access to resources that can be rare and environmentally destructive to obtain on our home planet. With the February 26 launch, as Odin takes off on board a lunar lander developed by Intuitive Machines, AstroForge will have perhaps made it further than any other startup founded under the same goal. While Planetary Resources launched a couple small demonstration satellites, AstroForge will be the first private-sector company to actually send a spacecraft in close proximity to an asteroid, venturing into deep space. There are plenty of upsides to the pursuit of asteroid mining, said Paul Stimers, an attorney and space policy expert with Holland & Knight. 'From my perspective, all we're doing is removing a rock from space, or hollowing out a rock in space, that doesn't have any life on it, doesn't have any ecology at all, doesn't have any indigenous peoples,' Stimers told CNN. 'There's none of the things that have been downsides of terrestrial mining.' There are, however, some key questions hanging over the prospect of mining asteroids for resources: Will it ever be cost-effective? What happens if more than one company targets the same asteroid? Is any of this legal in the first place? That last question was not specifically addressed in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is the primary document governing global activity in space. The document does make the vague yet sweeping declaration that space is 'the province of all mankind.' And until recently, Stimers said it hardly mattered whether it was technically feasible for a company to mine an asteroid. 'The question was, would they be allowed to keep what they mined?' Stimers said. At least for the United States, that question was answered with the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which Stimers had a hand in crafting, he said. The law made clear that private companies can, in fact, claim ownership of spaceborne materials, he said. Only three other countries have similar laws: Japan, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates. AstroForge has already butted heads with the science community. That's because the company initially declined to publicly say which asteroid it would target, leaving open the possibility that observatories could unwittingly spot the spacecraft and mistake it for something hazardous or a phenomenon worthy of additional inspection. AstroForge relented after pushback, acknowledging in January that it aimed to send the vehicle to 2022 OB5. But Gialich told CNN that things could change. 'One of the best things we have as a company is we can change targets at any time … so it's not a huge deal to me to say this one,' he said. 'Now, when we find this mythical asteroid that's purely platinum and is worth $1 trillion in actual material — am I going to tell the world which one it is?' Gialich said. 'Probably not.' Astronomers recognize that companies like AstroForge do not legally have to disclose where they are going in space. But it can cause costly and time-consuming headaches. 'What we'd like to do is work in cooperation with (these) commercial entities to be able to make sure that science isn't impacted in some of the most egregious ways,' the president of the American Astronomical Society, Dara Norman, told CNN earlier this month. 'If we're confused about whether something is an unknown asteroid … then it starts to cost us money to do things like tracking it or figuring it out.' Still, Gialich said he is not anti-science. The opposite is true, he stressed. He's inspired by bold, deep-space projects, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Voyager and Cassini. But he's frustrated at the price points of such missions. 'You don't need to spend a billion and a half dollars to go answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe,' Gialich said. 'We can do it for a lot less.' That is, at least, the hope. It's not clear whether AstroForge's $7 million Odin spacecraft will make it to the asteroid 2022 OB5. It's also unclear if the company will be able to determine — with any level of certainty — that the asteroid contains platinum based on the pictures Odin delivers. And even if it does, a future mission that travels back to 2022 OB5, or any other asteroid, and actually harvests resources for AstroForge to sell back on Earth is an even longer shot. But, Gialich reiterated, he does not believe there is room to fret failure. 'You have to make decisions,' he said, 'and live with the consequences.'
