Astroforge: This company will launch an exploration mission before mining asteroids for precious metals

Astroforge’s spacecraft will travel with Athena, a lunar landing developed by intuitive start machines, until it is interrupted on its own. Gialich said Odin should reach the other side of the moon in just five days, but it will spend another 300 days in the heavenly vacuum, waiting to make an approach close to its goal asteroid.

In particular, the spacecraft, which is approximately the size of an air conditioning unit of the window, was developed in the past 10 months. Less than a year is a relatively lowercase timeline for aerospace development.

“I tell the team (Astroforge) all the time, if you are not afraid when we threw it, we were too slow,” Gialich added. “As you have to live on the verge of fear to achieve greatness.”

In many ways, Astroforge is a poster child for a dominant theme in the space industry. The new young and ambitious companies seek to achieve what only governments have done so far, and make it much cheaper in the process. But with asteroid mining, no company has achieved what Gialich and his team are about to try.

Odin, called by Thor’s father in Nordic mythology, will be one of the first spacecraft developed by a private sector company in traveling to deep space, or beyond the moon.

The spacecraft is scheduled to spend a little less than a year traveling to an asteroid called 2022 OB5, which is expected to travel within approximately 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) of the earth. Equipped with an optical camera, Odin will take photographs and broadcast them to the mission team.

Astroforge is in the bank that 2022 OB5 is an asteroid of type M, potentially rich in platinum. And if the Odin Chamber can confirm that the space rock contains the valuable metal, a future Astroforge mission can try to extract, refine and transport the material to the earth, where platinum is expensive and is used in various industries including electronics, pharmaceutical products and oil refining.

The plan is bold, recognized Gialich.

Two other aerospace companies, planetary resources and deep space industries, folded while pursuing that dream in the last six years.

Until now, only government agencies of the United States and Japan have brought tiny asteroid samples to the land at the expense of hundreds of millions of dollars. To make his vision, Astroforge will have to make these cheaper magnitude orders.

NASA Osiris-Rex Mission cost More than $ 770 million for the development of the spacecraft and the assembly of their launch vehicle and returned just 122 grams of an asteroid sample in September 2023, which was twice the amount of material that NASA hoped to collect.

Astroforge says that this leaflet recognition mission will cost the company less than $ 7 million. In total, the company has raised around $ 60 million to date, which only a decade is not even enough money to obtain a small satellite in the orbit.

“It will be very, very difficult for this company to succeed,” Gialich said. “I work every day making it a little easier, and that’s all I can do.”

But Gialich believes with all my heart in this search, beyond the mission in question.

He told CNN in an interview last year that is only partly motivated by the perspective of success. “Even if we are not successful and we fail as a company, I hope it drives it a bit,” he said.

The underlying mission, Gialich added, is to encourage the private sector to continue fighting for extravagant exploits with the hope that the price of space trips will continue to decrease. Even if asteroid mining is not possible today, or performed by Astroforge, it can become a reality for one entity or another in the future.

“For me, it’s about pushing humans forward,” he said.

Gialich is not alone. Space visionaries have long imagined that precious metals could be harvesting abundantly from rocks that fly aimlessly through our solar system, providing almost bottomless access to resources that can be rare and destructive to obtain on our native planet.

With the launch of February 26, when Odin takes off aboard a lunar landing developed by intuitive machines, Astroforge may have reached it beyond any other startup founded under the same goal. While the planetary resources launched a couple of small demonstration satellites, Astrophorge will be the first private sector company to send a spacecraft near an asteroid, venturing into a deep space.

There are many advantages in the search for asteroid mining, said Paul Stimers, a lawyer and spatial policy expert Holland and Knight.

“From my perspective, all we are doing is eliminating a rock from space, or emptying a rock in space, which has no life, has no ecology, has no indigenous villages,” Stimers told CNN. “No There is none of the things that have been disadvantages of land mining. ”

However, there are some key questions about the perspective of mining asteroids for resources: will it be profitable? What happens if more than one company is addressed to the same tooth? 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 main document that governs the global activity in space. The document makes the vague but sweep statement That space is “the province of all humanity.”

And until recently, Stimers said that it was barely imported if it was technically feasible for a company to an asteroid.

“The question was, were they allowed to maintain what they extracted?” They said the stimuli.

At least for the United States, that question was answered with the 2015 Commercial Commercial Competitiveness Law, which estimators participated in the elaboration, he said. The law made it clear that private companies can, in fact, claim the property of space materials, he said.

Only three other countries have similar laws: Japan, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates.

Astroforge already has heads with the scientific community. This is because the company initially refused to say publicly to which asteroid it would point, leaving open the possibility that observatories could detect without knowing the spacecraft and confusing it with something dangerous or a phenomenon worthy of additional inspection.

Astroforge gave up after the backward, recognizing in January that it was aimed at sending the vehicle to 2022 OB5.

But Gialich told CNN that things could change. “One of the best things we have as a company is that we can change goals at any time … so it is not a big problem for me to say this,” he said.

“Now, when we find this mythical asteroid that is purely platinum and is worth $ 1 billion in real material, will I tell the world what is it?” Gialich said. “Probably not.”

Astronomers recognize that companies such as Astroforge do not have to legally reveal where they are in space. But it can cause expensive headaches and that require a lot of time.

“What we would like to do is work in cooperation with (these) commercial entities to ensure that science is not affected in some of the most heinous ways,” the president of the American astronomical society, Dara Norman, said CNN earlier this month. “If we are confused about whether something is an unknown asteroid … then it begins to cost us money to do things like tracking or solving it.”

Inspirator and expensive

Even so, Gialich said it is not anti-science. The opposite is true, he emphasized.

It is inspired by bold projects and deep space, such as those of NASA James Webb Space TelescopeVoyager and Cassini. But it is frustrated by the price of such missions.

“You don’t need to spend a thousand and a half million dollars to answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe,” Gialich said. “We can do it for much less.”

That is at least hope.

It is not clear if the ODIN spacecraft of $ 7 million in Astrophorge will reach asteroid 2022 OB5.

Nor is it clear if the company can determine, with any level of certainty, that the asteroid contains platinum based on the images offered by Odin.

And even if he does, a future mission that travels to 2022 OB5, or any other asteroid, and in reality he reaps resources for Astrophorge to sell on earth is an even longer shot.

But, Gialich reiterated, he does not believe that there is space to worry about failure.

“You have to make decisions,” he said, “and live with the consequences.”