California startup AstroForge is preparing to launch its second mission in the attempt to develop technologies for mining precious metals from asteroids millions of miles away. The company is in a race against time to become the first to mine an asteroid for platinum and sell it on Earth for a whole lot of money, cashing in on the rapid commercialization of space.
AstroForge, founded by Matt Gialich and Jose Acain in January 2022, launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine asteroid material in orbit. Its initial task, however, did not go so well as the company struggled to communicate with its satellite. The company’s second mission, named Odin, will attempt to observe a metallic asteroid from a distance, with plans for a follow up mission to land on the asteroid target in 2026.
The mission’s asteroid target and mining technique remain under wraps, with AstroForge not wanting to reveal all of its secrets to potential competitors. What we do know is that AstroForge is targeting platinum-group metals, or PGMs, which are used across a variety of industries.
Asteroid mining could become a lucrative business, with materials found on a single asteroid adding up to trillions of dollars in possible profit. The idea has been around for decades, although it hasn’t been attempted yet due to the high cost of launching to space. That’s changing, however, with private companies offering cheaper rides to orbit and creating a viable market in the cosmos for space bros to take advantage of.
AstroForge recently raised $40 million in funding as it prepares for its second mission, set to launch as a rideshare payload on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 lunar lander in late 2025. The company also scored an experimental license from the Federal Communications Commission, the first to allow a private company to operate in deep space.
Gizmodo spoke with AstroForge founder and CEO Gialich to discuss the company’s plans to become the first asteroid mining company in the world.
Passant Rabie, Gizmodo: What’s the story behind AstroForge’s founding?
Gialich: We started in January 2022, and our mission is simply to secure precious metals for the future. Jose Acain [AstroForge cofounder] and I were both employed at a company called Bird, a scooter company, and we had both been recruited actively by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in Pasadena. And so we looked at this, and there was a whole bunch of reasons why I didn’t end up joining JPL, the main one being that I just didn’t feel like going to a place that we all considered to mean retirement in aerospace, like I’ll go retire one day at JPL. That was when we realized there’s this weird inflection point happening right now where, for the first time in human history, we have rockets that can get us to deep space for really cheap and if you can leverage that by building cheap satellites, and get the price point to getting to deep space much lower, what can you do?
That’s really how the company was founded. I had a whole bunch of stupid ideas about what you could do if you got to deep space, the one that made the most sense was to go become a mining company, right? And that’s what we settled on. At the end of the day, we just want a version of JPL that can act differently, act faster, make things more economical, and really push the limits.
Gizmodo: And profit is obviously a part of that model, right?
Gialich: You’ve got to make a shitload of money doing this. I think anybody sees, when you go after something like asteroid mining, the market cap here is massive. A lot of space companies have a thesis on the market growing that they’re going into. I mean, not to bash any space companies, I love all these ideas but they make this leap [assuming] that the market is going to either continue to grow or grow to some level that’s economical. That’s not the leap we’re making, we’re going after the platinum group metals, a massive market here on Earth. It’s a commodity market that we’re trying to affect and that’s really how we wanted to start the company.
Gizmodo: What were some lessons learned from that first mission?
Gialich: The original thesis of the company was that we wouldn’t build our spacecraft, we would buy them. That’s how we thought we’d keep our overhead lower and that’s what mission one was, right? We bought the spacecraft from a company called Orbital Astronautics in London and we’re able to just build a payload. What we found out during that was, when you don’t have the same incentives, when one company’s incentive is to sell a spacecraft and your incentive is to see a result, those incentives are misaligned, and it became very difficult to make that work. The reality is, it didn’t work.
We made some great progress on mission one but a lot of those problems, I think, could have been avoided if we were to build everything in-house ourselves. So we made the decision going forward, we’re going to do that.
Gizmodo: What’s going to happen for mission two?
Gialich: It’s going to be the first time in human history that a private company launches into deep space to perform a mission. I think that’s a really fucking cool thing to go after and do it. So mission two is built—we’ve gone through all the major steps of testing, vibration testing, or thermal vacuum testing, all these things you’ve got to get through to make sure the spacecraft is ready for launch. We’re essentially ready for launch, and we’ll continue to do more testing as we go forward, but as of right now, we’re waiting on the rocket, which is a Falcon 9 on its way to the Moon. Obviously, we will not land on the Moon. We’re gonna miss it, slingshot around and go out to the asteroid.
Gizmodo: And then mission two leads to mission three, right?
Gialich: The point of mission two is to get to the asteroid and take a picture of it to show that we have found the correct asteroid that we want to go after. We want to go to a special type of asteroid called a metallic asteroid. Mission three goes back and lands on that asteroid to take a sample of it to confirm that that specific metallic asteroid is high in the concentration of material that we want to see.
Gizmodo: That seems a bit more complex than mission two, obviously. How are you preparing for that?
Gialich: It’s actually a lot less complex. We will have already proved that we can get to the asteroid, so mission three is a lot less risky. I think it’s all about how you look at those stepping stones as you go forward.
Gizmodo: How did you decide on the asteroid target?
Gialich: We picked it based off a number of criteria. At the end of the day, we want a metallic asteroid that we can access and keep mining over a certain given time. We keep some criteria under wraps, we spent a lot of capital making sure we’re going after the right asteroid. We pushed hard on this to make sure we end up at the right piece of stone in space.
Gizmodo: Is there a reason why you haven’t named the asteroid?
Gialich: We will never name the asteroid because there’s no reason to do that. It doesn’t benefit me whatsoever to disclose what asteroid we’re going after. Why would I give any competitors information on what we’re going after?
Gizmodo: With asteroid mining, there’s also this philosophical question of who owns any object in space.
Gialich: In 2015, we passed the Space Act, and the Space Act says any commercial company in the United States can mine an asteroid for profit. There may be a whole bunch of existential reasons people want to argue about this. You’re talking about a company that fundamentally is going to change [the availability of resources]. If we are successful, there will be a lot of people that will try to regulate us out of existence. They’ll be able to try to get their fair share. And that’s all fine, let it come when it comes. I think my job is to prove that it’s fucking possible, and as soon as we prove that it’s possible, we’ll probably hire a lot of lawyers or something.
Gizmodo: Why do you think mining asteroids hasn’t been done so far?
Gialich: What we are attempting to do is something that people view as extremely high risk. I’m not going to sit here and tell you our mission coming up has 100% chance of success. It doesn’t. In fact, we are going extremely fast and we’re gonna take a lot of fucking risk. We have to take a shot on goal, our job is to give us the highest probability of that shot on goal before the launch takes off.
Gizmodo: Do you think this can become a sustainable practice?
Gialich: Absolutely. Platinum is not sitting on the surface of the Earth and I’ve seen people go like, it’s much easier to mine on Earth than it is in space. The reality is actually this: That’s not true. We know there’s a lot of platinum at the inner core of the Earth but we have no fucking idea how to get that far. And once you start digging these mines that are 2,000 meters deep and extremely hot, they’re really hard to operate in, and even machinery breaks down, that marginal cost is not going to zero, it’s going up.
So at the end of the day, [asteroid mining] can actually be a hugely lucrative, and also much more environmentally friendly in every measurable way. I mean, a large percent of global emissions comes from mining. This is a major change in how we look at mining precious material, we just have to show that it’s possible.
Gizmodo: The same way that resources on Earth are limited, are we going to run out of material in space?
Gialich: Essentially, resources in space are unlimited for the sake of this conversation. Keep in mind that aluminum in the 1800s was this super rare material, more valuable than gold, and then we found a new way to get it. You can look at the monetary aspect, but more importantly, it changed our fucking lives. The reason you can fly on an airplane is because of aluminum, the reason you have a car is because of aluminum.
I want to build the fucking future. I’m not necessarily worried about dominating the world when it comes to dollars. I want to dominate the world when it comes to ideal progression. And that’s how we think about it. At the same time, in the short term, we’re going to make a shitload of money.
