The concept of flying out to distant asteroids and mining them for precious metals is going to seem preposterous right up until the moment that someone actually does it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a terrible business model because it requires years and years of up-front investment and solving myriad technical problems before there\u2019s any hope of a financial return. And scooping up material from a rock pile in space is a lot more challenging than mining the Earth. Asteroids are typically millions of miles away, moving tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to the Sun.<\/p>\n
Good luck.<\/p>\n
But that hasn\u2019t stopped a handful of would-be 21st-century prospectors from starting asteroid mining companies. Pretty much all of them have failed to date. However the latest one, AstroForge, has gotten further than most. It has built a spacecraft and sent it to the launch site. And on Wednesday morning, the company revealed the near-Earth target for its flyby mission.<\/p>\n
AstroForge will fly toward a small, M-type asteroid found three years ago named 2022 OB5. It likely measures a few dozen meters across, but there\u2019s a fair bit of uncertainty as to its size. This small asteroid has a few major upsides. First, it\u2019s likely richer in metals than most asteroids, and, critically, it will come within 404,000 miles of the Earth in January 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest thing is, when we intercept it, we will be less than 1 million miles from Earth,\u201d said Matt Gialich, chief executive and co-founder of the company.<\/p>\n
This is important because NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network is overtaxed in terms of its resources, so AstroForge will have to use commercially available satellite dishes around the world to communicate with its Odin spacecraft.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Odin is a rideshare payload that is due to launch as part of the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission, no earlier than February 26, on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. After the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s upper stage essentially puts itself into a trans-lunar injection, Odin will separate about 45 minutes after the launch. If all goes well\u2014and this is a huge if, Gialich readily acknowledges\u2014Odin will fly by its target asteroid 301 days later. The goal is to image the asteroid and characterize how much metal there is.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s important to remember that no private company has ever operated a spacecraft mission in deep space before, the area beyond the Moon. Moreover, AstroForge doesn\u2019t have teams of trajectory experts like NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory does for its deep space missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe built this spacecraft in 10 months,\u201d Gialich said. \u201cThis is a high-risk, by the seat-of-your-pants mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
The primary goal, he said, is to make sure Odin turns on and communicates back to Earth. Mission success, Gialich told his team, is reaching deep space beyond the Moon to determine how well Odin\u2019s components perform in this thermal and radiation environment. In terms of reaching the asteroid, failure is more likely than success.<\/p>\n
During an interview this week, Gialich also said the company has selected a launch provider for some of its future missions to land on and mine asteroids\u2014Stoke Space. AstroForge will be Stoke Space\u2019s initial customer, and the two space startups signed an agreement for \u201cmultiple dedicated launches\u201d on the Nova rocket. This booster, still in development, is intended to be fully reusable and have a payload capacity to low-Earth orbit of 5 metric tons. It is possible a debut launch could occur in 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really like their team,\u201d Gialich said. \u201cStoke offered us one of the better launch prices, and a dedicated launch makes things a lot easier for us. They can get us to deep space.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The concept of flying out to distant asteroids and mining them for precious metals is going to seem preposterous right up until the moment that someone actually does it. It\u2019s a terrible business model because it requires years and years of up-front investment and solving myriad technical problems before there\u2019s any hope of a financial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1182,21,7943],"class_list":["post-44494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-astroforge","tag-space","tag-stoke"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44494"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}