AstroForge plans to give its Solo artificial intelligence system control of a spacecraft on its Autonomy-1 mission in early 2027. The asteroid mining company said the vehicle will operate without commands from Earth after launch on the first flight of Stoke Space\u2019s Nova Pathfinder rocket. Before then, AstroForge intends to fly Solo in a monitoring role aboard its DeepSpace-2 spacecraft, targeted for launch by the end of 2026.<\/p>\n
The plan grew out of AstroForge\u2019s experience with Odin, which launched in February 2025. Odin reached deep space, but communications problems prevented the company from regaining control and completing most of the mission\u2019s objectives. Deep-space antennas are scarce, and opportunities to send commands can be limited. AstroForge is developing Solo so a spacecraft can recognize and respond to some problems using data already available onboard.<\/p>\n
Solo is a transformer-based intelligence layer built over the company\u2019s existing, physics-based flight software. AstroForge says it can monitor spacecraft systems, identify abnormal behavior and coordinate a response while conventional algorithms continue to perform their assigned control functions. The company is training subsystem models with test data and drawing on information from roughly 2,500 spacecraft sensors.<\/p>\n
Armand Awad, AstroForge\u2019s head of flight software, described a possible case in which Solo would connect a loss of position knowledge and a power anomaly to a star tracker fault, then attempt a corrective action such as restarting the component. That is a proposed capability; the planned flights have yet to demonstrate that Solo can diagnose and resolve such a fault in space.<\/p>\n
Chief executive Matthew Gialich has also framed autonomy as an operating-cost decision. He estimated that building a ground network with five dishes around the world would cost about $200 million. AstroForge says ground operations account for nearly a third of its mission costs. Onboard decision-making could reduce the time spent waiting for ground contact, although a successful autonomous flight would not establish that every spacecraft problem can be resolved without operators.<\/p>\n
Spacecraft already perform some tasks autonomously. NASA\u2019s Deep Space 1 tested onboard decision-making, and OSIRIS-REx used autonomous navigation during its final descent to asteroid Bennu. AstroForge\u2019s proposed distinction is broader mission operation without commands from Earth, including responses to anomalies. That approach also raises the stakes for testing: an incorrect diagnosis or action might be difficult to reverse if the spacecraft cannot receive a ground command.<\/p>\n
The next test is DeepSpace-2, which AstroForge expects to launch alongside Intuitive Machines\u2019 third lunar mission in the fourth quarter of 2026. The spacecraft is intended to travel to a near-Earth asteroid. Solo will run in \u201cshadow mode,\u201d allowing engineers to examine its decisions without handing it control.<\/p>\n
Autonomy-1 is scheduled to follow on Nova Pathfinder\u2019s first flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Stoke Space says the spacecraft will operate without ground commands after separation and support COMPASS, a NASA Goddard heliophysics payload. Gialich has said he currently wants Autonomy-1 to fly without a radio capable of receiving commands from Earth, while acknowledging that the team may change that decision before launch. Whether Solo is ready for that arrangement will depend in part on what AstroForge learns from the DeepSpace-2 flight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AstroForge plans to give its Solo artificial intelligence system control of a spacecraft on its Autonomy-1 mission in early 2027. The asteroid mining company said the vehicle will operate without commands from Earth after launch on the first flight of Stoke Space\u2019s Nova Pathfinder rocket. Before then, AstroForge intends to fly Solo in a monitoring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90030,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[130,7377,1182,288,1860,190,10501,345],"class_list":["post-90029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-asteroid-exploration","tag-astroforge","tag-deep-space","tag-heliophysics","tag-nasa","tag-spacecraft-autonomy","tag-stoke-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90029"}],"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=90029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90031,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90029\/revisions\/90031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}