This Asteroid Mining Startup Is Ready To Launch The First-Ever Commercial Deep Space Mission

Early next year, a SpaceX rocket will be launching a drill to the surface of the Moon as part of its Artemis program. And hitching a ride on that rocket will be a smaller spacecraft, with a much more distant destination: an asteroid that will take about nine months to reach. That ship, called the Brokkr-2, is being built by California-based Astroforge as part of its journey to commercialize mining in space.

Last month, the company successfully test fired the rockets that will enable the spacecraft to make it to the distant object, a crucial last step before the spacecraft is integrated with the rocket it will launch on next year. If successful, it would mark the first time a private company sent a mission into space beyond Earth and Moon.

That test was the last major milestone the company needed to hit before sending its ship off-world, Astroforge cofounder and CEO Matt Gialich told Forbes. “The fact that that went smoothly and we didn’t show you a picture of a fireball means that we got through that gate. We’re in a really good position to make an attempt at the world’s first commercial deep space mission.”

Mining asteroids sounds like science fiction but has a very practical force behind it: as the world transitions away from fossil fuels and begins to rely even more heavily on electricity, it’s going to need more metals. But Earth’s resources are limited and many of the best places to mine for important metals are already being tapped. On Monday, an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that the metals needed for batteries and renewable energy infrastructure could start to go up in price, “potentially delaying the clean energy transition.“ The analysis goes on to suggest that demand for metals will force mining companies to dig in places where such metals aren’t as readily available, which comes with significant economic and environmental costs.

Many of the asteroids in our solar system, however, are chock full of the metals that are needed for the industries of the future, such as cobalt, nickel and platinum-group metals. Plus, those metals can be found at higher concentrations than on Earth, meaning smaller amounts of material can be mined to produce more metals. The analysis suggests that over time, it would be possible to transition away from mining on Earth for the most part, instead relying on space resources to supply the planet’s needs. That’s exactly the market that Astroforge hopes to tap.

But it isn’t the first company to try its hand at space mining. In the early 2010s, two major efforts — Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources — launched to a lot of fanfare and collectively attracted over $60 million in venture capital from investment firms like Bryan Johnson’s OS Fund. But both companies eventually closed their doors before the decade was out. Gailich and Acain are keenly aware of this history and say they’ve had lots of conversations with former employees of those two companies to learn from their experiences. But one major difference between then and now, they say, is the fact that SpaceX and other companies have radically lowered the costs involved in doing business in space. One example cofounder Jose Acain cites is that a decade ago, a deep space mission would have required reserving a rocket at a cost of hundreds of millions. But today smaller spacecraft routinely share space with larger spacecraft on one rocket, which dramatically lowers the costs involved. The company estimates the total cost of its Brokkr-2 mission will be less than $10 million.

With just $13 million in seed funding, Astroforge is certainly putting the cost issue to the test. But another advantage of the current market is the fact that, unlike 10 years ago, there’s now a thriving ecosystem of space companies offering off-the-shelf components, meaning the company doesn’t have to design its systems from the ground up. Astroforge already launched a spacecraft earlier this year, which is currently in orbit testing the company’s mineral refining technology.

“It’s certainly not out of the question” that lower launch costs could make a big difference for Astroforge’s chances of success, space industry analyst Chris Quilty told Forbes in an email. Although he hasn’t studied the company’s specific economic model, he said the fact that launch costs have been “reduced by an order of magnitude” opens up a “whole universe” of opportunities for business in space.

Both Gialich, 37, and his cofounder Jose Acain, 39, have backgrounds in space engineering. Acain interned at NASA’s Ames Research Center before spending four years at SpaceX, where he worked on both the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft, and Gialich managed teams developing software for spacecraft at Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit. But it was only after they’d both left the space industry that they met, while working together at e-scooter company Bird. During their tenure, Gialich says, both were being recruited to work on missions for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The two said that while the prospect of doing deep space missions was exciting, the idea of long, multi-year projects embroiled in tedious bureaucratic issues wasn’t. Instead, they decided to launch Astroforge.

For its first deep-space mission, the company has targeted an asteroid that it thinks has a higher concentration of metals than Earth, known as an M-type asteroid. But its first mission won’t actually mine anything — instead, its spacecraft will fly by it, using its cameras to explore its craters and other geologic structures to confirm this is the case. This will be the first time a human spacecraft has done a close inspection of such an asteroid — NASA’s Psyche mission, which launched on Friday, is heading to explore another M-type asteroid, but it won’t reach its destination until 2029. Astroforge hopes the data gathered on Brokkr-2’s mission can then be used to plan future mining missions.

If that mission succeeds, the company will develop further missions to characterize asteroids, develop its mining technologies and plan return missions to Earth. Eventually, the company’s goal is to mine one to two tons worth of material and return it to Earth to sell on the spot markets. It hopes this will end up being cheaper than mining on Earth; for metals like platinum, the company thinks it can support mining missions with over 80% margins. (Platinum currently trades at about $25 million per ton.) Every step of the way is a gamble, Astroforge’s founders acknowledge, but one they’re hopeful can pay off.

“We’re an all-in or nothing company,” Gailich said. “All of our chips are in the center of the table every six months. That’s what makes it fun and exciting to us, and this is the way we’ll continue to operate the company until we either mine an asteroid or go bankrupt.”

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