WASHINGTON — Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has raised $40 million as the company races the clock to get its next mission ready for launch.
AstroForge announced Aug. 20 that it raised the Series A round led by Nova Threshold, bringing the total raised by the Southern California startup to $55 million. Others participating in the round include funds 776, Initialized, Caladan, YC and Uncorrelated Ventures as well as individual investor Jed McCaleb, the billionaire who also founded commercial space station company Vast.
Matt Gialich, co-founder and chief executive of AstroForge, said in an interview that the funds will support the company’s third mission, called Vestri. The spacecraft will launch as a rideshare payload on the IM-3 lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines in late 2025 and travel to an undisclosed asteroid. The 200-kilogram spacecraft will rendezvous with the asteroid and touch down on its surface to characterize it, including quantifying what precious metals could be extracted from it.
The funds will also allow AstroForge to refine technologies for refining asteroid materials in deep space. “But the primary thing it gets us is mission three,” he said.
AstroForge planned to test its refinery technologies in space on its initial mission, a cubesat called Brokkr-1 launched into low Earth orbit last year. However, problems communicating with the spacecraft kept the company from conducting the refinery demonstration.
Gialich said AstroForge expected to be able to rely on satellite manufacturers to produce its initial missions, with the company focusing on the payload. “Our thesis when we started the company was that there was enough capital that had gone into space where we could essentially horizontally integrate a lot of the company. That included communications with the spacecraft and the spacecraft itself. Both of those were wrong.”
AstroForge ran into further problems working on its second mission, originally called Brokkr-2 and later renamed Odin, that will fly by an M-class asteroid thought to have high concentrations of metals. The 100-kilogram spacecraft failed vibration testing in March, which an investigation traced to cracks in part of the spacecraft structure called the faceplate. Reviews found additional problems with the spacecraft’s propellant tanks, wire harnesses and avionics.
AstroForge announced July 30 that it had decided in early April to bring work on the spacecraft in-house. In that nearly four-month period, the company built a new version of Odin and was preparing to begin environmental testing.
“I thought that the chances of us getting there with the vendor we had selected had gone to zero,” he said of that decision. He did not identify that company but AstroForge has earlier said it was working with smallsat manufacturer OrbAstro on the mission, as it did on Brokkr-1. “We had quite a few problems, and the culmination of the vibration test failing meant that the chance of that happening was zero.”
Since that announcement, Gialich said the company has successfully completed vibration testing on its spacecraft, the same test that the earlier version failed, and is about to enter thermal vacuum tests.
“Building a spacecraft in three and a half months is stupid. Building it for deep space in three and a half months is really stupid,” he acknowledged. The company, though, is racing to complete the spacecraft in the next few months to launch as a rideshare payload on the IM-2 mission. He said the spacecraft must be delivered 35 days before launch; Intuitive Machines reported in an Aug. 13 earnings call it was planning to launch IM-2 in December or early January.
AstroForge had already decided to develop its third mission in-house, and so was able to leverage components and plans for that for the revised Odin spacecraft. He said engineers are working 24 hours a day to meet the impending deadline for Odin. “Half of this team is sleeping here every single day to get this done, and we’re all behind this massive game-changing mission,” he said. “There isn’t a substitute for just being really, really hardcore and getting this mission across the line.”
He said he never considered delaying Odin. “I told investors we’re going to be on IM-2,” he said, arguing that the investors cared ultimately about results rather than the process. “I told the team, we’re either on IM-2 or we’re not a company. Those are our two options.”
AstroForge has not disclosed details about missions after Vestri, but Gialich said he expects to talk about those plans once Odin launches. “We are still very much on track to return the first amount of platinum back to Earth before end of this decade.”