AstroForge completes DeepSpace-2 spacecraft
Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has completed assembly of its latest spacecraft for launch later this year, incorporating lessons from a failed mission last year.
The company announced June 4 that it finished assembly of its DeepSpace-2 spacecraft, which will now undergo environmental testing. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch late this year as a rideshare payload on a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines' IM-3 lunar lander mission.
DeepSpace-2 will fly by a near Earth asteroid, although the company said the destination will depend on when the mission launches.
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"We have a series of asteroids that, depending on the day of launch, we will go to," Matt Gialich, chief executive of AstroForge, said in an interview. "We will pick a target probably a couple days before launch, once we're on the pad."
The spacecraft will travel for between two and nine months to its destination, taking images with two high-resolution cameras. The main purpose of the mission, though, is to demonstrate the performance of the spacecraft, which is intended to be part of a line of low-cost spacecraft the company will use for asteroid prospecting.
"I want to show the world we can get to an asteroid," he said. "We've got to show we can operate in interplanetary space."
As the name suggests, DeepSpace-2 is the company's second interplanetary mission. Its first, Odin, launched as a rideshare payload on the IM-2 mission last year but malfunctioned shortly after deployment. The company concluded that the spacecraft's solar arrays failed to properly deploy, depriving it of power.
AstroForge applied those lessons in the design of DeepSpace-2. "We built in a whole bunch of contingencies into the spacecraft so that we don't have the problem we had last time," he said. The solar arrays are designed to provide power even if they do not deploy, and the spacecraft can carry out its full mission if only one of the two arrays fully deploys.
The company also conducted more preflight testing. "We went so fast with Odin it was such a miracle we even got on the rocket," he said. "The lessons are test early and test often."
DeepSpace-2 is the first flight of a new modular spacecraft platform the company has developed that will be able to carry up to 50 kilograms of payload on later missions. The company's goal is to have a spacecraft that can be built at low cost for its asteroid-mining plans as well as scientific missions.
Gialich said the cost of the spacecraft was "just under" $5 million, with a total DeepSpace-2 mission cost of less than $10.5 million.
"If this thing works, this is a revolution in the way we go explore the universe. That's the shot on goal we want to take as a company. We want to change the way we think about interplanetary space travel."
The company's long-term ambitions involve mining metallic asteroids, arguing in a statement that "the mineral wealth of the Solar System will become increasingly important to humanity's advanced future."
AstroForge is not the only company interested in asteroid mining. Notably, SpaceX included asteroid mining as one of the future markets it may pursue in its initial public offering prospectus.
"We plan to pursue asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, providing abundant raw materials for space-based industries and reducing the need to launch mass from Earth," SpaceX stated in the prospectus. The company did not disclose a timeline for attempting asteroid mining.
Gialich said he welcomed SpaceX's interest in the topic.
"What is the ultimate pinnacle commercial case for space? It's to go mine the universe," he said. "Anybody that wants to think about how we change society has to think about asteroid mining."
"We might just be the only crazy people that go after it," he said of his company's asteroid-mining plans. "Now, I think Elon [Musk] jumping aboard means maybe there's two crazy people going after it."
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