AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/astroforge-selects-target-for-high-risk-seat-of-the-pants-asteroid-mission/

by LorenDB • 1 year ago

101 79 1 year ago

It's a prospecting flyby of 2022-OB5, an 8m/25ft metallic asteroid in a 1 year orbit. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2022-OB5

Past mentions of AstroForge: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

Size estimates are really really hard to be clear. But we do have additional data that says this should be a little bit larger. That all being said, were gonna find out this year!

yk• 1 year ago

[flagged]

sebzim45003• 1 year ago

There are a lot of new space startups that operate this way, trying to replicate SpaceX's success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Retric• 1 year ago

SpaceX also came really close to failure. High risk strategies always look better after they have already paid off.

fluorinerocket• 1 year ago

It fails more often than works

HPsquared3• 1 year ago

That's how the original successful space program, the Soviet one, worked. Test-driven development is traditional in the space launch space.

Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization.

If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.

whatshisface• 1 year ago

Every successful program is test-driven.

tliltocatl• 1 year ago

The soviet space program stalled on N-1 because this approach (*integrated* move-fast-break-things testing) turned out to be unviable once there are too many failure points. And the engineers were well aware of that and proposed to do static fire tests, but that was not in the budget.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

Have you heard of Astra...

dang• 1 year ago

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hi• 1 year ago

I've met this team, been to their office and done a deep dive on what they are doing. They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company.

I do wonder why they chose Stoke Space as their launch provider given the founders come from SpaceX and Falcon rockets have a track record.

My first though is that investors are playing some game with investment going to revenues of another portfolio company. How common is this?

Overlapping Investors:

- 776

- Y Combinator

- Initialized Capital

- Caladan Ventures

aaronblohowiak• 1 year ago

I don’t know if that is what is happening here, but it is a common occurrence — both to juice numbers but also for special pricing (as mentioned in article) or mutual flexibility (dedicated launch), because the founders know each other, etc.

numbsafari• 1 year ago

verY Common…

foobarbecue• 1 year ago

Do they have a plan for reentry?

Or is the idea to sell the ore or processed material in space?

(Because when it comes to asteroid mining, I think that's the hard part. If they have believable plans here I might consider applying to work for them, but I haven't seen anything that passes the smell test on this.)

grey-area4• 1 year ago

Couldn’t you make an ablative heat shield possibly from waste materials on the same asteroid? Then lob your metal toward a shallow sea on earth?

Or take it back to some stable earth orbit then pick it up there?

Do we know what their reentry plan is?

Alex-Programs• 1 year ago

As far as I know, launching on new, unproven rockets tends to be a lot cheaper. E.g. the Escapade mission launching on New Glenn.

imglorp• 1 year ago

Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space, although reentry could be cheap if you form it into a lifting body for re-entry and are willing to lose some from ablation as it glides in.

So you have to get your miner and smelter and power plant into stable orbit at like $1m/ton, and then what? Does the money work out?

heelix• 1 year ago

I assume the point of mining in space is to have raw resources that are already outside the gravity well. Not so much for bringing it to earth, but space based construction.

sebzim45003• 1 year ago

They are going after platinum group metals, which are valuable enough that the cost of reentry is irrelevant assuming they can get a somewhat pure sample in space.

spenczar52• 1 year ago

I have directly worked with one of these companies on asteroid discovery. Even they would say it does not cash out for decades. But the premise is that as costs improve it becomes fabulously lucrative.

These companies are very, very risky. If they weren’t, you would see more competition!

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

We refine it (or better yet, enrich it) in space and bring it back to Earth. I wish someone would buy it in space, but currently, that market is worth... 0.

So, we ship that shit back to Earth and sell it into the commodities market.

LargoLasskhyfv2• 1 year ago

There is no ablation at 400°C to 800°C, which can be achieved by forming the 'lifting body' more into the direction of larger wingspans, instead of making it falling fast like a brick. Which hasn't been done so far, because larger wingspans are impractical for rocket lift from earth, but that doesn't apply here.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space

are there middlemen in this market, or is it a vertically integrated "smelt it/dealt it" situation?

financetechbro• 1 year ago

Portfolio company synergies is totally normal and a practice that Elon himself leans on

tsimionescu7• 1 year ago

They will 100% sell high value space mined materials into earth markets at a profit and be a multi-billion dollar company.

To whom? Who is interested in buying the minuscule amounts of material you could realistically bring back to earth from an asteroid? What raw material would be expensive enough to warrant the gigantic amounts of fuel needed to transport even a few tens of kilos of back?

spenczar52• 1 year ago

The usually cited mineral is iridium. It is exceptionally rare on earth (ninth rarest stable element!) but abundant in asteroids and very useful in alloys and many applications.

notfish• 1 year ago

The target market is the same as normal mining, you probably mine platinum. The cost probably only closes with either starship or mining fuel in space.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

I have over 8.5B in binding contracts.

primax2• 1 year ago

Bringing it back is a lot more energy efficient than getting up there in the first place.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

Honestly, this had nothing to do with mutual investors. While that's great, the space community is small, and we all talk to each other. Andy and Stoke Space are an amazing team, and in this case, we shared a lot of benefits with each other. It's a rare win/win.

_fat_santa• 1 year ago

Massive props to the founders for having the stones to even enter this space. I couldn't imagine the difficulties and setbacks these guys will encounter. But I think humans figuring out how to effectively mine stuff outside of our planet will be one of the great leaps forward for humanity and will likely become a proficient industry in our lifetimes.

MarcelOlsz2• 1 year ago

I think it's sad that our entire economy is designed around infinite growth to such a degree that we can say with a straight face astroid mining is the way to go. We have everything we need, it's power that is the problem and always has been.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.

derektank• 1 year ago

We have everything we need

Speak for yourself. If this company reduces the price of iridium, makes PET and CT scanners cheaper, helps more people get scans, and ultinately results in more cases of cancer and heart disease identified sooner and people leading healthier lives, then I need this company.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

Thanks — this shit is definitely hard mode. But we're 3 weeks away from sending the first private spaceship to deep space, and we're doing it for orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else before us.

Fingers crossed it works.

bloopernova• 1 year ago

I wish you every success. You're doing what 10 year old me in the 1980s dreamed of.

I still daydream about bootstrapping in solar orbit. My amateur idea was to focus the sun onto rocks with huge mirrors at first, lasers later. Then using a handwaving/centrifugal force to separate out the elements lol. Though I wasn't smart enough to figure out what was needed to build a factory via a bunch of robots.

Sorry for the rambling!

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

The surface of the Earth is an economically hard market for space mining; sure there is demand there, but there is already the most competitive supply in the solar system. It's no so clear that precious metals would be precious if you got more of them, see the short story that is titled the same as this book. [1]

I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like.

I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas.

You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

[3] https://www.dakotagas.com/

[4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source

cannonpr• 1 year ago

So much of the conversation is about profit and economic viability of landing raw materials on Earth under current market conditions... While I don't begrudge that, I think the true game changer for orbital mining is how greater material availability can open brand new frontiers, in other words, make the pie larger, not just compete and change the balance of the existing pie. I long for arcologies, orbital elevators, orbital habitats. Things that only become truly possible with automated manufacturing and a plunging of energy and material costs by orders of magnitude.

floppiplopp• 1 year ago

Space is way more difficult and expensive than people like to believe. While I wholly support the waste of venture capital and other dumb money for space things, I don't expect the company to come close to returning anything from an asteroid.

MattExSci13• 1 year ago

You will never meet a hater doing more than you.

AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission

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