Asteroid Mining Startup Loses Its Spacecraft Somewhere Beyond the Moon

A privately built spacecraft is tumbling aimlessly in deep space, with little hope of being able to contact its home planet. Odin is around 270,000 miles (434,522 kilometers) away from Earth, on a silent journey that’s going nowhere fast.

California-based startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on February 26 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The probe was headed toward a small asteroid to scan it for valuable metals, in service of the company’s ambitious goal of mining asteroids for profit. AstroForge was also hoping to become the first company to launch a commercial mission to deep space with its in-house spacecraft, a dream that fell apart shortly after launch.

After Odin separated from the rocket, the company’s primary ground station in Australia suffered major technical issues due to a power amplifier breaking, delaying AstroForge’s first planned attempt to contact the spacecraft, the company revealed in an update on Thursday. The mission went downhill from there, as several attempts to communicate with Odin failed and the spacecraft’s whereabouts were unknown. “I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission,” AstroForge founder Matt Gialich said in a video update shared on X.

AstroForge is working on developing technologies for mining precious metals from asteroids millions of miles away. The company launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine asteroid material in orbit. Its initial task also did not go as planned, as the company struggled to communicate with its satellite.

For its second mission, AstroForge opted to build its spacecraft in-house to avoid some of the problems encountered during its first mission, Gialich told Gizmodo in an interview last year. AstroForge built the $3.5 million spacecraft in less than ten months. “We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?” Gialich is quoted as saying in AstroForge’s recent update. “At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try.”

And try they did. “With continued attempts to command Odin over 18 hours per day, we were seeing no additional signs of commands received, preventing us from establishing communications,” AstroForge wrote in the update. “We employed more sensitive spectrum recorders and reached out to additional dishes to make sure we weren’t just missing Odin’s faint calls home, but to no avail.”

The team also reached out to observatories and amateur astronomers to try to track Odin, but the spacecraft was too faint to spot with smaller telescopes. “Wish we would have made it all the way – But the fact that we made it to the rocket, deployed, and made contact on a spacecraft we built in 10 months is amazing,” Gialich wrote Thursday on X.

AstroForge is still planning on launching its third mission, Vestri. The spacecraft is designed to travel to the company’s target near-Earth asteroid and dock with the body in space. The Vestri spacecraft will also be developed in-house, and is scheduled for launch in late 2025, hitching a ride with Intuitive Machines’ third mission to the Moon. “This is a new frontier, and we got another shot at it with Vestri,” Gialich added.