ORLANDO, Fla. — Space mining company AstroForge has revealed the destination of its next asteroid prospecting mission and has signed a contract with Stoke Space for several future launches.
AstroForge announced Jan. 29 that its Mission 2 spacecraft launching next month will travel to the asteroid 2022 OB5, a small near Earth asteroid that could be metallic. The spacecraft, called Odin, will fly by the asteroid about 300 days after launch.
Odin is flying as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9 launch Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 lunar lander mission. Intuitive Machines announced Jan. 28 that it delivered the lander, Athena, to Cape Canaveral and is planning a launch for a four-day window that opens Feb. 26.
AstroForge had previously declined to identify the asteroid Odin would visit, considering that information confidential. That lack of transparency rankled some in the spaceflight community, citing concerns about confusing the spacecraft with a natural object, and was one factor in a statement issued by the American Astronomical Society in September calling for transparency in cislunar and interplanetary spacecraft operations.
“There’s been a lot of pushback on what asteroid we’re going to from the scientific community,” said Matt Gialich, co-founder and chief executive of AstroForge, in an interview. He said it was not his company’s intent to aggravate researchers but instead work with them.
That is one reason why AstroForge is now disclosing the asteroid’s identity. “I would like more information on the asteroid, and a great way to get more information before launch is to announce which one it is for amateur astronomers to go look at,” he said. That would augment proprietary observations the company has obtained.
That information has given AstroForge some guidance on the size and composition of 2022 OB5, with Gialich saying it is up to 100 meters across and not an S-type stony asteroid. The company doesn’t yet know, though, if it is an M-type metallic asteroid that is most desirable for any mining operations.
Another advantage of the asteroid is that, at the time Odin makes its flyby, the asteroid will be within two million kilometers of the Earth, enabling higher bandwidth for returning images and other data. He said AstroForge ruled out another asteroid that had a higher chance of being an M-type body but would be further from Earth at the time of the flyby.
Another reason for disclosing the destination is to build interest in the mission. “What a great way to get people more excited than to start announcing big pieces of it as we go forward,” he said.
The mission is much an effort to demonstrate the company’s low-cost spacecraft technology — Gialich estimated the spacecraft cost the company $6.5 million — as it is to study the asteroid. “We’ve got a lot of risk to buy down. One of the lowest risks is actually the asteroid itself,” he said. ”A lot of this is, can we build a spacecraft for this price?”
Another mission is planned to launch as a rideshare on IM-3, scheduled for launch in late 2025 or early 2026. After that, Gialich said AstroForge would press ahead with missions to mind asteroids.
To launch those missions, AstroForge said it signed a contract with Stoke Space for several launches on that company’s Nova rocket under development. Stoke Space announced a $260 million round Jan. 15 to complete development of that fully reusable medium-class rocket.
Gialich declined to disclose details about the contract, including the number of launches and their schedule. “Stoke has a rocket that is ideal for our mission,” he said, based on both its size and cost. Starship, he noted, was too big for AstroForge, while Nova was more affordable than an existing vehicle like Falcon 9.
“Stoke is making tremendous progress on their rocket,” he said. “I’m excited to use them as a provider and they’re a big part of our plans going into the future.”
For now, Gialich is focused on getting Odin launched, demonstrating the ability of the company to quickly and inexpensively build the spacecraft after taking development of it in-house last year. “You don’t do that without being scared,” he said of Odin’s accelerated development. “I told everybody in the company that, if you’re not scared when we launch, we went too slow.”
