AstroForge

A Big Picture Problem 🗺️

The Quandary of Mining

The Dilemma

• Current State: Earth has a limited amount of natural resources, and society needs to mine many more precious metals and raw materials in order to build the products to transition the global economy to net-zero emissions and minimal waste.

• Complications: While the mining industry on Earth is attempting to reduce its use of emissions and hazardous chemicals, the mining process still pollutes the environment, damages the biosphere, threatens the safety of workers and impacts the health of local communities and biodiversity.

• Consequences: The damage caused by mining and the scarcity of resources to retrieve precious metals and raw materials leads to conflicts, economic instability, and social unrest around the world.

Searching For A Solution 📡

Astroforge

The Basics

• Mission: To make space resources accessible on Earth.

• Summary: Astroforge is developing a spacecraft and other cutting-edge technology to explore, extract, and process valuable materials and precious metals from asteroids.

• Year Founded: 2022

The Framework

• Solution(s): The Asterank database estimates hundreds of known asteroids hold mineral deposits worth > $100 trillion USD. Society would experience a major paradigm shift if a fraction of these deposits can be returned to our planet and replace the mining industry on Earth.

• Strategy: Since today’s technology is not at the scale and sophistication to mine asteroids in large quantities, Astroforge needs to follow a milestone-based approach where they start with small-scale missions and gradually increase the complexity and ambition of their projects over time.

• Signal: Later this year, they plan to launch their Odin spacecraft into deep space. If successful, this would be the first private space mission to fly towards a celestial object that is farther away from Earth than the Moon.

The Team

• Founder(s):

  • Chief Executive Officer - Matt Gialich. 

    • Previously:

      • Lead Software Engineer @ Virgin Orbit.

      • Director @ Bird Scooters.

  • Chief Technical Officer - Jose Acain.

    • Previously:

      • Deputy Chief Engineer @ SpaceX.

      • Engineer @ NASA.

• Headquarters: Huntington Beach, California, United States

• # Of Employees: 11 - 50

Click the button below to request an introduction to the founder

The Channels

• Socials: LinkedIn. Twitter. YouTube.

• Website: https://www.astroforge.io

• Resources: A story featuring Astroforge from Undark.

Risk Alerts ⚠️

The Threats

• Commercial Risk: While scientists may know the mineral composition of many asteroids, they may not know the geological grade of these minerals. More advanced asteroid pre-screening and mineral quality control checks need to be designed before extraction missions, which increases the costs and complexity of a space mining operation.

• Technical Risk: It is difficult to communicate to a machine in space from Earth in near real-time, which makes it far harder for teams to troubleshoot time-sensitive issues that can threaten the success of a mission. For example, dust clouds caused by asteroid mining activities can damage machinery, and not responding to certain damages immediately because of communication delays may be disastrous.

• Comparable To:

  • Karman+.

  • TransAstra.

  • Origin Space.

Deal Tracker 🧮

The Cap Table

• Series: A.

• Raised: $40 million USD. They have raised $55 million total.

• Investors: Led by Nova Threshold. Participation from 776, Initialized, Y Combinator and others.

Market Insights 💡

The Landscape

• Recent News: Within the past year, both India and Japan joined the Soviet Union, the United States, and China as the only nations to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. China also brought back lunar samples from the far side of the moon just a few months ago.

• Growth Rates: According to a report from Market Research Future, the space mining market was valued at just $1.2 billion in 2022, but is expected to grow by over 23% over the next 9 years and reach an $8 billion market valuation by 2032.

• Ecosystem Dynamics: While the United Nations has a number of treaties and agreements for space affairs, some legal analysts argue the world’s existing space governance framework is outdated and does not adequately address issues like property rights and space debris in a future with more commercialization. Norton Rose Fulbright.

Industry Trends 📊

The Indicators

• Catalysts: According to NASA, the costs to launch cargo into low orbit space has decreased by 90% - 95% since the last space shuttles built by NASA. This is largely thanks to the advent of reusable rockets and more efficient mission designs, such as separating astronauts and cargo into dedicated rockets.

• Challenges: The investment required to conduct asteroid sample return missions today vastly outweigh the amount of material that can be returned for research, let alone commercial use. For example, Hayabusa, Hayabusa2, and OSIRIS-REx all cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fund, and only a few grams of asteroid ore were returned from each mission.

• Recommended Reading: How Apollo Flew to the Moon by W. David Woods is a journey through the technical issues the Apollo program encountered and how the scientists managed to problem solve and overcome each obstacle in their way.

A Toolkit To Go 🛠️

The Equipment

• ⚒️ Retool - A toolkit for developers to build internal software for sales, marketing, operations and more.

• 🔮 Grafana Labs - Open source software to visualize and monitor an organization’s operational data.

• 🗞️ The Aurorean Newsletter - Our team’s weekly roundup of STEM’s most significant stories of progress. We scour 100+ sources so you don’t have to.

Share your favorite tools with us →

Share Your Thoughts 💬

The Community Wisdom