AstroForge bets asteroid mining works; Odin lost, Vestri lands in 2026

AstroForge builds small, low-cost spacecraft to prospect, land on, and eventually mine metal-rich near-Earth asteroids, with the goal of returning platinum-group metals to Earth.

Metal-rich asteroids are worth more than mission cost, so a startup can iterate with cheap in-house spacecraft on rideshares and be first to land and mine one.

US$55M total raised as of August 2024, including a US$40M Series A led by Nova Threshold (SpaceNews); Odin itself cost roughly US$3.5M and was built in 10 months (Engadget).

AstroForge was founded in 2022, and CEO Matt Gialich's original thesis was that commercial space had matured enough to let a startup horizontally integrate the spacecraft, communications, and payload. As he later told SpaceNews, 'Both of those were wrong' — the company had to bring spacecraft engineering in-house.

The first mission, cubesat Brokkr-1 (2023), lost communications before its refinery demo. The second, Odin (originally Brokkr-2), failed vibration testing in March 2024; AstroForge pulled the build in-house, rebuilt the spacecraft in about 3.5 months, and held to the IM-2 rideshare slot. Odin launched February 26, 2025 toward asteroid 2022 OB5, but contact was lost days later.

Odin never reached 2022 OB5, but AstroForge framed the mission as a learning win and is preparing Vestri, a ~200 kg lander slated for a 2026 launch on Intuitive Machines' IM-3 mission to attempt the first private soft landing on a metal-rich asteroid.

Rideshare economics made a deep-space mission affordable enough for a startup to attempt with a ~$3.5M spacecraft.

Failing fast in-house beat waiting for a perfect vendor build when the company had one hard launch deadline.

Platinum-group metal prices make even a small returned sample valuable enough to anchor a mission thesis.

Each mission built the next: lost spacecraft still left the team with a tested build process and a lander program.

When you cannot afford the flagship, make failure cheap enough to learn from: a lost $3.5M spacecraft still bought the team in-house build capability and a shot at the next mission.

As of 2026-09-02 AstroForge remains active. It raised a $40M Series A in August 2024 (US$55M total), lost Odin shortly after its February 2025 launch, and is building Vestri for a 2026 launch as a rideshare on Intuitive Machines' IM-3 mission. Vestri is designed to attempt the first private soft landing on a metal-rich asteroid and quantify extractable metals; no further funding round has been announced.