AstroForge豪赌小行星采矿可行；Odin失联，Vestri计划2026年着陆

做的是什么生意

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.

启动资金：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).

起因

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.

经过

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.

结果

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.

可借鉴之处

当你负担不起旗舰任务时，让失败变得足够廉价以从中学习：一个丢失的350万美元的航天器仍然为团队赢得了内部建造能力和下一次任务的机会。