AstroForge is an American aerospace startup founded to mine platinum-group metals from metallic asteroids and return the refined material to Earth. Founded in early 2022 by Matt Gialich and Jose Acain, the company builds small, low-cost spacecraft designed to fly deep-space missions more rapidly than traditional exploration programs.
The company has flown two flight tests and lost primary communications on both before demonstrating core technology. Its first satellite, Brokkr-1, reached orbit in 2023 but could not activate its refining payload, while its 2025 deep-space probe, Odin, suffered ground-station and vehicle failures shortly after launch. A third spacecraft, DeepSpace-2, is scheduled to fly on a Falcon 9 rideshare to an asteroid in late 2026.
Who Founded AstroForge and How the Startup Is Funded
AstroForge was founded in early 2022 and incorporated on January 10, 2022, by Matt Gialich and Jose Acain. Both co-founders brought experience from earlier space programs. Gialich, who serves as Chief Executive Officer, holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Before starting AstroForge, he led flight software and guidance, navigation, and control teams at Virgin Orbit, and later served as Director of Vehicle Software at the micro-mobility firm Bird. Acain previously worked as an engineer at both NASA and Virgin Orbit.
The company gained early institutional backing through the Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch, using the tag “We Mine Asteroids.” In May 2022, AstroForge announced a $13 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, according to reporting by TechCrunch. Participating investors included Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2, and Soma. At that time, the business operated out of Huntington Beach, California, with four full-time employees.
In August 2024, SpaceNews reported that AstroForge raised a $40 million Series A equity round led by Nova Threshold. Other participants in the round included 776, Initialized Capital, Caladan, Y Combinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Jed McCaleb, the founder of space station developer Vast. That financing brought AstroForge’s total venture funding to $55 million, with proceeds dedicated to manufacturing and flying its third deep-space mission.
As the engineering operation expanded, AstroForge moved its headquarters in September 2024 to a 64,000-square-foot facility in Seal Beach, California. The facility houses internal spacecraft integration bays, refining test benches, and environmental testing hardware, providing space to process two deep-space vehicles at once. The company has announced no subsequent priced equity rounds as of September 2026.
The AstroForge Space Mining Strategy and Operating Model
AstroForge’s stated business is asteroid mining and the extraction of platinum-group metals and other critical minerals, using spacecraft it describes as low-cost, autonomous, and built to fly often. Company marketing claims suggest asteroid-mining operations could yield roughly 85 percent operating margins compared to approximately 7 percent for terrestrial mining operations.
The refining step AstroForge has actually flown hardware for is the one Brokkr-1 carried: a payload meant to vaporize asteroid-like material and sort it into its elemental components. The founders’ 2022 goal was to become the first to mine an asteroid and bring the material back to Earth as early as the end of the decade.
In October 2024, the Federal Communications Commission granted AstroForge the first commercial deep-space license issued to a private entity, authorizing communications beyond two million kilometers from Earth. AstroForge also markets a rideshare payload service on its deep-space missions.
Academic modeling has examined the economic implications of the concept. A July 2026 study published on the arXiv repository by researchers Nachtrieb and Smith modeled whether successful extraction would disrupt commodity prices. The authors concluded that global market prices for platinum-group metals would drop toward the lower marginal extraction costs of space mining once primary global supply transitioned off-world.
Mission Record: Brokkr-1, Odin, and DeepSpace-2
AstroForge is testing its operational concepts across progressive demonstration missions.
| Mission | Launch Date | Vehicle Specs | Primary Objective | Flight Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brokkr-1 | April 15, 2023 | 6U CubeSat built on an OrbAstro bus | Test in-orbit vaporization and sorting of asteroid-like material | Partial mission: achieved orbit and deployment, but payload never activated |
| Odin | February 26, 2025 | 100 kg custom bus with deep-space avionics | Fly by near-Earth asteroid 2022 OB5 and capture imagery | Failure: contact lost within days due to ground-station and spacecraft errors |
| DeepSpace-2 | Late 2026 (Scheduled) | 200 kg custom bus with electric propulsion | Rendezvous with a metallic asteroid; assess mineral distribution | Awaiting launch on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 lunar mission |
Brokkr-1 (2023)
Brokkr-1 launched on April 15, 2023, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The vehicle was a 6U CubeSat built around a commercial satellite bus supplied by OrbAstro. The secondary payload contained a miniature refining unit loaded with an asteroid-simulant sample that the system was programmed to vaporize and separate into constituent elements.
Operations ran into immediate challenges after deployment alongside dozens of rideshare satellites. The AstroForge operations team required roughly 20 days to identify the satellite and establish contact. In addition, an internal magnetic field generated by the refining hardware prevented the solar arrays from unlatching, a risk the company acknowledged identifying before launch.
The solar panels were freed on September 2, 2023. While the team completed spacecraft commissioning and basic downlinks, the operations team could not close the command uplink required to activate the refinery payload. Last contact was recorded on May 16, 2024.
Odin (2025)
The company’s second mission, Odin, was designed to complete a deep-space flyby of asteroid 2022 OB5, a body measuring roughly 3 to 13 meters across and suspected to be a metallic M-type asteroid. Odin originally faced a setback on March 12, 2024, when the original vehicle failed vibration testing because of baseplate manufacturing defects. The engineering team pulled forward an internal spacecraft design and fabricated a custom 100-kilogram vehicle in under ten months. In a published post-mission review, AstroForge stated the spacecraft cost approximately $3.5 million to build, although Payload had earlier reported a figure of less than $7 million.
Odin launched on February 26, 2025, riding as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission to the Moon. The probe became the first commercial spacecraft directed on an asteroid intercept trajectory.
Communications failed during early operations. The company’s published debrief documented external ground-station errors, including major technical issues at an Australian station, reversed antenna polarization, pointing errors, and local cellular interference. Spacecraft data indicated the vehicle entered Sun Safe Mode without confirming solar-array release, and tracking suggested the chassis was tumbling. The team logged brief signals 7 and 15 hours after launch, but lost all signals by 36 hours. On March 6, 2025, with Odin roughly 270,000 miles from Earth, AstroForge wrote that the chance of talking with the spacecraft was minimal.
DeepSpace-2 (2026)
DeepSpace-2, the IM-3 spacecraft that 2024 and 2025 coverage called Vestri, is a 200-kilogram platform. According to Aerospace America, the spacecraft cost approximately $10 million and was assembled in eight and a half months. The probe carries two EPS X00 electric propulsion units supplied by Safran Defense & Space, containing a Hall-effect thruster, power processing units, and 60 kilograms of onboard xenon propellant. Solar arrays generate two kilowatts of electrical power.
The vehicle is built to fly on a Falcon 9 as a rideshare passenger on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission, which is targeted for launch in the fourth quarter of 2026. Following translunar injection, the probe will use electric propulsion over a flight profile lasting three to nine months to rendezvous with a near-Earth metallic asteroid selected from a pool of roughly 28 candidates.
After Odin was lost, AstroForge invested in internal qualification equipment at its Seal Beach facility, adding a thermal-vacuum chamber, anechoic RF testing room, vibration table, and solar simulators. DeepSpace-2 completed hardware assembly on June 3, 2026. The flight profile calls for close-range imaging of the target body, with a possible landing attempt; AstroForge’s June 2026 essay says it will attempt to land, while its DeepSpace-2 page describes flyby and imaging.
AstroForge Stock Status as a Private Company
AstroForge is not publicly traded. The company has no public stock ticker, its equity does not trade on any stock exchange, and it has announced no plans for an initial public offering as of September 2026.
Public equity markets contain no direct stock for AstroForge. Readers should treat any website or platform offering direct retail shares of AstroForge stock as unverified, because the company has announced no public retail stock offerings.
Investors can evaluate public aerospace suppliers that participate in the startup’s mission architecture. Intuitive Machines, whose IM-2 carried Odin and whose IM-3 is slated to carry DeepSpace-2, is covered in our guide to researching Intuitive Machines stock. The listed names with a documented resource link are mapped in our space mining stocks guide. Safran’s Hall thrusters on DeepSpace-2 are the type explained in our ion propulsion guide. For readers tracking the financing and private asset models used by space startups, OrbitalIntel’s look at how to invest in SpaceX explains pre-IPO structures, while the Varda investment overview evaluates another private orbital manufacturing business.
How AstroForge Compares to Other Space Resource Ventures
AstroForge is one of three U.S. companies with announced asteroid missions; the others, and the two earlier companies that no longer exist as independent miners, are compared row by row in our list of asteroid mining companies.
AstroForge’s target is platinum-group metals returned to Earth, where a market already exists, while Karman+ targets water for a propellant market that does not yet exist. At OrbitalIntel, we observe that both paths trade away the safety of low Earth orbit to tackle the difficult navigation, communications, and power margins of deep space. A broad comparison of the legal treaties, candidate resources, and extraction technologies across the market appears in the space mining explainer.
What to Watch Next for AstroForge
The immediate company milestone is the integration and launch of DeepSpace-2 on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission, scheduled for late 2026. AstroForge must show it can track and command a spacecraft beyond lunar orbit, the step that failed on Odin; its published lessons include automatic beacons and redundancy across ground-station networks.
A successful rendezvous would return high-resolution images of the target and, AstroForge says, a measurement of its platinum-group metal abundance.
The longer-term hurdle remains in-situ resource extraction. AstroForge still has not demonstrated zero-gravity material vaporization and separation in flight after the uplink failure on Brokkr-1. That refining step has to work in space before AstroForge’s goal of returning metal to Earth can be tested. Flight updates are posted on AstroForge’s DeepSpace-2 page.