AstroForge announced it has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Nova Threshold, including investments from 776, Initialized, Caladan, YC, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Jed McCaleb. The funding brought AstroForge’s total capital to $55 million.
AstroForge has several upcoming missions, including the development of its third mission, Vestri. Scheduled to launch in 2025 aboard Intuitive Machines’ third mission, the 200kg Vestri spacecraft is designed to dock with a near-Earth asteroid and analyze its composition. This mission could make AstroForge the first private company to land on a celestial body beyond the Earth-Moon system.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Exciting.
But what’s the big picture? Are we exploiting in-place, enabling a local claim per western country typical mining rights and sending back/ awaiting retrieval of product? Are we looking to characterize NEOs, enable total object rights to finder/lander, tow into or near cis-lunar, and exploit? I can’t believe a company would simply offer near-‘free exploration’ benefits without identifying how the whole exploitation thing would work out over the coming decades. Are they confident that the US would support/defend(?) their found claims when ex-earth exploitation takes off. Are we prepared for a new ‘gold rush’ of companies and likely ‘antagonistic countries’ flinging themselves into NEO orbits to lay claim to any remotely ‘promising’ rock/ agglomeration that happens to have a not-too-off-putting delta-V and composition? Like ocean-floor mining, all benefits are off if we let the ESG nut-cases (or antagonizing countries) dictate the paths of development goign forward.
They can start mining ISS for valuable resources in a few years. Easy access in LEO and possibility for remote operation of mining equipment. Complicated AI can be deferred.
If they can’t manage that, they are very far from anything practically useful.