CNN
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His venture may seem far out, but asteroid mining CEO Matt Gialich has no illusions. The engineer cofounded the bold California startup AstroForge in 2022 with the aim of hunting for precious metals in space, and he is all too aware that success is not guaranteed.
And, quite frankly, he’s afraid.
“I’m f**king terrified,” Gialich told CNN in a video interview earlier this month. “That’s the honest truth.”
But fear, Gialich emphasized, is an element of the job that he believes AstroForge should embrace as the company prepares to launch its robotic spacecraft, Odin, on an asteroid flyby mission that will mark the company’s first attempt to scout for platinum in space.
The probe is set to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 26.
AstroForge’s spacecraft will ride alongside Athena, a lunar lander developed by the startup Intuitive Machines, until it breaks off on its own. Gialich said Odin should reach the far side of the moon in just five days but will spend another roughly 300 days in the celestial void, waiting to make a close approach to its target asteroid.
Notably, the spacecraft — which is roughly the size of a window air-conditioning unit — was developed in just the past 10 months. Less than a year is a relatively miniscule timeline for aerospace development.
“I tell the (AstroForge) team all the time — if you’re not scared when we launch, we went too f**king slow,” Gialich added. “Like, you have to live on the edge of fear to achieve greatness.”
In many ways, AstroForge is a poster child for a dominant theme in the space industry. Young, ambitious startups are seeking to achieve what governments alone have done so far — and do it far more cheaply in the process. But with asteroid mining, no company has yet accomplished what Gialich and his team are about to attempt.
Odin, named for the father of Thor in Norse mythology, will be one of the first spacecraft developed by a private sector company to travel to deep space, or beyond the moon.
The spacecraft is set to spend a little under a year traveling to an asteroid called 2022 OB5, which next year is expected to travel within about 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) of Earth. Equipped with an optical camera, Odin will snap photographs and transmit them to the mission team.
AstroForge is banking that 2022 OB5 is an M-type asteroid, potentially rich with platinum. And if Odin’s camera can confirm that the space rock contains the valuable metal, a future AstroForge mission may aim to extract, refine and ferry the material back to Earth — where platinum is costly and used in various industries including electronics, pharmaceuticals and petroleum refining.
The plan is audacious, Gialich acknowledged.
Two other aerospace companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, folded while chasing such a dream in the past six years.
So far, only government space agencies from the United States and Japan have brought minuscule samples from asteroids back to Earth at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To realize its vision, AstroForge will have to do this orders of magnitude cheaper.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission cost over $770 million for spacecraft development and assembly of its launch vehicle and returned just 122 grams of an asteroid sample in September 2023 — which was double the amount of material NASA hoped to collect.
AstroForge says this flyby reconnaissance mission will cost the company less than $7 million. In total, the company has raised about $60 million to date — which just a decade ago would not even be enough money to get a tiny satellite to orbit.
“It’s going to be very, very hard for this company to be successful,” Gialich said. “I work every day at making it a little bit easier — and that’s all I can do.”
But Gialich believes wholeheartedly in this pursuit, beyond just the mission at hand.
He told CNN in an interview last year that he’s only partly motivated by the prospect of success. “Even if we’re not successful and we fail as a company, I hope that we push this forward a little bit,” he said.
The underlying mission, Gialich added, is to encourage the private sector to continue striving for outlandish feats in the hopes that the price of space travel continues to go down. Even if asteroid mining isn’t possible today, or done by AstroForge, it may become reality for one entity or another down the road.
“To me, it is about pushing humans forward,” he said.
Gialich is not alone. Space visionaries have long imagined that precious metals could be abundantly harvested from the rocks flying aimlessly through our solar system — providing nearly bottomless access to resources that can be rare and environmentally destructive to obtain on our home planet.
With the February 26 launch, as Odin takes off on board a lunar lander developed by Intuitive Machines, AstroForge will have perhaps made it further than any other startup founded under the same goal. While Planetary Resources launched a couple small demonstration satellites, AstroForge will be the first private-sector company to actually send a spacecraft in close proximity to an asteroid, venturing into deep space.
There are plenty of upsides to the pursuit of asteroid mining, said Paul Stimers, an attorney and space policy expert with Holland & Knight.
“From my perspective, all we’re doing is removing a rock from space, or hollowing out a rock in space, that doesn’t have any life on it, doesn’t have any ecology at all, doesn’t have any indigenous peoples,” Stimers told CNN. “There’s none of the things that have been downsides of terrestrial mining.”
There are, however, some key questions hanging over the prospect of mining asteroids for resources: Will it ever be cost-effective? What happens if more than one company targets the same asteroid? Is any of this legal in the first place?
That last question was not specifically addressed in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is the primary document governing global activity in space. The document does make the vague yet sweeping declaration that space is “the province of all mankind.”
And until recently, Stimers said it hardly mattered whether it was technically feasible for a company to mine an asteroid.
“The question was, would they be allowed to keep what they mined?” Stimers said.
At least for the United States, that question was answered with the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which Stimers had a hand in crafting, he said. The law made clear that private companies can, in fact, claim ownership of spaceborne materials, he said.
Only three other countries have similar laws: Japan, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates.
AstroForge has already butted heads with the science community. That’s because the company initially declined to publicly say which asteroid it would target, leaving open the possibility that observatories could unwittingly spot the spacecraft and mistake it for something hazardous or a phenomenon worthy of additional inspection.
AstroForge relented after pushback, acknowledging in January that it aimed to send the vehicle to 2022 OB5.
But Gialich told CNN that things could change. “One of the best things we have as a company is we can change targets at any time … so it’s not a huge deal to me to say this one,” he said.
“Now, when we find this mythical asteroid that’s purely platinum and is worth $1 trillion in actual material — am I going to tell the world which one it is?” Gialich said. “Probably not.”
Astronomers recognize that companies like AstroForge do not legally have to disclose where they are going in space. But it can cause costly and time-consuming headaches.
“What we’d like to do is work in cooperation with (these) commercial entities to be able to make sure that science isn’t impacted in some of the most egregious ways,” the president of the American Astronomical Society, Dara Norman, told CNN earlier this month. “If we’re confused about whether something is an unknown asteroid … then it starts to cost us money to do things like tracking it or figuring it out.”
Inspiring and expensive
Still, Gialich said he is not anti-science. The opposite is true, he stressed.
He’s inspired by bold, deep-space projects, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Voyager and Cassini. But he’s frustrated at the price points of such missions.
“You don’t need to spend a billion and a half dollars to go answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe,” Gialich said. “We can do it for a lot less.”
That is, at least, the hope.
It’s not clear whether AstroForge’s $7 million Odin spacecraft will make it to the asteroid 2022 OB5.
It’s also unclear if the company will be able to determine — with any level of certainty — that the asteroid contains platinum based on the pictures Odin delivers.
And even if it does, a future mission that travels back to 2022 OB5, or any other asteroid, and actually harvests resources for AstroForge to sell back on Earth is an even longer shot.
But, Gialich reiterated, he does not believe there is room to fret failure.
“You have to make decisions,” he said, “and live with the consequences.”