AstroForge is putting AI in command of its next spacecraft

Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes: If only it were that easy.

When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation. But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth. The Osiris-Rex mission, which rendezvoused with an asteroid in 2018, had 100 operators on each eight-hour shift.

But resources like that aren’t available to startups, so AstroForge, which is developing technology to mine asteroids, is turning to AI. The company has developed an autonomous control stack for its spacecraft called “Solo,” a transformer-based model made in-house.

AstroForge plans to fly its first autonomous spacecraft in 2027 on the first rocket launched by Stock Space. That mission will be backed by NASA and is expected to gather scientific data about the Sun.