AstroForge develops AI control system for 2027 spacecraft mission

AstroForge, the commercial asteroid mining startup founded in January 2022 by Matthew Gialich and Jose Acain, is developing an onboard AI system called Autonomy-1 to autonomously navigate its next deep-space probe, targeting a mid-2027 reconnaissance mission. The system pairs radiation-hardened SAMRH71 microcontrollers with an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial flight computer running a small transformer-based model for navigation, tracking, and decision-making, since deep-space radio delays of minutes to hours make real-time human control impossible. The 2027 mission would build on the roughly 200-kilogram DeepSpace-2 spacecraft, scheduled to launch in late 2026, using hyperspectral imaging to characterize M-type near-Earth asteroids that AstroForge believes contain commercially extractable platinum-group metals.

Photo: Dirk Schuneman / Pexels AstroForge develops AI control system for 2027 spacecraft mission The asteroid mining startup is building a transformer-based autonomous navigation system to pilot its next deep-space probe without real-time human input Sending a spacecraft to an asteroid is hard. Doing it when your commands take minutes or hours to arrive is harder. AstroForge, the commercial asteroid mining startup, is building an onboard AI system called Autonomy-1 to solve exactly that problem, and it is targeting a 2027 mission to put the technology to the test. The system uses a small, transformer-based AI model, the same architectural family behind large language models, adapted here to manage navigation, tracking, and decision-making aboard a space probe without waiting for a signal from Earth. Why the spacecraft has to think for itself Beyond Earth’s magnetosphere, real-time communication is a physical impossibility. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, and at deep-space distances that still means delays of several minutes to potentially hours, depending on orbital geometry. AstroForge’s answer is an onboard compute stack built around two distinct layers. Radiation-hardened SAMRH71 microcontrollers handle core flight functions, the kind of tasks where reliability matters more than raw processing power. An NVIDIA https://cryptobriefing.com/markets/nvidia/ Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial flight computer sits alongside them, taking charge of the perception and guidance work that requires serious AI horsepower. The road to Autonomy-1 AstroForge, founded in January 2022 by Matthew Gialich and Jose Acain, has been moving through an aggressive mission cadence for a startup of its age. AI, tech, and the markets they move—in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. The Odin spacecraft launched in February 2025 and ran into trouble early, with issues affecting its solar arrays and communications systems cutting the mission short. The lessons from Odin fed directly into the design of DeepSpace-2, a roughly 200-kilogram spacecraft equipped with electric propulsion that is scheduled to launch in late 2026. A 2026 conference paper describing the program outlines a reconnaissance mission planned for mid-2027 that would build on the DeepSpace-2 platform, using hyperspectral imaging to characterize near-Earth objects, specifically the M-type asteroids that AstroForge believes contain commercially extractable platinum-group metals. Platinum-group metals, which include platinum, palladium, iridium, and others, are used extensively in catalytic converters, electronics, and fuel cells. The pitch for asteroid mining rests on the idea that certain space rocks contain these metals in concentrations that dwarf anything on Earth. AstroForge’s near-term missions are reconnaissance and technology demonstration, not extraction. Mining an asteroid requires not just reaching it and surveying it, but landing on a low-gravity body, extracting material in a vacuum, processing it, and returning it to Earth orbit or directly to the surface. Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/ .