Odin was dying in the dark.
The angular 265-pound spacecraft with solar panel wings—so cyberpunk it almost looks like an angel—was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 26, 2025. Its job sounded simple enough: swoop past 2022 OB5, a rocky asteroid island adrift in a starry sea, and take photographs. It did manage to leave its ride… and then it vanished. The asteroid scout had barely started its five–million–mile journey from Earth. It was powerless to reach its destination.
Misryoum newsroom reported that shortly after launch, the crew on the ground began having communications issues. They were unable to hear Odin’s transmissions. His solar panel wings might not have deployed, causing him to quickly lose power. The spacecraft, drifting uncontrollably and unstoppably into deep space, soon faded from Earth’s view, and Odin was declared lost.
Named after an all-seeing Norse god, the mission carried big ambition. If everything went according to plan and Odin journeyed to that asteroid, he would have been the first private spacecraft in history to do so. And the people behind Odin—AstroForge, a private California-based company—have been quietly building the kind of roadmap that sounds, frankly, like space piracy: plundering rocky bodies for precious metals, including platinum.
Asteroid mining isn’t new as an idea. A few companies have tried to turn it into something real and… well, it didn’t really stick. “There’s definitely economic viability there,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. “But asteroid mining, right now, is science fiction.”
AstroForge insists it isn’t waiting around for mining at scale to become a plausible fantasy. That future is treated like a “later” problem. The near-term bet is narrower and more practical: a scrappy startup flies to a metallic asteroid—at a fraction of the cost of any comparable mission by a government space agency.
In 2026, its next spacecraft—one currently under construction—will attempt something that not even Odin could have pulled off: “Fucking land on an asteroid,” says Matthew Gialich, the company’s cofounder and CEO. If the mission goes sideways the way Odin did, investors could get cold feet, and AstroForge might go the way of Icarus. But if it works, it wouldn’t just be a headline moment—it could change how private companies participate in deep space.
Asteroids themselves are the leftovers from the creation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, a kind of cosmic rubble that includes building blocks that didn’t fully piece together and remains of worlds erased by cataclysmic impacts. To some scientists they’re time capsules; to others, the carriers of water and organic matter to Earth. Planetary defenders see them as an enemy. Gialich, though, keeps returning to them like they’re X’s on a treasure map.
Most asteroids live in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but near-Earth asteroids are the ones planetary defense teams watch closely. To date, astronomers have discovered around 40,000 near-Earth asteroids. That number is set to rise dramatically: The U.S.-controlled Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began operations in 2025, and its remarkable eyesight is predicted to find 89,000 more near-Earth asteroids; NASA’s space-based Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, the first space telescope specifically designed to spy stealthy asteroids hidden by the sun’s glare, is set to launch as early as 2027.
Asteroids come in different flavors. The three main groups are the waterlogged, carbon-rich C-types (about 75 percent of all known asteroids), the second-most common stony S-types, and finally the supposedly metallic iron-and nickel-rich M-types. M-types are thought to contain precious platinum-group metals like iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium—elements used in everything from jewelry to electronics. But the hard part is that telescopes can’t confirm it in a satisfying way. “No, of course not,” Bell says. Telescopic observations of M-types, which can hint at their densities, have never conclusively shown that any are rich in metals.
Still, a big NASA mission is already racing toward one candidate: Bell is the multispectral imager lead on a $1.2 billion NASA mission that’s currently on its way to Psyche, believed to be a large M-type asteroid that could be the exposed iron core of an obliterated planet. Perhaps it’s a huge metal ball; or, as some evidence suggests, a mixture of rocky and metal matter. Either way, when the mission reaches its destination in 2029, it could be the first meeting of an envoy of humanity with an M-type rock—unless AstroForge gets there first.
There’s also the graveyard problem. Misryoum editorial desk noted that AstroForge’s path is flanked by Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, two asteroid mining companies that met financial difficulties before ever reaching an asteroid. Gialich says they were wrong on timing—“They were just too early”—and that the price to make a spacecraft was still too steep.
One bright summer day in August 2025, I went to AstroForge’s headquarters in Seal Beach, California, a short drive from Los Angeles. The place had the usual hangar atmosphere, but with a specific edge—hot solder and the sharp smell of fresh electronics warmup. Gialich didn’t ease into his pitch. He just moved. Engineers worked around the machines called Vestri, and the workspace hum sounded like it was always mid-task.
Vestri’s successor, DeepSpace-2, is where AstroForge hopes to turn that energy into something tangible. When assembled, DeepSpace-2 will be a 440-pound spacecraft with a pair of 10-foot solar panels. It will launch on another SpaceX rocket sometime in 2026, fly for roughly nine months toward its asteroid target, and include at least one sensor to survey a space rock to sniff out precious platinum-group metals. The target isn’t random either. Gialich says AstroForge will choose a diminutive target from 165 to 1,300 feet in length—no smaller than half of the Statue of Liberty, but not much larger than the Empire State Building—and spinning fairly fast. And yes, they’re trying to avoid rubble piles. Bennu, Ryugu, and Dimorphos taught everyone something: if you interact with a loosely bound “foam” asteroid the wrong way, you don’t get a clean landing.
The mission’s biggest wager is also its most human-sounding part: if AstroForge is right that its chosen asteroid is rich enough in magnetic iron and nickel, DeepSpace-2’s magnetic landing gear should grab on. If they pick wrong… they still attempt the landing, but the real fear is bouncing off. “Godspeed,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, says—capturing the skepticism of several independent experts.
And even if DeepSpace-2 manages to arrive and land, investors might still ask the uncomfortable question: will it ever pay? Busch doubts it all. “Asteroid mining ‘never really pans out,’” he says. Ian Lange doubts the economy too, pointing out that M-type asteroids’ platinum-group wealth isn’t even known. Richard Binzel goes further and says, essentially, water will come first: “Water will be the first valuable space resource.”
Gialich seems to accept the argument but refuses to let it steer the company. “I almost wish we weren’t called an asteroid mining company,” he says. What drives him, he insists, isn’t just the promise of shiny things. It’s creating a mechanism to explore the universe—through robotic ambassadors—and proving the cynics wrong. He dodges hard questions about failure. Or maybe he just refuses to think about them.
DeepSpace-2, he says, will either achieve all its goals or die trying. And the thought he keeps returning to is the easiest one: doubters looking back at DeepSpace-2’s achievement and exclaiming, “Holy fuck, they pulled it off!”
