by For generations, Western space missions have mostly taken place outdoors. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they were planning to do. But the world is about to enter a new era in which private interests override such openness, and there may be big money to be made.
Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be sent on a mission to a rocky object near Earth’s orbit. If successful, it will be the first fully commercial deep space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its asteroid target a secret.
The secret space rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend unwelcome by astronomers and other experts: commercial space missions conducted in secret. Such missions highlight gaps in spaceflight regulation as well as concerns about whether the exploration of the cosmos will benefit all of humanity.
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“I’m not really in favor of having stuff floating around the inner solar system without anyone knowing where it is,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It seems like a bad precedent to set.”
But for AstroForge, the calculation is simple: If it reveals the destination, a competitor can get the asteroid’s precious metals for itself.
“There is a risk that another entity could capture that asteroid,” said Matt Gialich, chief executive of AstroForge, when announcing the asteroid.
Asteroid mining went into the doldrums in recent years after two startups were proposing that the solar system went out of business in the late 2010s. But now some companies in the United States, Europe and China are taking another stab at the effort. A conference committee even had a hearing on the matter in December.
The renaissance was fueled by a new wave of commercial space exploration, driven primarily by SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk that flies reusable rocket boosters and lowered the cost of reaching space.
With that increased activity the secrecy is also increasing.
In 2019, the Israeli-built commercial Beresheet lander collided with its attempt to land on the Moon. On board, kept secret until after the failed landing, were a few thousand tardigrades, microscopic animals provided by the non-profit Arch Mission Foundation. The accident raised concerns about the moon being potentially contaminated with the giant creatures and led to an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Recently, the spaceflight startup Virgin Galactic has withheld the identities of the people aboard its spaceplanes until after the missions have been completed, a practice unprecedented in human spaceflight. And some satellites are hitching a ride to space with many other orbiting craft, known as mission sharing missions, also kept secret.
“We’re often seeing launches where we don’t know what satellites were deployed until some time later,” said McDowell, who maintains a public database of spacecraft in orbit.
For missions beyond Earth, there are no legal restrictions against keeping the destination of a deep space mission secret as AstroForge plans to do, said Michelle Hanlon, a law professor who specializes in space at the University of Mississippi.
“We don’t have an actual process for deep space missions like this,” she said, because “there’s no licensing process” in the United States.
But complicated issues could arise if, for example, multiple asteroid miners encountered the same asteroid.
“There needs to be some kind of transparency here,” McDowell said. He noted that while space agencies and space companies were required by the United Nations to disclose their orbits and trajectories in space, “solar orbiting objects are generally ignored.”
The lack of punishment, he said, should “provide motivation among regulators.”
AstroForge’s mission, Odin, would be the second spacecraft it sent to space. The first was in April, Brokkr-1, a microwave-sized machine weighing about 25 pounds. The goal of that mission was to practice refining metals in the space environment. However, the spacecraft had problems, the company said on December 11. AstroForge is in a “race against time” to get Brokkr-1 working before it is lost.
Odin, on the other hand, weighs a much higher 220 pounds. AstroForge plans to return on a robotic mission to the moon in 2024 by the NASA-sponsored company Intuitive Machines and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. A launch date has not yet been set.
During the trip to the moon, the plan is to release Odin and enter deep space beyond the moon’s orbit. Within a year, according to AstroForge, the spacecraft will fly past the mystery asteroid, taking pictures and looking for evidence of metals.
AstroForge is targeting an asteroid thought to be an M-type asteroid. These are thought to be fragmented pieces of failed planetary cores and could be rich in precious platinum group metals, which have a wide range of uses including health care and jewelry.
No spacecraft has ever visited such an asteroid before, although NASA’s Psyche mission, launched in October, is on a mission to a possible M-type asteroid, also named Psyche, between Mars and Jupiter. However, it won’t arrive until August 2029, giving AstroForge the chance to be the first to visit such an object.
To date AstroForge has raised $13 million from investors. A full mining mission would require a much larger investment. But there is a fortune to be made if the company succeeds. On Earth, the metals that may be found on M-type asteroids can be difficult and expensive to mine. Iridium, for example, sells for thousands of dollars per ounce.
The business case for capturing metals from asteroids has not always been clear. Returning matter to Earth is difficult and expensive; NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned an estimated half pound of material from an asteroid called Bennu in September at an estimated cost of $1.16 billion.
AstroForge is confident about its financial prospects. “We’re hoping that we can return materials at a high margin,” Gialich said. “We created our business model by leveraging ride shares and partnerships to make each mission as economically viable as possible.”
Akbar Whizin, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said he understood the motivation to keep the asteroid a secret. He had previously worked at Planetary Resources, a mining start-up that had never mined any asteroids, and he, too, was excited about their goals.
“This is a commercial enterprise,” he said. “You wouldn’t go around telling people, ‘I know where the gold is.'”
But some scientists think asteroid miners should be further along in what they’re looking for. M-type asteroids give mankind a window into the chaotic early solar system 4.5 billion years ago, when objects collided frequently and the planets were born. That means anything AstroForge discovers could be scientifically valuable, said Stephanie Jarmak, a planetary scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“I’m a pretty big proponent of open science,” said Jarmak, also a NASA Science Explorer project scientist. “We’ve never visited an M-type asteroid before, so there’s a lot we can learn.”
That could include “insights into the heating processes that took place early in the history of the solar system,” said Andy Rivkin, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory who led NASA’s DART mission to go impact on an asteroid in September 2022.
“We will never touch the heart of the Earth,” he said. “So by visiting these things, we will be given information that we can extrapolate to learn more about Earth and apply that to different planets.”
Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the deputy principal investigator of the Psyche mission, said the true nature of M-type asteroids was still unclear. While it was “always under the assumption” that M-type asteroids were metallic, he said, we didn’t know for sure.
In 2010, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft flew past the asteroid Lutetia. Scientists discovered that it was not as metallic as suspected. That would make anything AstroForge discover worth more, Weiss said.
Gialich said AstroForge would be transparent, except about the asteroid itself. “We are not keeping our mission a secret,” he said. “We plan to share the images.”
Although AstroForge is not revealing its target asteroid, it may be possible to work out where the company is going.
About 30,000 near-Earth asteroids are known, giving AstroForge many potential targets. But the company has said its target is less than 330 feet in size, and can be reached within a year of launch. That means it must cross or at least pass close to Earth’s orbit. The asteroid is also suspected to be an M type, which is brighter than other asteroids due to their potential metal content.
According to Mitch Hunter-Scullion, CEO of Asteroid Mining Corp., a potential competitor to AstroForge in Britain, these clues narrow the list of potential targets to “about 300 asteroids.”
Jarmak further refined the potential targets, taking into account brightness and size. “We have a list of 14 objects,” she said.
Of these, 2010 CD55 is particularly promising, being about 270 feet across, relatively bright—referring to metallic matter—and reachable from Earth in the time frame of AstroForge’s launch date.
Gialich would not confirm or deny that suggestion.
“We don’t want to publicly declare our asteroid target,” he said.
He added that there were multiple goals that AstroForge was considering. “We are actively pursuing a number of asteroids that would be viable for our Odin mission should our launch date happen,” he said.
Even if the asteroid can’t be identified before launch, McDowell noted that amateur astronomers on Earth could track the spacecraft after it goes into space and work out where it’s going.
“There are some practical issues,” he said. “But I definitely think there will be interest in tracking it.”
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