On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.
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However, Gialich said AstroForge learned a lot from this mission and is working toward launching a second spacecraft named Odin. This will be a rideshare payload on the Intuitive Machines-2 mission, which is due to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. If successful, the Odin mission would be spectacular. About seven months after launching, Odin will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data—truly visiting terra incognita. Odin would also be the first private mission to fly by a body in the Solar System beyond the Moon.
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On Tuesday, the company also announced plans for its third mission, Vestri (the company is naming its missions after Norse deities). This spacecraft will be about twice as large as Odin and is intended to return to the targeted metallic asteroid and dock with it. The docking mechanism is simple—since the asteroid is likely to be iron-rich, Vestri will use magnets to attach itself.
The docking mechanism is simple—since the asteroid is likely to be iron-rich, Vestri will use magnets to attach itself.
Love this.
That is brilliantly simple. Certainly better than using collector limpets.
I understand this reference and I approve o7
Collector limpet failed :(
Programming limpet drone
Collector limpet failed
Programming limpet drone
o7
Fly safe, cmdr
o7
Make the magnets strong enough and they won’t even need rockets :D
Cool!
So, soon the space miners will need an outlet during their inevitable rivalries…
Might I recommend a… maybe a series of gruesome matches… a tournament if you will…
In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.
Liandri Mining Corporation, working with the NEG, established a series of leagues and bloody public exhibitions. The fights’ popularity grew with their brutality.
Soon, Liandri discovered that the public matches were their most profitable enterprise. The professional league was formed; a cabal of the most violent and skilled warriors in known space, selected to fight in a Grand Tournament.
Now it is 2341. 50 years have passed since founding of DeathMatch. Profits from the Tournament number in the hundreds of billions.
You have been selected to fight in the professional league by the Liandri Rules Board. Your strength and brutality are legendary.
The time has come to prove you are the best. To crush your enemies. To win the Tournament.
Unreal Tournament GOTY let’s fucking go!
exactly!
Personally, I’m just waiting on Deep Rock Galactic to get started. Rock and stone!
That would be unreal if true!
This is really cool, but it would have been cooler if they’d named their scouting missions Hugin and Mugin, since they’re Odin’s ravens that scour the earth for secrets to give to Odin.
That’d be too close to the plot of Ace Combat 7
Mining CEO: is there a cheaper way to deliver this mineral rich material to the surface of the earth?
Mining scientist: YES! We can redirect the asteroid towards the planet and make it land on the surface!
Mining CEO: how much will this cost?
Mining scientist: probably billions of lives.
Mining CEO: … No no … I mean how much money will this save us and how much money will we make?
We’re going to break the table into two teams: team 1 will research the value of the asteroid for space construction, and team 2 will research the fees we can charge world governments not to accidentally drop the asteroid on their country.
It’s amazing people are still wasting time and resources on this trash while the planet is literally being destroyed.
How long until they call it an “AI” miner? That’s when the big bucks come in.
I don’t think that viewpoint makes sense.
It’s like saying you shouldn’t throw out food because people elsewhere in the world are starving.
The two things are divided by a large gap of unrelatedness.I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.
This is not space exploration, this is not for science’s sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there’s virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity’s exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we’re in.
“I wish we could mine without destroying the environment”
“Well what if we mined in space instead?”
“Why don’t you focus on the problems here on Earth buddy. Wow what an idiot. Can you believe that guy?”
Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.
There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.
Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won’t bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.
Coal is a basic substance, so it is in the space. Maybe there is not likely oil or gas ( although I believe methan should be pretty much available everywhere as it’s simple substance ), uranium will be in space for sure. Maybe even mining dead stars or close to dead would be possible in the future, who knows
If you engineer for it, you can send up a machine to fabricate the miners with raw resources. Then you just have to send up a couple starter miners and you never have to send another rocket up. Infinite resources down (limited by time). Solar power to drive the machines. Hell the manufacturer can double as basic initial processing plant and drop purified metals.
There miners robot don’t exist yet, but they would probably require high tech components and manufacturing capabilities for all these different components (motors, electronics, batteries, sensors, …).
Self replicating robots is still science fiction. If we wanted to build such robots in space, we’d need to build and launch manufacturing facilities in space before we can actually build robots in space.
This means space colonization. Here is the problem: 1) either we meet sooner or later aliens whom we don’t whether they are dangerous and hostile 2) we discover we live in a simulation but still every simulation has its limits ( like maps in the games )
Heh, the first step in a long series of steps towards orbital shipyards and coriolis-class space stations.
The future is looking bright.
Climate change is threatening to potentially be an extinction level event and yet Americans keep buying bigger and bigger tank sized vehicles… If we can’t even be bothered to save ourselves by addressing climate change now then I think there is virtually zero chance that we will ever colonize space or other planets.
I wonder how long we could mine before we cause gravity issues. Couple dozen millennia?
Feels like we’re 20 years too early for that, but I hope it works out well. That’s the inevitable long term solution.
