AstroForge Bets on AI to Pilot Asteroid Miner

AstroForge, the asteroid mining startup backed by $56 million in venture funding, is developing an AI-powered autonomous control system called Solo to operate its spacecraft without human ground control. The transformer-based model handles anomaly detection, navigation, and subsystem management across 2,500 onboard sensors. The move follows communication failures with its Odin spacecraft in 2025, which the company couldn't recover after losing contact. AstroForge plans to test Solo in shadow mode on a 2026 lunar mission before deploying it fully on its Autonomy-1 spacecraft in 2027, potentially with no Earth-receiving radios onboard at all.