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(TechCrunch) Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value. Y Combinator startup Astroforge wants to succeed where other companies have failed, by becoming the first to mine an asteroid and bring the material back to Earth — and it’s aiming to do so as early as the end of the decade.

To kickstart its operations, the startup has closed a $13 million seed round, financing which co-founder Matt Gialich says will fund Astroforge through its first two missions, including an initial demonstration flight that’s scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission next year. The seed round was led by Initialized Capital, with investments from Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2 and Soma.

Astroforge’s two co-founders, Gialich and Jose Acain, say they have developed an innovative technique to refine materials in-space — but for now, they’re staying mostly mum on what it involves, and how it solves the myriad technical challenges for which asteroid mining is so notorious. They were able to share that the technology requires a high-rated vacuum and to be in zero-G to work.

wjfox wrote: ↑Thu May 04, 2023 8:01 am

Two teams of economists have conducted economic assessments of mining asteroids—one of them is a trio with one member each from the University of Tor Rome Vergata, the University of Maryland and Middlebury College. They looked at asteroid mining as part of the next logical step in monetizing space exploration.

The second group, with three members from the Colorado School of Mines and a fourth with the International Monetary Fund, focused more on the challenges that would have to be surmounted for industry to capitalize on assets that are currently free for the taking on asteroids. Both groups have published papers describing their efforts in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prior research has shown that there are valuable materials on asteroids. This includes diamonds and perhaps other gems, but the truly valuable materials are more likely to be metals that are highly valued but in short supply here on Earth, such as cobalt, nickel and platinum. Such metals have seen a rise in value in recent years as they have been used in a host of modern technology products such as batteries, solar panels and windmill parts.

Such metals tend to come from a few countries, which puts their supply at risk, adding to costs. To overcome such challenges, some companies are turning their sights to the oceans—the seafloor has been found to harbor huge amounts of valuable metals. But harvesting them involves disturbing ecosystems, polluting the sea and incurring costs associated with deep-sea operations.