AstroForge

Recognized under Tier 2 — In-Situ Resource Utilization, AstroForge is a California-based company developing spacecraft and refining processes to prospect and extract platinum-group metals from near-Earth asteroids. In February 2025 it launched Odin, intended to image asteroid 2022 OB5 and assess whether it is metal-rich, but the spacecraft lost contact with ground controllers about a week after launch. The company has raised roughly $40 million to date and is now preparing Vestri (also referred to as DeepSpace-2), a larger, electric-propulsion spacecraft built with propulsion hardware from Safran DSI, targeted to rendezvous with and land on a metallic asteroid as soon as late 2026 to measure its composition in situ. AstroForge's work tests whether asteroid material can eventually be refined in space rather than hauled to Earth, a capability relevant to any Moon-to-Mars supply chain that depends on sourcing metals off-world instead of launching them.