For generations, Western space missions have largely taken place in the open air. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the eve of a new era in which private interests transcend this openness, with potentially a lot of money at stake.
Sometime in the next year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, a US asteroid mining company, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth's orbit. If successful, it will be the first fully commercial space mission beyond the moon. However, AstroForge is keeping its target asteroid a secret.
The secret space rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend that astronomers and other experts don't welcome: commercial space missions conducted in secret. Such missions reveal gaps in the regulation of space travel, as well as concerns about whether exploring the cosmos will continue to benefit all of humanity.
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"I'm absolutely not in favor of things wandering around in the inner solar system without anyone knowing where they are," 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 math is simple: If the destination is revealed, a competitor can grab the asteroid's valuable metals for itself.
"Announcing which asteroid we are targeting carries the risk that another entity could seize that asteroid," said Matt Gialich, CEO of AstroForge.
Asteroid mining hit the doldrums in recent years after two startups proposing to explore the solar system went bankrupt in late 2010. But now several companies in the United States, Europe and China are making a new attempt. Even a congressional committee held a hearing on the subject in December.
The renaissance is being fueled by a new wave of commercial space exploration, driven in large part by SpaceX, the Elon Musk-founded company that flies reusable rocket boosters and has lowered the cost of reaching space.
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With this increased activity, secrecy also increases.
In 2019, the Israeli-built commercial Beresheet lander crashed while trying to land on the moon. On board, kept secret until after the failed landing, were several thousand tardigrades, microscopic animals supplied by the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation. The crash raised concerns about the moon's possible contamination with the savory creatures and led to an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.
More recently, the suborbital spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has concealed the identities of the people aboard the spaceplane until after the missions are completed, a practice not previously seen in human spaceflight. And some satellites that fly into space along with many other spacecraft, in so-called rideshare missions, have also been kept secret.
"We regularly see launches where we don't know which satellites have been deployed until some time afterwards," said McDowell, who maintains a public database of spacecraft in orbit.
For missions beyond Earth, there are no legal restrictions against keeping a deep space mission's destination secret, as AstroForge plans to do, said Michelle Hanlon, a law professor specializing in space travel at the University of Mississippi.
"We don't have an actual process for these types of missions in space," she said, because "there is no licensing process in the United States."
But complex problems can arise if, for example, multiple asteroid miners arrive at the same asteroid.
"There has to be some kind of transparency here," McDowell said. He noted that while there was a requirement by the United Nations for space agencies and companies to disclose their orbits and trajectories in space, "this requirement is mostly ignored for objects in solar orbit."
The lack of sanctions, he added, "should spark discussion among regulators."
AstroForge's mission, Odin, would be the second spacecraft it has sent into space. The first in April, Brokkr-1, was a microwave-sized machine that weighed about 25 pounds. The purpose of that mission was to practice refining metals in space. However, the spacecraft has encountered 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 heavier 220 pounds. AstroForge plans to hitch a ride on a robotic mission to the moon in 2024 from the company Intuitive Machines, which will be sponsored by NASA and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. A launch date has not yet been set.
During the journey to the moon, the intention is for Odin to be released and venture into deep space beyond the orbit of the moon. According to AstroForge, the spacecraft will fly past the mysterious asteroid within a year, taking photos and looking for evidence of metal.
AstroForge is targeting what is believed to be an M-type asteroid. These are believed to be fragmented pieces of failed planetary cores and may be rich in valuable platinum group metals, which have a wide range of uses including healthcare and jewelry.
No spacecraft has ever visited such an asteroid, although NASA's Psyche mission, launched in October, is on a mission to a potential M-type asteroid, also called 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 wealth to be made if the business is successful. On Earth, the metals that might be on M-type asteroids could be difficult and expensive to mine. Iridium, for example, sells for thousands of dollars per ounce.
The business case for extracting metals from asteroids has not always been clear. It is difficult and expensive to return material to Earth; NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission returned just half a pound of material from an asteroid called Bennu in September, at an estimated cost of $1.16 billion.
AstroForge is confident in its financial prospects. "We expect to be able to return materials at a high margin," Gialich said. "We created our business model using rideshare 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 for keeping the asteroid secret. He previously worked for Planetary Resources, a mining startup that never reached asteroids, and it too was coy about its goals.
"This is a commercial venture," he said. "You wouldn't go around telling people, 'I know where the gold is.'"
But some scientists believe asteroid miners should be more candid about what they're looking for. M-type asteroids give humanity a glimpse into the chaotic early solar system of 4.5 billion years ago, when objects often collided and the planets were born. That means anything AstroForge discovers could be scientifically valuable, says Stephanie Jarmak, a planetary scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"I'm a pretty big believer in open science," says Jarmak, who is also a project scientist for NASA Science Explorer. "We have never visited an M-type asteroid before, so we can still learn a lot."
That could include "insights into the heating processes that occurred early in the solar system's history," says Andy Rivkin, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who led NASA's DART mission to orbit an asteroid in September 2022. to hit.
"We will never reach the core of the Earth," he said. "So visiting these types of objects gives us information that we can extrapolate to learn more about Earth and apply it to different planets."
Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and deputy principal investigator of the Psyche mission, said the true nature of M-type asteroids is still unclear. Although it was "always the main assumption" that M-type asteroids were metallic, we 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 whatever AstroForge discovered all the more valuable, Weiss said.
Gialich said AstroForge would be transparent except about the asteroid itself. "We don't keep our mission a secret," he said. "We plan to share the images."
While AstroForge isn't revealing its target asteroid, it may be possible to find out where the company is headed next.
About 30,000 asteroids are known to be near Earth, giving AstroForge many potential targets. But the company has said its target is less than 100 meters in size and can be reached within a year of launch. That means it must cross Earth's orbit or at least pass close by. 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 Britain's AstroForge, these clues narrow the list of potential targets to "about 300 asteroids."
Jarmak further refined the potential targets, taking brightness and size into account. "We have a list of fourteen objects," she said.
Of these, 2010's CD55 is particularly promising, which is about 75 meters wide, is reasonably bright (indicating metallic content) and is reachable from Earth in the time frame of AstroForge's launch date.
Gialich would not verify or deny that suggestion.
"We do not want to publicly confirm our target asteroid," he said.
He added that there were several targets that AstroForge was considering. "We are actively monitoring several asteroids that would be viable for our Odin mission if our launch date were to shift," he said.
Even if the asteroid cannot be identified before launch, McDowell noted that it might be possible for amateur astronomers on Earth to track the spacecraft after it enters space and figure out where it goes.
"There are some practical issues," he says. "But I definitely think there will be interest in following it."
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