Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes: If only it were that easy.

When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation. But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth. The OSIRIS-REx mission, which rendezvoused with an asteroid in 2018, had 100 operators on each eight-hour shift.

But resources like that aren’t available to startups, so AstroForge, which is developing technology to mine asteroids, is turning to AI. The company has developed an autonomous control stack for its spacecraft called “Solo,” a transformer-based model made in-house.

AstroForge plans to fly its first autonomous spacecraft in 2027 on the first rocket launched by Stoke Space. That mission will be backed by NASA and is expected to gather scientific data about the sun.

That would be an accomplishment: Most spacecraft autonomy depends on traditional control algorithms due to concerns about the unreliability of neural networks. The first use of a neural network to control a satellite’s positioning in orbit took place just last year.

AstroForge, founded in 2022 and backed with $56 million in venture funding, has launched two prototype spacecraft, both of which suffered anomalies that prevented them from achieving most of their mission objectives. In 2025, its Odin spacecraft was launched into deep space, but the company had difficulty communicating with it. There are a limited number of antennas on Earth big enough to transmit to spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles away, and the windows of time in which to do it are small.

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