Presenting a transparent, no-holds-barred look at what we learned from our first deep space mission
TL;DR
We embarked on the Odin mission with a simple yet audacious goal: to push the boundaries of what a privately funded space company can achieve in deep space exploration. The primary objective was to identify whether our models had correctly located a metallic asteroid—one rich in platinum group metals.
But internally, this mission represented something more fundamental: a critical step in our roadmap toward building an actual asteroid mining vehicle.
As our CEO Matt Gialich put it: "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?"
What many don't realize is that 99% of our learnings happened before Odin ever reached the rocket. We learned invaluable lessons about spacecraft construction, wiring, and testing. And while we knew about some of the issues before launch, we made the bold decision to launch anyway—and that made all the difference.
"At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."
We built Odin in less than ten months at a cost of approximately $3.5 million. For comparison, a similar NASA mission like Lunar Trailblazer cost about $95 million just for the spacecraft. We accomplished our build at roughly 7% of that cost.
This rapid iteration approach embodies our philosophy: learn fast, adjust quickly, and accept calculated risks to gain experience that can't be acquired through simulation or planning alone.
As of now, Odin is approximately 270,000 miles away from Earth, having traveled beyond the Moon, paralleled Earth briefly, and starting to head away quickly. This places our spacecraft in truly deep space territory—an achievement few private companies can claim.
The spacecraft continues its silent journey, carrying with it our aspirations and the valuable lessons we've gained. Although we have not received any confirmed communication since those early detection events, optical tracking confirms Odin is following its expected path through the solar system.
As the spacecraft travels further, we’ll have less and less certainty about where Odin is, and that will make communications and tracking more and more difficult.
This image shows different possible paths for Odin as viewed from an antenna on Earth. Each line is one estimate of a trajectory with a marker on every hour. If you were there and looked straight at the horizon, you would be looking at the edge of this circle, with 0 degrees meaning looking North and 90 degrees looking East. If you scan your eyes upward, you move towards the center of the plot (straight up). As time goes on, the different estimates of Odin’s location will continue to spread out in the sky.
While we maintain periodic attempts to re-establish contact, our focus has shifted to applying these hard-won insights to our next mission. The data we did receive, though limited, has proven invaluable in understanding the challenges of deep space communication and spacecraft operation.
In many ways, Odin has become both a pioneer and a teacher—continuing its mission by informing our future endeavors, even in silence.
In deep space missions, the first hours and days are often the most critical. For Odin, this timeline reveals both the rapid pace of events and the cascading nature of the challenges we faced. Each hour represented a crucial window of opportunity that, once passed, could not be recovered.
The timeline below tracks not just a spacecraft's journey, but our team's round-the-clock battle to establish communication against mounting odds:
Throughout this entire sequence, our team worked in continuous shifts, making real-time decisions with incomplete information, adapting strategies on the fly, and pushing both themselves and the equipment to the absolute limits.
From a technical perspective, we achieved something no other private company has accomplished: communicating with a spacecraft that has a C3 greater than zero—meaning its velocity is high enough that it's on its way to deep space and will no longer be in Earth's orbit.
We communicated with Odin when it was approximately 124,000 miles away, requiring incredibly precise pointing of massive 32-meter dishes within 0.15 degrees of centerline. As Matt explains:
"We don’t have the luxury of LEO communication margins. We're dealing with pointing accuracies that are within 0.15 degrees of center line. If we are not pointed directly on that on a dish, by the way, that is 32m in diameter... we would never hear the spacecraft and we heard it."
The launch and deployment phase was flawless. Odin separated from the Falcon 9 exactly as planned, entering its intended deep-space trajectory with precision. We successfully put the spacecraft into a power-positive state at one point, commanded it to turn on its power amplifier, and established two-way communication—all significant technical milestones.
Our COO Robyn Ringuette highlighted that external partners found our team to be "one of the easiest teams and most technically competent teams to work with" compared to others operating concurrently.
The team demonstrated exceptional dedication, with everyone on call 100% of the time, working shifts dictated entirely by when we could communicate with the spacecraft. As Robyn noted:
"Every single person in this company was on call 100% of the time, and no one complained, not even once. People were actually constantly coming and asking what else they could do to help."
This dedication extended to extreme measures—some team members literally pulled travel trailers into the loading dock to sleep between shifts, highlighting the commitment level needed for pioneering space missions.
When traditional ground stations struggled with signal acquisition, we witnessed an extraordinary development in the form of crowdsourced assistance. Amateur satellite operators and independent observatories provided invaluable support.
Most notably, Peter at AmSat, who operated his own 22-meter dish, provided some of our most reliable signals without being on our payroll. As Matt recalled:
"That dude was like the most legit ground station in the world, and we didn't pay him. So, Peter, if you're listening, I owe you something."
We were transparent from the beginning about the high-risk nature of this mission. As noted in our pre-launch blog, we assigned Odin only a 30% chance of success. We went into the mission aware of several specific issues:
As Robyn explained, "There's thousands of these things that we can go through every single week... some of them just go in the memory bank because they didn't cause a failure. Others stay in the forefront of mind because they may have been the issue."
We deliberately accepted these risks because, as Matt noted in our blog: "Aerospace and venture capital success are all predicated on managing risk, not eliminating it. We chose to iterate quickly to maximize our learning rate."
While we anticipated many challenges, several unexpected issues caught us by surprise:
The combination of these unexpected challenges created a cascade effect that significantly impacted our ability to maintain consistent communication with Odin. As Matt summarized: "We're not fucking new space. We are very much playing with old space. And this is really stressing the limits of what the current infrastructure is able to handle."
After some more sleep and a lot of analysis, we've developed several plausible theories to explain the current communication challenges with Odin, but first what we can deduce with high confidence about Odin:
Our leading theory involves potential complications with solar panel deployment. Odin booted up into a Sun Safe Mode—a protective state designed to conserve power while attempting to re-orient toward the sun.
If the panels didn't fully extend and lock, Odin would operate with severely limited power, prioritizing essential systems over communication, periodically attempting to deploy panels and stabilize position. How long Odin can stay in this mode before losing power and tumbling depends on how much power the panels are able to generate in this off-nominal situation — from 2.5 hours to indefinitely.
Another possibility is that Odin is tumbling through space without stable attitude control, meaning its antenna only briefly points toward Earth during rotation.
Several mechanisms could cause tumbling: excess momentum during separation, asymmetric forces from partial solar panel deployment, reaction wheel failure, or power brownouts preventing stabilization.
If tumbling is occurring, we might expect occasional brief communications when the antenna happens to align with Earth—precisely the pattern we observed early in the mission.
Vestri will be our third spacecraft and is scheduled to launch on the IM3 mission. It represents a significant evolution from Odin:
Robyn notes that the design of Vestri was deliberately held back in certain areas: "We purposely held off on committing to some of those [components] until Odin launched. And the reason for that is to make sure that if we had a finding that we incorporated that learning back in."
The team is focusing on hiring more principal-level engineers with spacecraft-specific experience, recognizing that rocket experience doesn't always translate directly to spacecraft design. As Matt explained:
"I spent a lot of time in rockets. Robyn spent a lot of time in rockets. Hans has spent a lot of time in rockets. This isn't a fucking rocket... we all have a lot of rocket experience, and that's great. What I realized right away is that experience is wrong."
Our commitment to radical transparency throughout this mission proved to be one of our most valuable strategic decisions. While unconventional in the aerospace industry, this approach yielded benefits we couldn't have anticipated.
When asked why we chose this level of openness, Matt explained:
"What I've noticed about aerospace is it's still full of a bunch of people that are low risk individuals... If you ever go to an AI convention right now, like you walk in the door at an AI conference. And half these people in there are like high on drugs and they're like, 'I'm gonna fucking make God.' And you're like, where are those people in the aerospace community? We're that person, right? We're the one that is saying, like, we think we can take more risk and we think we can actually change the world."
Robyn added a practical dimension, noting that our transparency "led us to being able to find and collect data from our spacecraft that we otherwise would not have gotten."
This openness created a ripple effect throughout the space community:
Matt emphasized that this approach breaks down artificial barriers in the industry:
"What I want to do is open that door. So, yeah, some of the shit's going to be embarrassing. Some of the shit's going to be like, well, we're fucking idiots. We should have noticed this. But I think there's a lot of it that people just don't understand. This stuff is really complex, really detailed, and I want to let you experience just as we do."
Robyn further explained this philosophy by saying: "It's not a locked door. It's actually just a green curtain. Right. Like it's the Wizard of Oz. Every step in my career that I have thought that like, oh, there's this like next level group of people that actually knows what's going on or that, like, somehow did some super secret math that figured it out... that has never been true."
By removing this "green curtain," we not only received practical assistance with our mission but also contributed to demystifying deep space operations for the broader community. This approach aligns with our core philosophy: learning fast, sharing knowledge, and accelerating progress through collective effort rather than siloed secrecy.
From our blog post summarizing Odin's learnings, we identified several critical takeaways that will directly impact our future missions:
Despite the challenges, the Odin mission has already yielded tremendous insights that are directly informing our next steps. Based on these lessons, we're implementing significant improvements to our ground infrastructure, incorporating greater redundancy in communication systems, and expanding partnerships with ground stations globally.
Vestri builds directly on these lessons while taking us one step closer to our ultimate goal of asteroid mining operations. As Robyn emphasized:
"The only way to learn that stuff is actually to go do it. And we did it. And so now we're going to go absorb all those lessons and take the next step."
We remain committed to our vision of changing how humanity approaches space resources—taking calculated risks, moving quickly, and being transparent about both our successes and failures along the way.
These learnings from Odin will significantly de-risk our upcoming missions and increase our chances of success. While we didn't achieve everything we hoped for with Odin, the mission has already provided an invaluable return on investment through the knowledge gained."
Follow @AstroForge on X for more updates on our journey to mine asteroids.
