AstroForge builds Solo, an AI stack to command its spacecraft
What's the deal? AstroForge,the asteroid-mining startup, has built an autonomous control stack called Solo for its spacecraft:a transformer-based model trained on about 2,500 spacecraft sensors, designed to perform tasks like anomaly resolution without instructions from Earth. Solo will fly in "shadow mode" on the company's third vehicle, DeepSpace-2, scheduled to launch by the end of 2026 alongside Intuitive Machines' third moon mission.
Why it matters: Most spacecraft autonomy relies on traditional control algorithms because neural networks are seen as unreliable. AstroForge's bet is that a constrained transformer model, trained for the specific subsystems of its own vehicle, can handle the kinds of anomalies that killed its earlier missions. In 2025 its Odin spacecraft was launched toward deep space but the company lost communications with it, limited by the small number of Earth antennas big enough to reach hundreds of thousands of miles out. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Gialich argues the trade was either building a ~$200 million global ground network or trying to remove the failure mode with an onboard model.
What's next: DeepSpace-2 is AstroForge's first commercial rendezvous with a body outside the planetary gravity well per its site, launching Q4 2026 with Solo riding along. The Autonomy-1 mission, slated for ạ2027 on the first rocket launched by Stoke Space and backed by NASA, could see Solo fully in control: Gialich says he does not plan to fly radios that can receive from Earth on that vehicle, though he expects his team to talk him out of it by launch.
Context: AstroForge, founded in 2022, has raised $56 million in venture funding and launched two prototype spacecraft, both of which suffered anomalies. Its head of flight software, Armand Awad, describes the stack as combining traditional control algorithms, subsystem models trained on test data,and an overall intelligence layer. The company frames Solo as "constrained autonomy at a very low sensor input," not general spacecraft intelligence.
Read more: TechCrunch
