There's a startup in Huntington Beach, California that built a spacecraft in ten months, launched it into deep space, lost it, learned everything, and started building the next one before the dust settled.
Most companies would call that a catastrophe. AstroForge called it Tuesday.
AstroForge is mining asteroids. Not metaphorically. Not in a pitch deck. They’re building spacecraft, launching them on SpaceX rockets, and pointing them at floating space rocks packed with rare metals that the entire global economy depends on and is quietly running out of.
Why asteroids
The metals that make modern civilization run are getting harder and harder to find on Earth. We're digging deeper and finding less. The stuff is in your car, your phone, and the chips running AI so you can make memes of your buddies. And we're running out.
What about on a metallic asteroid? Concentrations are roughly 5,000 times higher than anything we can dig up down here. Google says one rock could supply Earth for 200 years. From one rock. Floating around out there not doing a damn thing.
Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted the world's first trillionaire would be whoever cracks asteroid mining. AstroForge looked at that and said "woooord."
The mission — Odin
They named their first spacecraft Odin. As in the father of Thor. And yes, after looking at their About Us page, these people are absolutely that cool and have likely seen every Marvel movie at least twice.
Odin launched in February 2025 and made it to deep space — which alone puts AstroForge in a category almost no private company has reached. They communicated with it 124,000 miles away using a 32-meter dish — like the one your grandpa had in his backyard that killed the grass for a decade. A day or so after launch, they lost contact and haven't heard from it since. Odin is out there somewhere, drifting silently past the asteroid it was supposed to scout, doing absolutely nothing for science.
More about Odin and their upcoming missions can be heard on their podcast, Roid Rage — incredible name.
The CEO is scared and doing it anyway
Matt Gialich is the kind of founder who tells CNN he's "f**king terrified" the day before a launch and means it as a compliment to his team. His philosophy on risk: "At the end of the day, you got to show up and take a shot. You have to try." All in on that philosophy, Matt.
He built Odin knowing there was a 30% chance of success. He launched anyway. And the next mission, DeepSpace-2, will attempt something no private company has ever done — landing on a metallic asteroid outside Earth's gravity well — the first time in human history. Queue the Steve Ballmer “I’m just fired up to be here” memes.
They're moving this fast on purpose… and they should when your target is hurtling through space at 56,000 mph.
The honest take
There’s a chance this doesn’t work. Deep space is unforgiving and the graveyard of asteroid-mining companies is already filling up. The physics is hard, the communication is hard, and building a spacecraft in ten months with a small crew is objectively insane.
But here's what's different: they actually launched something. Real hardware. Real deep space. And then they published a debrief about every single thing that went wrong, what went right, and what they learned, written by their Chief of Mining, Chapman Snowden, who genuinely has the most asteroid-mining-sounding name of all time.
On their careers page they say two things: "Space is hard." and "We ship real shit." That's the whole company in four words.
I hope we look back at Odin the way we looked at the rockets that exploded on the pad before we got to the moon. Necessary chaos. Expensive tuition. The price of going somewhere nobody has gone.
Want to work there?
AstroForge is hiring. And when their careers page says “we ship real shit”… they mean it.
Open roles → astroforge.com/careers
Welcome to the field. Left Field goes out every week. One company. No filler. Know a company that belongs out here? Hit the comment button and let us know.
If someone sent this to you, you can subscribe here: