AstroForge develops AI control system for 2027 spacecraft mission

Sending a spacecraft to an asteroid is hard. Doing it when your commands take minutes or hours to arrive is harder. AstroForge, the commercial asteroid mining startup, is building an onboard AI system called Autonomy-1 to solve exactly that problem, and it is targeting a 2027 mission to put the technology to the test. The system uses a small, transformer-based AI model, the same architectural family behind large language models, adapted here to manage navigation, tracking, and decision-making aboard a space probe without waiting for a signal from Earth. Why the spacecraft has to think for itself Beyond Earth’s magnetosphere, real-time communication is a physical impossibility. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, and at deep-space distances that still means delays of several minutes to potentially hours, depending on orbital geometry. AstroForge’s answer is an onboard compute stack built around two distinct layers. Radiation-hardened SAMRH71 microcontrollers handle core flight functions, the kind of tasks where reliability matters more than raw processing power. An NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial flight computer sits alongside them, taking charge of the perception and gu...