AstroForge plans transformer control stack for its 2027 spacecraft

AstroForge is preparing to put Solo, an in-house autonomous control stack, in charge of its Autonomy-1 spacecraft in 2027. The asteroid-mining startup trained the transformer-based system on roughly 2,500 onboard sensors and plans to fly the mission on the first rocket launched by Stoke Space, with NASA backing to gather solar data.

The push follows two prototype spacecraft failures, including Odin, which reached deep space in 2025 before AstroForge lost communications. CEO Matthew Gialich said building a private ground network would cost about $200 million for five dishes, making onboard decision-making a strategic alternative for a company founded in 2022 with $56 million in venture funding.

Solo combines traditional control algorithms, subsystem-specific models and a broader intelligence layer that interprets telemetry across the spacecraft. Its initial focus is anomaly resolution, such as identifying a lost position fix, linking a power issue to a star-tracker fault and cycling the affected component.

AstroForge will first run Solo in shadow mode on DeepSpace-2, which is set to launch alongside Intuitive Machines’ third moon mission by the end of 2026. Human operators will remain in control while the model’s decisions are logged, giving engineers flight data before any live autonomous deep-space mission.