AstroForge is putting AI in command of its next spacecraft
Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes: If only it were that easy. When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation. But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth.
- ▪Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes: If only it were that easy.
- ▪When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation.
- ▪But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/22/astroforge-is-putting-ai-in-command-of-its-next-spacecraft/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T15:03:51.690Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T15:03:51.690Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ngTVnU2UA4UK · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes: If only it were that easy. When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation. But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth. The Osiris-Rex mission, which rendezvoused with an asteroid in 2018, had 100 operators on each eight-hour shift. But resources like that aren’t available to startups, so AstroForge, which is developing technology to mine asteroids, is turning to AI. The company has developed an autonomous control stack for its spacecraft called “Solo,” a transformer-based model made in-house. AstroForge plans to fly its first autonomous spacecraft in 2027 on the first rocket launched by Stock Space.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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