AstroForge to fly Solo AI on 2027 Autonomy-1

AstroForge's move toward onboard AI follows two prototype spacecraft that both suffered anomalies preventing them from achieving most of their mission objectives, including the 2025 Odin launch into deep space, which the company ultimately could not control. The company's own explanation points to a hardware constraint: there are a limited number of Earth antennas big enough to reach spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles away, and the communication windows are small. CEO Matthew Gialich framed the choice as a trade between building a ground network at a cost of around $200 million for five dishes around the world, or trying to remove that need with a model.

The technical approach is deliberately bounded. Armand Awad, head of flight software, said the company leveraged advances in transformer models driven by the frontier labs. The resulting stack combines traditional control algorithms, models trained on test data for specific subsystems like power generation or navigation, and an overall intelligence layer trained on about 2,500 sensors in the spacecraft. Gialich described it as constrained autonomy at a very low sensor input, rather than general spacecraft autonomy.

What the company is attempting would be unusual: most spacecraft autonomy depends on traditional control algorithms because of concerns about neural-network reliability, and the first use of a neural network to control a satellite's positioning in orbit took place just last year. The plan is to prove Solo in "shadow mode" aboard DeepSpace-2 before letting it take charge on Autonomy-1, and Gialich has said he does not plan to fly radios that can receive from Earth on that mission, though he acknowledged the team may talk him into it by the time they fly. Whether this becomes a real shift for low-cost deep-space operations likely hinges on how Solo behaves when an anomaly actually occurs.