A privately built spacecraft is tumbling aimlessly in deep space, with little hope of being able to contact its home planet. Odin is around 270,000 miles (434,522 kilometers) away from Earth, on a silent journey that’s going nowhere fast.

NASA has chosen SpaceX to launch an advanced asteroid hunter telescope that will detect and observe asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth.

SpaceX launched its second lunar mission of 2025, just over a month after flying the Firefly Blue Ghost and HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience landers to the Moon atop a single Falcon 9. Another Falcon 9, this time with the Intuitive Machines IM-2 NOVA-C lander on board,

AstroForge says there's no real hope of reestablishing contact with its Odin probe, the first private spacecraft ever to fly beyond the moon.

As for AstroForge's Odin asteroid-mining scout, unfortunately, like the Lunar Trailblazer, Odin has also fallen out of contact with controllers. The most likely scenario is that the probe is in a slow tumble, like the Lunar Trailblazer, which would mean the power supply is intermittent.

NASA has selected SpaceX to launch its NEO Surveyor spacecraft, which will hunt for asteroids and comets that could pose a threat to Earth.

"Even worse, because this is so powerful, we are trying to reach a spacecraft which at this point is 300,000 km [186,411 miles] away, it would block us from getting any actual signal from the spacecraft. Think of it like trying to hear a whisper in a room where someone is blasting music at full volume—it drowns everything else out."

Intuitive Machines launches its second moon lander, which will use NASA and commercially developed tools to search for ice in the moon's crust.

The dream of mining metals in deep space crashed and burned in the 2010s. AstroForge’s Odin mission to survey a potentially metallic asteroid is packed and ready to lift off.

NASA’s NEO Surveyor will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2027 The mission aims to detect asteroids that pose a threat to Earth The spacecraft will use infrared tech to track hazardous space objects

California startup AstroForge launched a spacecraft dubbed Odin on February 26, but the team lost communication with it shortly after launch.

In November 2021, a Falcon 9 sent NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) probe on its way to the binary asteroid system Didymos. Ten months later, DART slammed into the smaller space rock ...