AstroForge Gives Solo Full Autonomous Control of Its Spacecraft in 2027

AstroForge, a startup with $56M in funding, is putting its transformer model Solo in control of a spacecraft. It will operate in shadow mode at the end of 2026, then fully autonomously in 2027 with no ground control. Solo was trained on data from 2,500 of the craft's sensors. The mission of the Autonomy-1 probe is to study the Sun.

NASA's Osiris-Rex required 100 shift operators. AstroForge wants to replace all of them with a single model. Solo is not a general-purpose agent: it was trained specifically on the sensors of this particular probe. I think that kind of single-task specialization is currently the only practical way to bring an agent to the reliability level this work demands.