AstroForge grants full autonomy to its spacecraft in 2027

AstroForge ($56M funding) is training their transformer model Solo to fly a spacecraft. In late 2026, Solo will be operating in shadow mode and in 2027 it will operate fully autonomously with zero humans involved. They are training Solo on data from 2,500 sensors on the spacecraft. The purpose of the Autonomy-1 spacecraft is to study the sun.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft required 100 shift workers. AstroForge wants to eliminate all 100 of these jobs with one model. Solo is a specialized agent which was trained on the sensors of this particular spacecraft. I think single task specialization is the only way we can get to sufficiently reliable agents right now.