We are in full build&test mode at the moment, across all of the components on our spacecraft.
Design->Build->Test->Break->Redesign
This last quarter was a bit of a disappointment for lunar activity (ispace' Hakuta-R mission 2 crashed on the lunar surface) and for programs like Starship (both the booster and the ship disintegrated, with the latter doing so before it was able to test any of its deployment architecture). We did see some exciting news about asteroid missions as well:
Tianwen-2
The Chinese space agency CNSA has launched its Tianwen-2 mission, which is on its way to near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa to sample and return material after its 2027 rendezvous. The spacecraft is designed to grab 100 grams of material and also uses solar electric propulsion similar to our design. With a launch mass of 2,100 kg, it is significantly heavier than our design though.
One interesting choice in mission architecture that jumps out is that they are planning to use both a TAG (touch-and-go) asteroid interaction as well as a tethered interaction. Both O-REx and Hayabusa2 used a TAG design, as does our mission given the expected surface conditions (C-type rubble pile).
Based on the data available for 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, it is expected to be a small rocky S-type that is expected to be a fast rotator ruling out the rubble pile archetype. With a diameter of 40-70m, it is expected to rotate around its axis once every 28 minutes. That rapid rotation and expected consistency make a TAG much more complicated and potentially hazardous for the spacecraft, which makes the tethered experiment more interesting and appealing in this case.
Lucy
NASA spacecraft Lucy has been on a tour of the solar system since 2021 and just had another close encounter with an asteroid, showing asteroid 52246 Donaldjohansen at a separation of about 1,000 km.
Based on this and followup images, researchers are positing that this asteroid is actually a conglomeration of 2 separate asteroids that somehow intersected and stayed connected, with its narrow link between 2 lobes connecting the 2 separate bodies.
While originally thought to be a ~5km single body, the new close-up observations are showing an elongated body that is about 8km long and 3.5km wide, slowly rotating with a period of about 10 hours.
Asteroids are awesome!
High Frontier Mission Update
Our primary mission objective is:
To rendezvous with an uncharacterized near-Earth Asteroid and showcase capturing regolith at kilogram scale, minimizing mission duration and cost.
We're launching in ~18 months on Transporter 19.
Budgets
We track our mass, financial, power and delta-v budgets in great detail as design drivers for our mission. Mass and delta-v are closely related and would normally work in tandom (mass goes down, delta-v goes up), but the last quarters showed a move in the other direction. Last quarter was a downgrade in our assumptions on propulsion performance, while this quarter showed a large uptick. This is due to a much lower overall spacecraft mass, while increasing our tank size to bring more fuel. That led to a much higher delta-v, even though our total launch mass only increased marginally.
This mass/delta-v optimization will keep running in the coming months, as we lock down all of the parts and items on our spacecraft. Cost has increased slightly, in part due to that increased amount of Xe and in part due to increased costs for other components.
Mission Design
We keep updating our leaderboard with new asteroid discoveries to make sure we have an optimized mission design that targets the most attractive asteroid available, rather than being stuck in a local optimum based on the available data at the time. This approach keeps us flexible around possible shifts in launch date and ensures we can keep optimizing across all the targets we can reach in our reachability envelope.
The Vera C. Rubin observatory, a massive new telescope built in Chili that came online last year, released its first set of images showing a massive influx of new data. Over 2,000 new asteroids were discovered in its first 10 hours of operation, with projections showing an expected 5,000,000 new discoveries in the next 10 years.
The asteroids effectively photobomb the long duration exposures that the observatory is taking of stars and galaxies, allowing for these discoveries during regular operations because all of the images need to be processed and filtered.
With our go/no-go decision for a target ~7 months after launch, this allows us to include about 2 more years of observations like this to make sure we have the largest and best possible set of targets to choose from.
Spacecraft
Our spacecraft design is coming together well, with layout and expected performance more and more locked in. All of the critical components and parts have been ordered and are well under way, with the first engineering models expected to trickle in later this year as we build out our flatsat. We've moved from prototypes to full engineering models for the parts we are designing in house, allowing for both functional as well as environmental testing that allow us to rapidly iterate and improve on our designs as they mature.
With our cleanroom up and running, we are starting to build out our first assemblies requiring specific levels of cleanliness and controls. We are initially focused on solar cells and will move on to building our camera assemblies in the coming months.
One of the major design efforts we wrapped up was the design and construction of our own gimbals. These 2-axis gimbals have been designed to provide low mass, high accuracy pointing for our primary propulsion system. Our design was made out of aluminum as well as titanium, which will allow us to calibrate and test the performance across both materials as we determine what works best for both our usecase as well as for the broader market.
With performance specs that beat anything available on the market, we are offering this gimbal as a product that is better, cheaper and several times faster than any of the competition was able to offer.
K+ gimbal operation & assembly
We are also developing a dedicated stack for deep space comms on top of the X-band radio that we are purchasing from Rocket Lab. To allow our link budget to close at the Earth range that we need to operate, we needed both significant amplication of RF power as well as a dedicated high gain antenna. These antennas are often designed as large deployable structures, but that architecture is not possible for us given our plans for excavation on an asteroid.
Our deep space comms stack includes a power amplifier, diplexer and high gain antenna that jointly provide a combination that allows us to to operate at a distance of over 100 million kilometers.
With NASA's Deep Space Network unavailable for commercial missions, we don't have access to any of the large ground station dishes and need to be able to work with the much smaller ones provided by commercial ground station operators.
Excavation
Our primary excavation method has moved from prototype to a metal build engineering model that is much closer to what we expect to fly. Our initial tests are all focused on bite strength, using a simple sharpened edge without additional design complexity as we expect this to provide the best seal and closure.
We expect to fully submerge into the regolith surface before we start chomping through the material itself, which our modeling and testing shows will provide an elegant way to convey the material into the storage bag behind the excavator due to simple displacement.
With the C-type asteroids that we are going after behaving like rubble piles with little cohesion and surface strength, this allows us to get large bites out of the surface as long as we can break through the material we can expect to find. Given what we know about the density of the material and the composition of the samples that have been tested on Earth, we are inferring a strength test range across 5 orders of magnitude. The material we expect to find sits in the 1-2 range of material strength. We are designing and testing our bite strength to work up through 5, several orders of magnitude higher than we expect to find to ensure resilience given how many unknowns there are around asteroid composition.
We won't be able to chomp through granite, but this comes pretty close.
Regolith Age
Regolith itself as a material can be used structurally or as shielding mass, but currently has no direct applications beyond that. Our focus from a product development perspective is on consumables first, starting with water.
The cold trap shown below is used as we try to release ionically bound water from C-type simulant and form ice crystals. We baked out the atmospheric moisture that was mechanically captured by running the furnace at 150C for 2 hours with Argon as our carrier gas. Now we’re ramping up to 800C to sublimate the ionically bound stuff. Since we are going to 800C and might begin to see CO2 as well, we are also adding a simple CO2 detector. We bubble the Argon carrier and any liberated gases through a solution of calcium hydroxide. When CO2 bubbles through this solution, calcium carbonate is formed which is insoluble in water, making the solution look milky.
We're testing a number of different extraction methods at varying temperature ranges, testing both velocity and energy efficiency.
We were able to run a first end-to-end extraction of water from regolith simulant:
We are now working on scaling and efficiency metrics for water extraction, while exploring how we can convert that water into LOX and hydrogen, followed by methane to expand the range of products we can offer to our customers.
Our Q2 2025 Goals:
All schedule-critical parts have been ordered, some final short lead time parts remain open.
Our first offtake agreements for water delivery in GEO are almost wrapped up.
Our Q3 2025 Goals:
Thanks for joining us on this adventure!
The Karman+ Team