School of Hard Rocks Syllabus

Welcome to the school of Hard Rocks. We know we’re leading off with a bad joke. But we had to make it.

Over the next two months, we're going to be releasing a series of blog posts that will go into the technical details of what we've learned from Odin and how we're applying those lessons to Vestri. This is an industry that very few get the opportunity to bear witness to the details; we recognize this and hope that us sharing details publicly changes that dynamic and increases our chances of success.

Immediately after the Odin launch, we wrote a lot about the risks that we were aware of prior to launching and the things that we learned from that went wrong post-launch. Since then, even though we've been doing the podcast (available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube) we haven't really released much writing about what we've been doing for the past 4 months. In short, we've been incorporating the lessons learned from Odin into our Vestri build, and it's time to showcase the significant improvements we've made between these two spacecraft.

Odin taught us invaluable lessons about the process of building spacecraft headed for deep space. Building with speed is critical to our continued existence as a venture-backed company, but we built Odin faster than even we were anticipating. Odin went from a clean-sheet design to being launched into space in 10 months, which is an unheard-of timeframe in spacecraft. The fact that we passed qualification and made it to the launch site was a feat in itself. However, Odin failed its mission, and that failure puts increased pressure on Vestri's success. This pressure is compounded by the fact that Vestri is a fundamentally different type of spacecraft.

Each of the upcoming series will be focused on a particular subsystem or component of the spacecraft. We’re breaking each topic into its own post to provide as much detail as possible on the lessons from Odin, changes in our approach to Vestri, and identifying critical questions. So before we start this open class on building spacecraft, we’ll break down the subsystems and the key question(s) we’re addressing in each post:

Post #1: Power Systems:

Key Question: How do we ensure we are power positive for the L+24 hours in case something goes wrong?

In this post, we’ll examine the solar array architecture and power distribution strategy used on Odin, what went wrong (or nearly did), and how we’ve redesigned those systems for Vestri. We’ll talk about how we’re planning for worst-case orientation scenarios, early orbit constraints, battery sizing, and why our emphasis has shifted from just “power generation” to “resilience under uncertainty.” Expect a breakdown of electrical budgets, early survival strategies, and onboard power control logic.

Post #2: Spacecraft Communications:

Key Question: How do we talk to something millions of miles away with a relatively small amount of power and no access to DSN?

Here, we’ll go deep into the communications stack on the spacecraft side—antennas, RF front ends, link budgets, and protocol architecture. You’ll get a detailed view of how we’re managing low-power constraints, antenna placement tradeoffs, modulation schemes, and error correction. We’ll also share lessons from Odin’s comms difficulties, and what specific diagnostics we’ve added to help us troubleshoot in deep space when time is not on your side.

Post #3: Ground-based Communications

Key Question: How do we manage a network of different comms stacks to ensure comms work consistently?

This post will focus on our ground segment, including the challenges of using multiple commercial ground stations, varied latency windows, and how we coordinate signal reception worldwide. We’ll explain the software stack that enables handoff between sites, our scheduling challenges, and the telemetry infrastructure that supports real-time analysis and long-latency recovery. We’ll also dig into what happens when the signal disappears—and how we build systems that let us find it again.

Post #4: Structure Design

Key Question: How do you build both a mass and thermal efficient spacecraft capable of operating in deep space?

We’ll explore Vestri’s structural redesign from the ground up, covering primary and secondary structures, thermal constraints in interplanetary space, vibration environments from launch, and radiation tolerance. Expect cross-sections, thermal maps, and a look at the new materials and assembly techniques we’ve implemented post-Odin. We’ll highlight how we balanced rapid development with design margins, and why getting this part right is so mission-critical.

Post #5: Integration and Testing

Key Question: When you can’t simulate space, how do you test effectively to ensure everything works?

In this final post, we’ll walk through how we designed Vestri for testability from the start. We’ll cover what failed with Odin’s integration and testing flow, how we adapted our build process, and the full stack of test protocols—from flat-sat simulations to system-level thermal vac. We’ll also touch on the tooling we developed in-house to catch integration issues early, and how our mindset has shifted from “testing as a phase” to “testability as a requirement.”

Follow @AstroForge on X for more updates on our journey to mine asteroids.