ExLabs, a Long Beach aerospace firm, is preparing a high-stakes mission concept built around a single target: the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. The company said it is scheduled to design a spacecraft that would launch in April 2028, then catch up to Apophis during the narrow period when the asteroid is closest to Earth and visible enough to be seen by the naked eye.
The plan calls for the spacecraft to launch when Apophis is at its closest approach distance—about 32,000 kilometers away—before dipping below satellites. ExLabs said the spacecraft would take about a year from launch to reach the asteroid as Apophis, moving at roughly 7,000 miles an hour, loops past Earth and returns on a trajectory that brings it back to the area in 2029.
ExLabs said it selected Apophis because of the timing of the flyby. “We just chose that because it’s such a unique time and moment in human history,” co-founder James Orsulak said. “We can’t miss that.” The company said Apophis, originally found in 2004, is not expected to return again until 2036.
Because the operation would occur far from Earth—at a distance the company described as some 100 million kilometers—it would be largely autonomous, ExLabs said. The company said crews would provide orders based on data transmitted back to Earth, acknowledging that those instructions would arrive with delay.
Once the spacecraft reaches Apophis, ExLabs said the mission would use a one-way approach: payload items would be launched from the craft onto the asteroid, where they would study the rock’s composition, origin and other data. ExLabs said the spacecraft would stay for the remainder of its lifespan, estimated at 3 to 5 years.
The company said its funding comes from a mix of grants and contracts involving the U.S. Space Force, the Air Force, NASA and JPL, along with additional design contracts through its robotics team. ExLabs co-founder and chief finance officer Freyr Thor described the financing as a patchwork of business partners and customers, clients and civil agencies that pay to send payloads that can collect data during the mission’s operation.
Beyond the Apophis rendezvous, ExLabs said it hopes its work would be an early model for an emerging industry of capturing, studying and mining asteroids. Orsulak said the company is aiming first at the “first category,” adding that telescopes cannot reveal certain internal details and that ExLabs is working to understand “what is the internal structure,” including “what are the changes happening as it passes through Earth’s gravity field.” He said ExLabs’ next goal is to develop spacecraft within the next decade that can capture and retrieve asteroids, studying them or prospecting for rare earth materials that are used in medical devices, hand-held electronics and computers.
ExLabs said it envisions standardized spacecraft that could be built using 3-D printers in a matter of months and scaled up to be larger over time. The company also described focusing on near-Earth asteroids—those whose orbits bring them close to Earth—rather than the more typical main-belt asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter, saying that about 41,000 near-Earth objects have been identified. While it expects Apophis to be made of some nickel and rock, it said other near-Earth asteroids could contain valuable minerals such as cobalt, gallium, platinum and chromium.
Orsulak also linked the business concept to a longer-term defense and resource strategy. He said the idea includes changing how materials flow by mining in the moon’s orbit, with spacecraft that would stay in space for tasks including refueling and gathering water. “It’s the beginning of a reversal of Earth’s supply chain,” Orsulak said. “There’s no reason to mine Earth when you have access to truly infinite resources in space.”
The mission planning also reflects what Orsulak described as the need for practical approaches to protecting Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids. He pointed to a widely studied scenario in which a large asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he said he is “not too keen” on letting that moment repeat itself. In his remarks, Orsulak asked how humanity would move or redirect an asteroid that threatens the planet, and he said, “Humanity has the opportunity to start to do kind of bigger, harder things in space.”