We talked/ranted a lot about NRE and vertical integration in our Q3 update, a theme that ended up also dominating the last 3 months of 2024 for us. The first mission budget we made for High Frontier (we're talking late 2022, so almost 2 years ago) was based on the assumption that we would focus on our excavation payload almost exclusively with everything else sourced from different vendors. The amount of in-house development was less than 20% of the spacecraft, with over 80% outsourced.
That old budget tracked at roughly $50M for everything from the spacecraft hardware to launch to mission operations. Stupid expensive, but we felt pretty good at the time because that was already 6x cheaper than our reference mission from JAXA and 30x cheaper than the most recent NASA mission. We set ourselves a goal at the time of $20M for our first mission. Still a lot of money, but this felt like a level that balanced performance with the ability to turn a profit for our first missions.
We spent the last 2 years 'trading' different designs to fit within that budget goal and achieve our primary mission objective. Most of those major ideas and permutations have shown up in prior updates, as we gradually cut out budget down to size to get closer and closer to that $20M number. We closed out Q3 with a budget at $25M, so a lot closer to our goal but not there yet.
As of last week, our budget stands at $17M. The 2 biggest drivers in that reduction of cost are a new spacecraft design that allows for a low Earth orbit launch (much cheaper when it comes to launch options) and our decision to bring not just design but also the development and qualification of that spacecraft in house.
That original ratio of in-house to outsourced has flipped entirely and we are now tracking at more than 80% vertical integration with just 20% outsourced. These ratios are a bit fuzzy (should we use $ cost, mass, volume, etc) and mostly based on what the original cost was for every item. This gives us plenty of room for more improvement over time, as well as a lower budget goal.
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.
Our choice for a different launch provider and spacecraft design has pushed our first launch back several months. Our original schedule had us launch in Q4 of 2026, although we had not booked this yet as we ran through the various options. We are now booked for launch in February of 2027, while our new spacecraft design ensures that we can conclude our mission on our original timeline.

We are preparing a second mission at the end of 2027 with a customer interested in life extension for their existing spacecraft, which will use the same design and architecture.