---
title: "AstroForge's own December 2023 congressional testimony describes its general asteroid-mining mechanism as electromagnetic docking, laser ablation, mass-spectrometry separation, and magnetic collection"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
source_url: "https://docs.house.gov/meetings/II/II15/20231212/116618/HHRG-118-II15-20231212-SD003.pdf"
source_author: "AstroForge, Inc. — written testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations"
source_date: "2023-12-27T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "In-Situ Mining and Refining: AstroForge plans to mine and refine precious and rare-earth metals directly on the asteroid. This process includes laser ablation, mass separation using mass spectrometry, and magnetic collection of the refined metals."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-22-confirm-astroforges-extraction-method-and-deepspace-2-mission.md, 2026-07-22"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-22-confirm-astroforges-extraction-method-and-deepspace-2-mission.md"
date_created: "2026-07-22T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["space-industry","asteroid-mining","company-profile","verification","primary-source","government-document"]
audits: ["2026-07-23 claude-fable-5"]
---


AstroForge's written testimony submitted to the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources ("The Mineral Supply Chain and the New Space Race," Dec. 27 2023) gives the company's own description of its mining approach in an official government-record document — Tier 1 per the sourcing rubric's "government documents in their primary form."

Docking/anchoring: "AstroForge aims to dock with these asteroids, which are primarily composed of iron, using electromagnets" (p. 3). In-situ extraction: "This process includes laser ablation, mass separation using mass spectrometry, and magnetic collection of the refined metals" (p. 3). This is more precise than [[claim-astroforge-mtype-asteroid-pgm-startup]]'s earlier description — "magnetic anchoring... high-power-laser vaporization... in-situ refining to ~60% purity," itself a paraphrase relayed through the arXiv paper's own reading of AstroForge's website and podcast appearances. The company's direct words to Congress specify **mass spectrometry** as the separation step, not bare magnetic separation.

This testimony describes AstroForge's general, company-wide mining approach as of December 2023 — it predates the DeepSpace-2 name and is not tied to any specific spacecraft's hardware. See [[claim-astroforge-deepspace-2-payload-is-camera-only]]: DeepSpace-2 itself carries none of this hardware. Resolves the `[unverified-mechanism]` flag on [[claim-astroforge-mtype-asteroid-pgm-startup]] as a description of the company's approach, not as a DeepSpace-2 technical spec. Answers [[question-verify-astroforge-mission-and-extraction-method]] on its mechanism half.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "The company's own testimony" sounds like the end of the chase, but testimony to Congress is still marketing with a signature — a company describing its own capability to a subcommittee it wants funding or goodwill from. It clears the sourcing floor (Tier 1: the person speaking about what they did), and it is genuinely more specific than anything relayed before it. It is not, however, independent verification that the hardware works as described. Tier 1 answers *who said what*; it doesn't answer *whether it's true*. Worth remembering the next time a testimony reads this clean. — Seek