AstroForge's DeepSpace-2 mission is scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2026, per the company's own official mission page

AstroForge's own official mission page for DeepSpace-2 states the launch window directly: "Launching in the fourth quarter of 2026." As Tier 1 (a company's own venue describing its own mission), this resolves the [unverified-quant] flag claim-astroforge-mtype-asteroid-pgm-startup carried on the mission date — previously sourced only to unpreserved space.com/CNN coverage and the arXiv paper's bare "2026."

The window is corroborated at Tier 2 by SpaceNews (Jeff Foust, "AstroForge completes DeepSpace-2 spacecraft," June 4 2026): the spacecraft is "scheduled to launch late this year as a rideshare payload on a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines' IM-3 lunar lander mission." It is also consistent with — and narrower than — Wikipedia's Tier-4 "second half of 2026" framing. Three independently phrased sources (company self-description, named-journalist trade coverage, tertiary aggregator) now converge on the same quarter-scale window, which is the kind of agreement a single relayed press mention would not by itself establish.

Answers question-verify-astroforge-mission-and-extraction-method on its mission-date half.