Autonomy first
As latency increases, spacecraft must make more navigation and safety decisions without continuous ground intervention.
VYOR / RESEARCH STAGE / GERMANY / 2026
Find it.Reach it.Know it.
VYOR is developing the low-cost autonomous prospecting and material-acquisition stack required to characterize and exploit small Solar System bodies.
WORKING THESISCharacterize → rendezvous → interact → acquire → process.
01AUTONOMOUS OPTICAL NAVIGATION◆SPECTRAL PROSPECTING◆DEEP-SPACE AVIONICS◆LOW-GRAVITY MATERIAL ACQUISITION◆REPEATABLE MISSIONS◆AUTONOMOUS OPTICAL NAVIGATION◆SPECTRAL PROSPECTING◆DEEP-SPACE AVIONICS◆LOW-GRAVITY MATERIAL ACQUISITION◆REPEATABLE MISSIONS◆
01 Mission thesis
Before you mine it,you have to understand it.
Mining is not the first mission. Reliable characterization is.
Our roadmap begins with the capabilities that survive every later phase: autonomous target acquisition, optical navigation, spectral sensing, onboard decision-making, deep-space communications, proximity operations and controlled interaction with low-gravity surfaces.
The company is built around turning one-off exploration capabilities into a compact, repeatable commercial stack for small-body missions.
Prospect before extracting
Remote sensing reduces uncertainty before expensive contact, excavation and processing hardware is committed.
Flight heritage compounds
Every early mission should retire a failure mode that appears again on the eventual resource mission.
Own the differentiator
Buy commodity spacecraft hardware early. Own the autonomy, sensing, mission software and acquisition architecture.
02 Technology stack
Four systems.One mission stack.
The early company is not a refinery in space. It is the enabling layer that makes characterization and controlled interaction inexpensive enough to repeat.
A / 01NAVIGATION
Autonomous navigation
Optical target acquisition, relative navigation, autonomous approach, safe-mode logic and fault-aware planning.
B / 02SPECTROSCOPY
Spectral prospecting
Compact visible and near-infrared sensing designed to classify candidate materials and map compositional variation before contact.
C / 03SPACECRAFT
Deep-space platform
High-reliability avionics, power, propulsion, communications and operations built around small-body missions rather than generic LEO duty cycles.
D / 04ACQUISITION
Material acquisition
Low-reaction-force contact, capture and excavation concepts designed for environments where the tool can push the spacecraft away from the surface.
03 Mission roadmap
Earn the next mission.
A staged program from bench testing to asteroid interaction. Dates are planning targets, not claims. Each phase is designed to retire a specific class of risk.
PHASE 00 / NOW2026–27
Foundation
Target-selection database, autonomous tracking, spectral breadboard, systems engineering, regulatory strategy and first low-gravity acquisition tests.
PHASE 012027–28
Prospector-0
Hosted orbital payload proving sensing, calibration, autonomous target acquisition, onboard processing and reliable space-to-ground operations.
PHASE 03–042029–34
Deep-space prospector
Flyby first, then rendezvous: deep-space communications, long-duration reliability, optical navigation, close characterization, resource mapping and proximity operations.
00
2026–27
Laboratory stack + mission architecture
Mission design, target database, sensing breadboards, autonomy software, systems engineering and funding/regulatory groundwork.
01
2027–28
Hosted payload — Prospector-0
Prove the differentiated payload and autonomy stack in orbit before taking responsibility for the entire spacecraft bus.
02
2028–29
Dedicated 6U / 12U — Prospector-1
Integrate propulsion, precision ADCS, safe modes and more autonomous operations into a spacecraft controlled end to end.
03
2029–32
Near-Earth asteroid flyby
Demonstrate deep-space communications, optical navigation, long-duration operations and remote spectral characterization.
04
2031–34
Asteroid rendezvous
Match velocity, map shape and spin, characterize surface properties and identify candidate interaction sites.
05
2033–36
Miner-0 — controlled contact + acquisition
Demonstrate surface interaction and kg-scale capture while measuring reaction forces, dust behavior and material properties.
06
2035+
Processing demonstration + scaling
Select the extraction chain after ground truth exists. Prove processing at kilograms before committing to industrial-scale transport or refining.
04 Mission heritage
The physics is proven. The economics are not.
NASA, JAXA and ESA missions demonstrate the sequence: find, approach, map, touch, sample and operate around small bodies. The commercial problem is to compress mission cost, time and operational complexity.
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio / OSIRIS-REx
NASA / OSIRIS-REx
Characterize → touch → return.
A reference architecture for turning remote observations into site selection, physical contact and sample return.
ISAS/JAXA — CC BY 4.0-compatible source
JAXA / HAYABUSA2
Low-gravity surface interaction.
Multiple surface interactions and returned samples provide ground truth for what remote sensing can and cannot tell us.
ESA – Science Office, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO — display crop
ESA / HERA
European small-body operations.
Autonomy, close characterization and CubeSat-enabled investigation around a binary asteroid system.
Mission imagery is presented as technical heritage and context. VYOR is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, ESA, JAXA, DLR or their mission partners. Before commercial publication, re-check each source licence and retain the detailed attribution file.
05 Operating thesis
Every mission must retire real risk.
01
Unknown objectTarget priors + remote observations
↓
02
Characterized targetShape, spin, spectrum, surface state
↓
03
Controlled interactionRendezvous, proximity operations, contact dynamics
↓
04
Acquired materialCapture yield + physical ground truth
↓
05
Resource productProcessing, transport and customer economics
06 Building from Europe
The first mission starts before launch.
We are at the research and architecture stage. We are interested in conversations with spacecraft engineers, GNC researchers, planetary scientists, spectroscopy teams, low-gravity robotics groups and early deep-tech partners.
Start a conversation ↗Configure the final VYOR email address after securing the company domain.