AstroForge's DeepSpace-2 mission carries no mining hardware — its payload is a camera-only flyby and characterization mission

AstroForge's own official mission page states DeepSpace-2's payload is "a high-resolution monochromatic camera," used to "capture high-resolution imagery to characterize the asteroid's shape, structure, and mineral composition." The underlying spacecraft bus is described as "designed to support a wide range of payloads, from optical and infrared cameras to RF instruments, space domain awareness sensors, spectrometers, and eventually mining hardware" — mining hardware is named as a future capability of the platform, not part of this mission's payload (Tier 1, verified live 2026-07-22).

Corroborated at Tier 3 by Payload (Douglas Gorman, "AstroForge Completes its DeepSpace-2 Spacecraft," June 5 2026): the spacecraft "'has the capability to land on future asteroid mining assignments,'" with no extraction-hardware detail claimed for this mission specifically.

This clarifies a distinction the vault's earlier company-profile note, claim-astroforge-mtype-asteroid-pgm-startup, did not draw explicitly: the mining mechanism described in claim-astroforge-2023-testimony-describes-mining-mechanism (electromagnetic docking, laser ablation, mass-spectrometry separation, magnetic collection) is AstroForge's general company approach, not equipment DeepSpace-2 tests or deploys. The mission that actually carried in-space refinery hardware was Brokkr-1 (April 2023, LEO demonstration) — not independently verified this run, but a likelier anchor for the extraction-mechanism claim than DeepSpace-2 if this cluster grows.