01
Never anchor
Small bodies have negligible gravity and, as Bennu showed, a near-zero-cohesion subsurface. A machine that pushes against that surface will not get purchase. Every Hive subsystem is built around standoff.
Layton, Utah · Founded 2026
Work with space.
Don’t fight it.
Dellingr Dynamics builds a modular small-spacecraft bus for work that cannot land: standoff extraction, on-orbit servicing, and cislunar logistics.
02
One coupling, many vehicles
The ANT is not a single spacecraft. It is a bus: identical mechanical, power, data, and propellant faces so a miner, a servicer, and a tanker are section swaps — not three programs.
03
Assay before committing
Median PGM grade in iron meteorites is 40.8 ppm, not the 300–700 ppm of popular lore. The first product is verified composition. Extraction follows only for enriched, confirmed targets.
The platform
A parts inventory, not a list of bespoke vehicles.
Most asteroid-mining concepts fail the same way: they treat a rubble pile as a terrestrial worksite. Project Hive inverts that. Worker drones hold geometry, apply energy from a distance, and capture ejecta. A Queen hub docks, inspects, recharges, and reissues them. A hauler is the same bus with a different nose and tail.
That coupling standard is the load-bearing idea. Front, power core, propulsion ring, and aft section terminate on one face — latch, power, data, propellant — whether the section is a sensor pod or a tanker. Mining is the hardest application of that platform. It is not the whole of it.
- Micro
- Colony
- ANT-scale
- Bus
- Queen
- Hub
Coverage by numbers
The coupling standard
Service and command
Architecture
Three classes. One geometry.
Worker
ANT
300–500 kg class free-flyer. Top optical sphere, protected mid-body power core, hollow toroidal thruster ring for omnidirectional authority. Burst-mode laser on the Miner configuration; other noses take tools, grapples, tanks, or sensors.
Service hub
Queen
Command, recharge, optics cleaning, spare sections, and swarm scheduling. Five ANT docking bays and a central repair arm. Individual failure is a maintenance event, not a mission event.
Tow configuration
Hauler
The same ANT bus with the laser traded for tow structure, tension sensing, and payload damping. A damaged Miner becomes a Hauler by swapping two sections at the Queen.
Project Hive
Mining is the proving ground. Servicing is the near-term wedge.
NASA and NSF can be pitched the ISRU problem directly. Dual-use customers — SpaceWERX, contested logistics, on-orbit servicing — get the same bus without the mining headline. ANT-S is the configuration that can be funded first: stationary tool work on a dual-ring, ESPA-class airframe.
Burst laser work is specified at about 5 kW optical from ~14 kW electrical, ~11.5% duty cycle, phase-change heat storage. A 2 kW solar bus cannot run that load continuously. The swarm schedule is the thermal solution.
- MinerStandoff laser extraction — the fully sized baseline
- ANT-SDual-ring servicer: weld, clean, tool-change in place
- HaulerTow configuration on the same coupling faces
- ANT-GDebris tug — net and grapple, not magnets
- ANT-C / JFluid tanker and dry cargo, reordered layout
- ANT-RAssay scout: radar, VNIR/SWIR, thermal-IR, LIBS
Claim boundaries
The concept lives or dies on three tests.
Hive is a conceptual engineering architecture and a research roadmap. It is not a flight design and it is not a near-term PGM prospectus. A negative result on any test below changes the baseline. That is the point.
01
Fe-Ni extraction
Published laser-spallation data is on silicates. Metallic iron-nickel is expected to melt and splash, not spall. Vacuum analog tests are the first gate. Until they close, production rates are not claimed.
02
Capture envelope
Removing material is not the mission. Keeping it — hot fragments, velocity spread, electrostatic dust — is. Capture geometry is designed only after the ejecta field is measured.
03
Thermal closure
Continuous rejection of ~10 kW waste heat will not fit a sub-500 kg craft. Burst storage plus staggered firing has to close inside the mass envelope, with margin, or the worker class changes.
The company
A Utah LLC built for non-dilutive deep-tech work.
Dellingr Dynamics LLC was organized on 22 July 2026 as a domestic limited liability company in the State of Utah. The purpose is lawful technical work: research, design, prototyping, software, autonomy, robotics, aerospace, and defense systems.
Funding path is SBIR/STTR first — NSF, NASA, and Department of War / SpaceWERX — run in parallel with STTR faculty collaboration. We are looking for research partners in extreme-environment materials, radiation-tolerant electronics, and multi-agent autonomy.
- Entity
- Dellingr Dynamics LLC
- Status
- Active, Utah
- Office
- Layton, Utah
- Domain
- dellingrdynamics.com
Write.
Partnerships, STTR, government topics, press. Direct email also works: [email protected].