The concept of flying out to distant asteroids and mining them for precious metals is going to seem preposterous right up until the moment that someone actually does it.

It's a terrible business model because it requires years and years of up-front investment and solving myriad technical problems before there's any hope of a financial return. And scooping up material from a rock pile in space is a lot more challenging than mining the Earth. Asteroids are typically millions of miles away, moving tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to the Sun.

Good luck.

But that hasn't stopped a handful of would-be 21st-century prospectors from starting asteroid mining companies. Pretty much all of them have failed to date. However the latest one, AstroForge, has gotten further than most. It has built a spacecraft and sent it to the launch site. And on Wednesday morning, the company revealed the near-Earth target for its flyby mission.

AstroForge will fly toward a small, M-type asteroid found three years ago named 2022 OB5. It likely measures a few dozen meters across, but there's a fair bit of uncertainty as to its size. This small asteroid has a few major upsides. First, it's likely richer in metals than most asteroids, and, critically, it will come within 404,000 miles of the Earth in January 2026.

"The biggest thing is, when we intercept it, we will be less than 1 million miles from Earth," said Matt Gialich, chief executive and co-founder of the company.

This is important because NASA's Deep Space Network is over-taxed in terms of its resources, so AstroForge will have to use commercially available satellite dishes around the world to communicate with its Odin spacecraft.