a16z is challenging Silicon Valley’s love for drop-outs by launching a school; plus, AstroForge is putting AI in command of its next spacecraft

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is launching a school called the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, aimed at aspiring founders who have just graduated high school and have not yet attended college. The Academy is aiming to train these high school grads with hands-on coursework on a variety of topics, ranging from the technical, such as AI research and models, to life philosophy, such as the geometry of luck, which promises to teach students about arranging a life so good fortune flows through it. Students will also work on personal projects.

1:56The school's main pitch is that it promises to provide students with mentors who are big names in tech. The school is currently accepting applications for its first year, which will be a one-year program that charges no tuition and is open to about 50 students, chosen on proof of work, what they have built, shipped, or earned, according to the school's frequently asked questions. The Academy is located in San Francisco, and students will be responsible for their own housing, although the school is working to help them find it and match them with other student roommates. One item to note, the Academy is currently not an accredited school, so participants will not earn a degree or college credits that transfer anywhere.

2:44In 2028, the Horowitz-Andresen Academy, which is a for-profit venture that has raised$42 million hopes to offer a two-year program. At that point, it plans to charge tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university, the school's CEO said in a post on X. Now, the schools, which is open to high school graduates, even if they are younger than 18, may also expand beyond 50 students in the future. In exchange for that elite tuition price tag, students will gain access to 200 speakers and mentors, including people from 10 founding corporate partners, Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe.

3:29Those companies and dozens of others hope to hire from the grads of this school. So this is like if Y Combinator, the most famed startup school, and Peter Thiel's fellowship program, which is a famed program for young people who opt to build companies instead of attend college had a baby. The difference is, instead of a short-term experience ending with funding for a company, these students will pay tuition, earn tech trade skills, and have an inside track at tech industry jobs. Or they may also have a startup in the works, built with access to a lot of mentorship. As the founders of the Academy describe it, it's meant to be a new middle ground between obtaining a full degree before entering the tech industry and dropping out to start a company.

4:19In this era, when AI has been hampering the entry-level job market, gaining access to jobs may be enough reason for some young people to try this new trade school-like approach.

4:33How about this for a task? Fly to an asteroid, land on it, make no mistakes. Yeah, if only it were that easy. When NASA sends spacecraft to explore the solar system, they build in redundancy and automation. But much of the work is done by teams of flight controllers communicating with the vehicle from Earth. The OSIRIS-REx mission, which rendezvoused with an asteroid in 2018, had 100 operators on each 8-hour shift. But resources like that are not available to startups. So, Astroforge, which is developing technology to mine asteroids, is turning to artificial intelligence. The company has developed an autonomous control stack for its spacecraft called SOLO, a transformer-based model made in-house.

5:21Astroforge plans to fly its first autonomous spacecraft in 2027 on the first rocket launched by Stoke Space. That mission will be backed by NASA and is expected to gather scientific data about the Sun. That would be an accomplishment. Most spacecraft autonomy depends on traditional control algorithms due to concerns about the unreliability of neural networks. The first use of a neural network to control a satellite's positioning in orbit took place just last year. Astroforge, founded in 2022 and backed with$56 million in venture funding, has launched two prototype spacecraft, both of which suffered anomalies that prevented them from achieving most of their mission objectives.

6:09In 2025, its Odin spacecraft was launched into deep space, but the company had difficulty communicating with it. There are a limited number of antennas on Earth big enough to transmit to spacecraft, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and the windows of time in which to do it are pretty small. Ultimately, Astroforge could not gain control of Odin, but the experience spurred it to consider alternatives. Could it put sufficient intelligence on board the spacecraft for it to solve its own problems? Would they have been recoverable with all the data on the spacecraft, says Matthew Geologist, Astroforge's co-founder and CEO.

6:52I don't know, but I can tell you nothing on board tried it, and I would love something on board to try if the spacecraft is unrecoverable at launch. The trade for me is, do I go build my own ground network, which is going to cost around $200 million to put five dishes up around the world and then do operations on it, Or do I try to remove it with a model? Armand Awad, Astroforge's head of flight software, said the company decided to leverage the advances in transformer models driven by the frontier labs. It created a stack that includes traditional control algorithms, models trained on test data for specific subsystems like power generation or navigation, and an overall intelligence layer trained on about 2 ,500 sensors in the spacecraft.

7:40Now, Geolich said, I'm not saying I'm going to make general spacecraft autonomy or general autonomy for the world. I'm making a constrained autonomy at a very low sensor input, following the basic training of a transformer model. In theory, the agent in control of the spacecraft will perform tasks like anomaly resolution. Awad imagines it realizing that it has lost track of its position in space, correlating a power anomaly to issues in its star tracker and fixing the whole thing, probably turning it on and off in that case. The company's third vehicle, Deep Space 2, is currently set to launch alongside Intuitive Machines' third moon mission, expected to head for space by the end of this year.

8:28Solo will be on board that vehicle, flying in shadow mode, so Astroforge's engineers can put it through the paces before the Autonomy One mission. Now, would this truly be an AI agent operating an independent spacecraft? Geolich said, I don't plan on flying radios that can receive from Earth to Autonomy One. We have to go all in right now. The team's probably going to talk me into it by the time we fly it. But right now, I'm telling them no radios. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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