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Earth’s 1st Asteroid Mining Prospector Heads to the Launchpad
A private company is aiming to heave a microwave oven-size spacecraft toward an asteroid later this week, its goal to kick off a future where precious metals are mined around the solar system to create vast fortunes on Earth.
“If this works out, this will probably be the biggest business ever conceived of,” said Matt Gialich, the founder and chief executive of AstroForge, the builder and operator of the robotic probe.
That may sound familiar: A decade ago, news stories were aflutter about the wealth promised by asteroid mining companies. But things didn’t quite work out.
“We blossomed three or four years too early for the big gold rush of investor enthusiasm for space projects,” said David Gump, the former chief executive of Deep Space Industries, one of the earlier batch of would-be asteroid miners. Eventually the money dried up; Deep Space Industries was sold off in 2019 and never reached an asteroid.
AstroForge is betting on things being different this time around. The California company has already launched a demonstration spacecraft into Earth orbit and raised $55 million in funding. Now the company is set to actually travel toward a near-Earth asteroid in deep space.
AstroForge’s second robotic spacecraft, called Odin, is bundled into a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will also launch a privately built moon lander and a NASA-operated lunar orbiter as soon as Wednesday from Florida. About 45 minutes after the launch, Odin will separate and begin its solo journey into deep space, while the moon missions — the Athena lander from Intuitive Machines and NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer — take off on their own separate journeys.
No commercial company has ever launched an operational mission beyond the moon, and AstroForge is the first company to receive a license from the Federal Communications Commission that allows it to transmit from deep space. AstroForge will communicate with the spacecraft using undisclosed dishes in India, South Africa, Australia and the United States.
At first, AstroForge kept its target asteroid a secret, fearing competitors. But in January, the company announced the destination, an object called 2022 OB5. Mr. Gialich said he was more confident of AstroForge’s advantage.
“We’re the only one that’s actually doing anything,” he said. “Who else is preparing to go to an asteroid?”
Asteroid 2022 OB5 is small, no more than 330 feet across, about the size of a football field. AstroForge’s science team assessed the asteroid by using telescopes, including the Lowell Observatory and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, to estimate its metallic content. They believe that 2022 OB5 is an M-type, a class of asteroids comprising 5 percent of known space rocks that may have a high amount of metal. The analysis of the asteroid has not yet been published.
Stephanie Jarmak, a planetary scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the company’s analysis was plausible.
“There are several different ways to determine whether it’s an M-type or not,” she said, including studying the asteroid’s brightness, or albedo. A higher brightness suggests the presence of more metal. She lauded the company for being more open about its target asteroid. “I thought that was really nice,” she said.
M-type asteroids are thought to be rich in metals such as iron and nickel. These could be useful as a resource for construction in space, perhaps to build new spacecraft and machinery. However, some M-types may also be rich in more valuable platinum group metals, or P.G.M.s, used in devices such as smartphones. The windfall would be huge if these could be mined in abundance and brought to Earth.
“A single one-kilometer-diameter asteroid, if it was platinum-bearing, would contain about 117,000 tons of platinum,” said Mitch Hunter-Scullion, the founder and chief executive of the Asteroid Mining Corporation in Britain. His company is taking a slower approach and plans to demonstrate technologies on the moon later this decade.
“That’s about 680 years of global supply. You’re talking about centuries of platinum demand from a single asteroid,” Mr. Hunter-Scullion said. “Even if you get 1,000 tons of platinum, you’re sitting there with the next half century of mobile phones.”
Not everyone is convinced that so much valuable metal will be found inside M-type asteroids.
“There’s not enough P.G.M.s in asteroids to justify that as a stand-alone business,” said Joel C. Sercel, the founder and chief executive of TransAstra, a company that is developing a giant bag that could be used to grab and extract resources from asteroids in the future. The company will test a small mock-up of the technology aboard the International Space Station following a launch to the station this summer.
The legalities of mining asteroids and selling their resources remain uncertain.
In 2015, President Obama signed a law allowing asteroid resources to be sold on Earth. But no one has yet put this law to the test.
“Is AstroForge going to make a claim? Does the fact they reach this asteroid before anybody else mean nobody else can go to it?” asked Michelle Hanlon, a law professor specializing in space at the University of Mississippi. “It’s going to be interesting to see the international reaction.”
Odin will arrive in late 2025 after a journey of about 300 days to 2022 OB5. The asteroid follows an orbit around the sun similar to Earth’s. The probe will fly past the asteroid at a distance of 0.6 miles, using two black-and-white cameras to snap pictures. Zooming by the object at thousands of miles per hour, the spacecraft will have an encounter that will last five and a half hours.
“And it’s probably only the last 10 minutes that we’re getting pictures bigger than a pixel,” Mr. Gialich said.
The goal is for these pictures to be enough to tell if the asteroid is metallic.
“Hopefully it looks shiny,” Mr. Gialich said. However, it’s very possible that any metal could be mixed into the asteroid’s soil and not be visible.
“I’m not sure how much compositional information they can get purely from images,” Dr. Jarmak, the planetary scientist, said.
Craters on the surface may hint at hidden metal though, Mr. Gialich said, adding: “We expect to see cracking on the surface” that could be indicative of metallic content.
The spacecraft will also precisely track the asteroid’s position in space during the flyby. Doing so could allow the density of the asteroid to be calculated, based on its gravitational tug on the spacecraft. Higher density would hint at more metallic content.
Success is not guaranteed. AstroForge’s first mission, Brokkr-1, was launched into low-Earth orbit in April 2023 to test the company’s planned asteroid refining technology. But the mission encountered problems and burned up in the atmosphere. Mr. Gialich said that AstroForge had improved its technologies on the Odin spacecraft by relying on components produced in-house.
Vestri, the third mission of AstroForge, will be its most ambitious. That spacecraft, the size of a refrigerator, will be designed to land on an asteroid as soon as next year, possibly even 2022 OB5 if the metallic content is confirmed. Vestri’s landing legs would be equipped with magnets designed to stick to the surface of the asteroid and be capable of estimating how many P.G.M.s are present.
It’s unclear how successful this mission will be. “If it’s made out of solid metal it will stick,” said Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, many asteroids are known to be rubble piles, essentially collections of rocks held together loosely by gravity, such as the asteroid Bennu that was visited by NASA’s ORISIS-REx spacecraft.
“They are barely held together,” Dr. Weiss said, meaning that the magnets might just end up pulling a few rocks away from the surface as the lander drifts away.
Only one spacecraft, the Rosetta spacecraft from the European Space Agency, has visited a suspected M-type asteroid before, a flyby of the asteroid 21 Lutetia in 2010. The presence of metal at that time was inconclusive. A much more capable mission, NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche spacecraft, is currently on its way to an asteroid bearing the same name by 2029. Astronomers think the asteroid may be a fragment of a failed planet’s core and is rich in metal.
Results from the Odin mission’s analysis of 2022 OB5 could be a tantalizing tease for Psyche. “If it turns out it’s made of solid metal, that would support the idea that some of these larger bodies like Psyche could be the cores of differentiated bodies,” Dr. Weiss said.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton at Arizona State University, the principal investigator on Psyche and also an adviser to AstroForge, said that the opportunities afforded by commercial deep space missions like Odin are exciting, enabling small and fast missions at low cost. “It’s going to be a bit of a game-changer,” she said.
Others are more focused on what Odin means for asteroid mining in the present tense.
“It’s probably the highest achievement in the sector so far,” Mr. Hunter-Scullion of Asteroid Mining Corporation said. Mr. Sercel of TransAstra also applauded the company.
“We’re gung-ho for AstroForge and wish them the best of luck,” he said. “We’re behind them 100 percent.”
Now there’s just the small matter of the launch and journey to the asteroid, and the hope that what Odin finds will lead to the riches long touted from asteroid mining.
“If we make it, I’m popping champagne,” Mr. Gialich said.
A gig drivers organization filed a lawsuit against Uber, alleging the company violated their rights by not providing a sufficient appeals process for deactivated accounts.
The lawsuit was announced Monday during a news conference by Rideshare Drivers United, an independent organization that represents more than 20,000 app-based drivers in California.
The organization, represented by attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, said thousands of drivers have been terminated with little to no explanation, many of whom had worked as drivers for years and had high ratings.
“Drivers want to stand up for themselves and for basic fairness, and we can’t when there is no fair appeals process,” said Jason Munderloh, the chairman of the organization’s Bay Area chapter.
The lawsuit is the latest in a long battle between drivers and major ride-hailing service companies. Uber, a frequent target of lawsuits, has often faced claims of labor violations and vehicle collisions.
The tension could reach the November ballot, as the ride-hailing giant attempts to curb the laundry list of legal action. Uber is advocating for legislation that could cap how much attorneys can earn in vehicle collision cases.
Rideshare Drivers United said Monday that Uber is violating Proposition 22, which passed in 2020 and was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2024. The legislation was a win for gig economy companies, allowing them to classify drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, provided certain requirements are met.
Uber is violating a clause in the proposition that requires the company to provide an appeals process for drivers who are terminated, the organization said.
“Uber has had six years of hiding behind Prop. 22 on issues favorable to it and ignored the law when it seemed inconvenient,” Munderloh said.
The lawsuit seeks a statewide judgment that Uber has failed to comply with Proposition 22, along with an opportunity for the thousands of deactivated drivers to appeal their terminations. The suit also seeks reactivation and back pay for drivers who were unfairly terminated.
Uber denied the claims in the lawsuit and reaffirmed that it offers a clear appeals process, in compliance with Proposition 22, a spokesperson told The Times.
“This is a baseless lawsuit by an opportunistic trial lawyer seeking to overturn Proposition 22 and the will of California voters,” the spokesperson said. “We’ll fight this publicity stunt in court while continuing to strengthen drivers’ voice on the platform.”
The company posted on a blog Friday that details its termination and appeals process. Every deactivated driver is given a reason for termination and offered a review process for more information. Drivers can then appeal, and the appeal is evaluated by a real person, according to the website.
Rirdeshare Drivers United said drivers are often terminated for vague reasons and are met with endless automated chatbots when inquiring about their terminations.
Drivers who request an appeal are either automatically denied or given the runaround without being offered an actual appeals process, Liss-Riordan said.
Devins Baker had given about 18,000 rides for Uber in eight years and boasted a 4.96 rating when his account was unexpectedly terminated just before Christmas in 2024. An automated message from the company claimed Baker had driven recklessly and offered no other information, he said.
He wasn’t told what resulted in his termination, but said that during his last ride, he had to drive defensively to avoid crashing into a vehicle that was merging recklessly on the freeway.
Baker had to hit the brakes to avoid the collision, and the passenger, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, fell off the seat.
Baker was not offered a chance to appeal, he said.
Proposition 22 carved out a new classification for gig economy workers, affording them limited benefits, but not the rights granted to full-fledged employees.
The legislation received strong financial backing from Uber.
A group of drivers challenged Proposition 20 in 2024, claiming the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the state Legislature’s authority to provide workers’ compensation protections to drivers. Their claims were ultimately rejected by the state’s highest court.
Ride-hail drivers have long raised concerns about low wages, minimal workplace protections and exploitative practices.
More recently, they have grappled with rising gas prices amid the war in the Middle East, which has driven some away from the ride-hailing business.
“The pay is not good in the first place. We do what we can to create a solid framework for ourselves and our families,” said Munderloh, who works as a part-time Uber driver. “It’s hard enough with how little they pay us, and then even that is taken away.”
Various gig companies, including Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, have said Proposition 22 is a crucial component of their businesses and threatened to shut down in the state if the proposition were struck down. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign to sway voters on the proposition.
When Infowars, the website founded by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, came up for sale two years ago, an unlikely suitor stepped up. The Onion, a satirical news outlet, planned to convert the site into a parody of itself.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’ Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Guerra Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
Mr. Jones had no immediate comment.
The battle over Infowars has been a long and fraught saga, and Mr. Jones — a notorious peddler of lies and invective — has used his bully pulpit for more than a year to crusade against The Onion’s efforts to take over the platform. The site is in limbo because of a series of defamation lawsuits against Mr. Jones filed by families of victims of the mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which Mr. Jones falsely claimed was a hoax.
People who believed his lies that the shooting was staged subjected the families to years of online abuse, harassment and death threats.
In 2018, the families of two Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones for defamation in Texas, where Infowars is based, and relatives of eight other victims sued him in Connecticut. In 2022, a jury in Texas awarded the parents of one victim $50 million.
Mr. Jones declared bankruptcy later that year. A trial pitting him against the parents of a second victim was delayed indefinitely by that move. Later that year, a jury awarded the families and a former law enforcement official who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut a total of $1.4 billion.
Mr. Jones appealed the Connecticut verdict, the largest defamation award in history, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In October, the justices declined to hear the case.
To help satisfy Mr. Jones’s debts to the Sandy Hook families and other creditors, Judge Christopher Lopez of U.S. Bankruptcy Court ordered in mid-2024 that a court-appointed trustee sell off equipment, intellectual property and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.
In late 2024, a sealed-bid silent auction drew only two contenders: The Onion’s parent and a company associated with Mr. Jones. The trustee and the families chose The Onion’s bid, despite its potential to yield less cash than the rival company’s. Mr. Jones and his lawyers cried foul, and Judge Lopez intervened, saying that the process was opaque and that The Onion’s bid was not obviously superior. He rejected plans for a do-over of the auction, instead directing the families to seek a liquidation through Judge Guerra Gamble’s court in Texas, where the first defamation case was heard and won.
In August, Judge Guerra Gamble ruled that a court-appointed administrator would take over and sell Infowars’ assets, reopening the door to The Onion. “We’re working on it,” Ben Collins, the chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, wrote on social media on the same day as Judge Guerra Gamble’s ruling.
The Onion’s proposal, worth $486,000 in its initial six-month term, does little to satisfy the enormous damages awarded to the Sandy Hook families. The families have been fighting to collect since Mr. Jones filed for personal and business bankruptcy. Mr. Jones is expected to lose access to his studio and equipment as part of the deal, Mr. Collins said.
The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially planned to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker hopes to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy, he said.
“I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview. During a recent trip to Philadelphia, he traveled to the Liberty Bell to film a video in character as the new creative director of Infowars.
“The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
“We are excited to lie constantly for cold, hard cash, but this time in a cool way, and we’ll make sure some of it gets back to the families,” Mr. Collins said.
While broadcast programming is “out of my lane,” Mr. Mattei said, “satire and humor can be universal. If their programming can be of interest to Jones’s former audience, and help bring them out of the dark, that would be wonderful.”
In the meantime, the company has been filming satirical videos in antipation of the court’s ruling. One of them features a fictional anchor from the satirical Onion News Network, “Jim Haggerty,” who defects from the mainstream media to become a conspiracy monger. He will be played by the actor Brad Holbrook.
“For 35 years, I was part of the problem,” Mr. Haggerty intoned in a dramatic trailer released by The Onion. “But now, I’m free of my corporate shackles, and my only business is freedom.”
Apple, one of the world’s most valuable companies, is getting a new chief executive, marking a new chapter in the story of what has become arguably the most influential company in consumer technology.
The Cupertino, Calif., smartphone maker said Monday that John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, will become Apple’s chief executive on Sept. 1.
Tim Cook, who has served as chief executive for roughly 15 years, will become executive chairman of the company’s board of directors, the company said. He was long expected to step down soon.
Under Cook’s leadership, Apple’s market capitalization grew to $4 trillion from about $350 billion, according to the company. Its revenue ballooned from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Apple also expanded its business under Cook’s tenure, including its presence in entertainment with Apple TV and Apple Music. People also use other services such as Apple Pay and iCloud to store their photos, videos and other content.
The leadership transition marks a new era for Apple, which turned 50 years old in April. The company has revolutionized technology, selling popular consumer electronics including iPhones and smartwatches.
But the company has lagged behind as its rivals such as OpenAI, Google, Meta and more move quickly to dominate the artificial intelligence race. It has also had to grapple with tariffs and criticism for manufacturing its products in other countries, such as China and India, during President Trump’s second term.
“These will be big shoes to fill and the timing of Cook exiting stage left as CEO could make sense but also creates questions. Apple is making a major transition on its AI strategy, and longtime CEO and legendary Cook leaving now is a surprise,” Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said in a statement.
In a statement, Cook expressed gratitude for his time leading Apple. The 65-year-old succeeded chief executive and co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011 after he passed away from pancreatic cancer.
“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor,” Cook said in a statement. “He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”
Ternus was widely expected to be next in line as chief executive.
In a statement, he said he’s worked at Apple for nearly his entire career, including under Jobs. He described Cook, who will work with him during the transition, as his mentor.
“I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century,” Ternus said in a statement.
Ternus has served as Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering since 2021, working on new products such as the iPad and AirPods. Before that role, he was on Apple’s product design team in 2001 before becoming vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, according to the company.
“Ternus’s work on Mac has helped the category become more powerful and more popular globally than at any time in its 40-year history,” Apple said in its news release about the transition.
In the fiscal year ending in September, Apple reported revenue of $416 billion and a net income of $112 billion. Worldwide, there are more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices.
Apple’s stock was down less than 1% in early after-hours trading, changing hands at around $271 a share.
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