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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.
The sale of Warner Bros. — whether in pieces to Netflix or in its entirety to Paramount — is stirring mounting worries among Hollywood union leaders about the possible fallout for their members.
Unions representing writers, directors, actors and crew workers have voiced growing concerns that further consolidation in the media industry will reduce competition, potentially causing studios to pay less for content, and make it more difficult for people to find work.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends,” said Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West. “There are lots of promises made that one plus one is going to equal three. But it’s very hard to envision how two behemoths, for example, Warner Bros. and Netflix … can keep up the level of output they currently have.”
Last week, Netflix announced it agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studio, Burbank lot, HBO and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. It also agreed to take on more than $10 billion of Warner Bros.’ debt. But Paramount, whose previous offers were rebuffed by Warner Bros., has appealed directly to shareholders with an alternative bid to buy all of the company for about $78 billion.
Paramount said it will have more than $6 billion in cuts over three years, while also saying the combined companies will release at least 30 movies a year. Netflix said it expects its deal will have $2 billion to $3 billion in cost cuts.
Those cuts are expected to trigger thousands of layoffs across Hollywood, which has already been squeezed by the flight of production overseas and a contraction in the once booming TV business.
Mulroney said that employment for WGA writers in episodic television is down as much as 40% when comparing the 2023-2024 writing season to 2022-2023.
Executives from both companies have said their deals would benefit creative talent and consumers.
But Hollywood union leaders are skeptical.
“We can hear the generalizations all day long, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s on paper, and we just don’t know if these companies are even prepared to make promises in writing,” said Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters at-large vice president and principal officer for Local 399, which represents drivers, location managers and casting directors.
Dougherty said the Teamsters have been engaged with both Netflix and Paramount, seeking commitments to keep filming in Los Angeles.
“We have a lot of members that are struggling to find work, or haven’t really worked in the last year or so,” Dougherty said.
Mulroney said her union has concerns about both bids, either by Netflix or Paramount.
“We don’t think the merger is inevitable,” Mulroney said. “We think there’s an opportunity to push back here.”
If Netflix were to buy Warner Bros.’ TV and film businesses, Mulroney said that could further undermine the theatrical business.
“It’s hard to imagine them fully embracing theatrical exhibition,” Mulroney said. “The exhibition business has been struggling to get back on its feet ever since the pandemic, so a move like this could really be existential.”
But the Writers Guild also has issues with Paramount’s bid, Mulroney said, noting that it would put Paramount-owned CBS News and CNN under the same parent company.
“We have censorship concerns,” Mulroney said. “We saw issues around [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re concerned about what the news would look like under single ownership here.”
That question was made more salient this week after President Trump, who has for years harshly criticized CNN’s hosts and news coverage, said he believes CNN should be sold.
The worries come as some unions’ major studio contracts, including the DGA, WGA and performers guild SAG-AFTRA, are set to expire next year. Two years ago, writers and actors went on a prolonged strike to push for more AI protections and better wages and benefits.
The Directors Guild of America and performers union SAG-AFTRA have voiced similar objections to the pending media consolidation.
“A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less,” the union said.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union has been in discussions with both Paramount and Netflix.
“It is as yet unclear what path forward is going to best protect the legacy that Warner Brothers presents, and that’s something that we’re very actively investigating right now,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how much influence the unions will have in the outcome.
“They just don’t have a seat at the ultimate decision making table,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “I expect their primary involvement could be through creating more awareness of potential challenges with a merger and potentially more regulatory scrutiny … I think that’s what they’re attempting to do.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
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