Turning Dead Asteroids Into Platinum Mines: Astroforge

Asteroid mining sounds insane until you speak to AstroForge CEO Matthew Gialich. Then it makes perfect sense.

Matthew’s team at AstroForge builds spacecraft to mine metallic M-type asteroids for platinum group metals, the unglamorous but essential metals inside phones, cars, chips, electronics and much more.

AstroForge is one of the few companies trying to make space mining real, targeting metal-rich asteroids that could contain platinum, palladium, iridium and other PGMs.

Why? Earth’s resources are getting harder, deeper and more expensive to reach. The good stuff is not sitting neatly on the surface. A lot of it is buried, depleted, regulated or uneconomic.

In this episode, Matthew explains why asteroid mining may now be technically and economically possible, why Planetary Resources may have been too early, how SpaceX changed the capital story for space startups, and why AstroForge’s first deep-space spacecraft failed after travelling nearly a million miles from Earth.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.

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Chapters

(00:00) Asteroid Mining Trailer

(02:51) The Economic Necessity of Asteroid Mining

(08:37) Lessons from Planetary Resources

(10:43) Risk and Innovation