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From Cosmos to Quarries: Asteroid Mining, Autonomous Drilling, and the Trillion-Dollar Metals Opportunity
In our latest Pirates Only adventure, we trade surfboards for star-ships and jackhammers for ion thrusters, asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when you treat the whole Solar System like one giant opportunity? To find out, I sit down with two founders who are attacking humanity’s metals bottleneck from opposite directions.
Matthew Gialich, co-founder & CEO of AstroForge, believes platinum-group metals are too valuable to keep digging out of Earth's diesel-powered pits. His answer is to send small, replicable spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids, vaporize the regolith, magnetically separate the PGMs, and haul home billions.
Ted Feldmann, founder & CEO of Durin, keeps his drills planted firmly on Earth (for now). He’s building semi-autonomous core-drilling rigs that beam real-time rock data to geologists, aiming to cut exploration costs way down and speed America’s race for secure supplies of copper, lithium, and other valuable metals.
We map out an industry on the brink of a trillion-dollar upheaval. Matt walks through the market math that pushed AstroForge toward a $60 B annual demand curve, razor-thin surface deposits, and an Outer Space Treaty loophole cemented by the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which lets private firms “mine and sell for profit” anything they can grab in orbit.
Meanwhile Ted argues that, even on Earth, the real choke-point isn’t ore bodies but outdated drill tech and a permitting cycles that stretches mine development to years. Slash drilling costs and you unlock faster discoveries, tighter supply chains, and a stronger defense industrial base .
We even give a shout-out to one of the best movies of all-time: Armageddon.
Highlights:
00:00 Introduction to Mining and Founders' Backgrounds
02:53 Asteroid Mining: The Future of Resource Extraction
05:59 Challenges in Earth Mining: Permitting and Capital
09:01 The Current Demand for Mining: National Security and Technology
12:06 Regulatory Landscape and Its Impact on Mining
15:03 Exploration vs. Processing: The Mining Dilemma
17:59 Technological Innovations in Mining
21:03 The Economics of Mining: Margins and Market Caps
24:03 Space Mining: A New Frontier
26:50 Ownership and Regulation in Space Mining
30:01 Unlocking Potential: The Role of Technology in Mining
32:46 Innovation in Mining Technology
35:11 Challenges of Deep Sea Mining
38:20 The Future of Space Mining
41:07 Environmental Impact of Mining
45:18 The Vision for the Future of Mining
49:13 Building a Sustainable Mining Industry
57:21 Hiring and Retaining Talent in Tech
01:01:12 Opportunities in the Mining Sector
View all episodes
By Black FlagIn our latest Pirates Only adventure, we trade surfboards for star-ships and jackhammers for ion thrusters, asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when you treat the whole Solar System like one giant opportunity? To find out, I sit down with two founders who are attacking humanity’s metals bottleneck from opposite directions.
Matthew Gialich, co-founder & CEO of AstroForge, believes platinum-group metals are too valuable to keep digging out of Earth's diesel-powered pits. His answer is to send small, replicable spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids, vaporize the regolith, magnetically separate the PGMs, and haul home billions.
Ted Feldmann, founder & CEO of Durin, keeps his drills planted firmly on Earth (for now). He’s building semi-autonomous core-drilling rigs that beam real-time rock data to geologists, aiming to cut exploration costs way down and speed America’s race for secure supplies of copper, lithium, and other valuable metals.
We map out an industry on the brink of a trillion-dollar upheaval. Matt walks through the market math that pushed AstroForge toward a $60 B annual demand curve, razor-thin surface deposits, and an Outer Space Treaty loophole cemented by the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which lets private firms “mine and sell for profit” anything they can grab in orbit.
Meanwhile Ted argues that, even on Earth, the real choke-point isn’t ore bodies but outdated drill tech and a permitting cycles that stretches mine development to years. Slash drilling costs and you unlock faster discoveries, tighter supply chains, and a stronger defense industrial base .
We even give a shout-out to one of the best movies of all-time: Armageddon.
Highlights:
00:00 Introduction to Mining and Founders' Backgrounds
02:53 Asteroid Mining: The Future of Resource Extraction
05:59 Challenges in Earth Mining: Permitting and Capital
09:01 The Current Demand for Mining: National Security and Technology
12:06 Regulatory Landscape and Its Impact on Mining
15:03 Exploration vs. Processing: The Mining Dilemma
17:59 Technological Innovations in Mining
21:03 The Economics of Mining: Margins and Market Caps
24:03 Space Mining: A New Frontier
26:50 Ownership and Regulation in Space Mining
30:01 Unlocking Potential: The Role of Technology in Mining
32:46 Innovation in Mining Technology
35:11 Challenges of Deep Sea Mining
38:20 The Future of Space Mining
41:07 Environmental Impact of Mining
45:18 The Vision for the Future of Mining
49:13 Building a Sustainable Mining Industry
57:21 Hiring and Retaining Talent in Tech
01:01:12 Opportunities in the Mining Sector