ExLabs' Asteroid Mission: Space Mining & Defense

0:00It's April 1st, welcome to Canada News Today, powered by AI. X-Labs out of Long Beach is gearing up for a high-stakes space shot, aiming a spacecraft at the asteroid Apophis. This rock, discovered back in 2004, was as close to Earth on April 13th, 2029. Their probe launches in April 2028, chasing it down over a year at blistering speeds, then docking about 100 million kilometers. Away for a one-way study mission, lasting three to five years. The whole thing runs mostly on autopilot because of the huge signal delay from Earth. Once there, it'll deploy payloads to scan the asteroid's makeup, structure, and how Earth's gravity tweaks it. X-Labs pulls funding from the US Space Force, Air Force, NASA, and JPL, plus clients paying to hitch rides with their own gear. A small team of about a dozen sees this as the kickoff for asteroid hunting as big business. They're dreaming of mining rare metals like platinum and cobalt from space rocks,

1:01easing Earth's resource crunch and fueling tech from phones to meds. Co-founder James Ursula calls it a reversal of our supply chain, towing halls to lunar orbits for processing. Looking ahead, they plan standardized probes printed in months, scaling up tenfold to snag and redirect threats. Apophis packs nickel and stone, but others hold game changers, and this could birth a billion dollar industry while prepping defenses against. Dino-killer impacts. As humanity eyes bigger plays in the solar system, X-Labs is betting on infinite space riches to redefine how we build and protect our world.