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Low Earth orbit is already getting crowded. Around 14,500 active satellites are circling Earth, and roughly two-thirds of them are run by SpaceX. Now, in filings connected to Elon Musks plan to fold SpaceX and his AI firm xAI together ahead of an IPO, the company has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch up to one million more. The figure is so large it would dwarf the number of satellites currently in orbit. In fact, it is more than every object ever sent into space by every nation combined. So why is Musk planning it, and what would it mean for the rest of us? In a public update posted on the SpaceX website as part of the merger process between SpaceX and xAI, Musk wrote that Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization. The Kardashev scale is a measure of technological development first outlined in the 1960s by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who died in 2019. While the scale of the proposal may have impressed Kardashev, many experts are far more skeptical. A million new satellites would represent roughly a 67-fold increase over todays orbital population. Proposals on the scale being discussedup to one million satellitesrepresent a step change that deserves the same level of scrutiny we would apply to any other major global infrastructure project,” says Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky International, a nonprofit focused on preserving night skies and mitigating the impacts of light pollution. Satellite deployment at such a scale would have huge knock-on effects. The consequences extend well beyond astronomy, Hartley says. They include cumulative impacts on the night sky, increased atmospheric pollution from satellite launches and re-entries, and a sharply elevated risk of orbital congestion and collision cascades that could impair access to low Earth orbit for all nations. When satellites burn up, they release metals such as aluminum into the upper atmosphere, a process scientists and the U.K. Space Agency warn is still poorly understood but likely accelerating as megaconstellations grow. There is also the question of safety. Space is already crowded with satellites that power communications, enable GPS navigation, and support countless services we rely on every day. Adding vastly more objects increases the chances of close approaches, which, if not monitored and avoided, can result in collisions and cascading debris. SpaceX will say they can do that stationkeeping successfully, but it doesn’t take many failures to have you end up in a bad situation, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space sustainability analyst based in London and Boston and formerly at the Center for Astrophysics. The SpaceX satellites will be in the higher part of low Earth orbit where it will take a long time for failed satellites to re-enter. Hartley, for his part, argues that these risks demand far more scrutiny. Decisions made now will shape the near-Earth environment for generations, he says. Not everyone believes the million-satellite figure is even realistic. As to the question of if its practical, I would think not, says Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. Filing for 1 million satellites is probably a way for SpaceX to push the envelope before accepting whatever fraction regulators deem acceptable. That tactic may already be working. The FCC initially rejected a 2022 SpaceX proposal to launch 30,000 satellites, before later approving it in 25% tranches. The commission authorized another 7,500 satellites this January, for a total approval of 15,000 satellites from that filing, says Henry. SpaceX is also asking the FCC to waive standard deployment milestones, and says the economics of the plan depend on Starship becoming fully reusable, a goal it has not yet reached. In that sense, the million-satellite request is not a signal of imminent growth, but a bid to stake out spectrum and orbital real estate for a future that Musk is already trying to define.
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President Donald Trump’s administration is expected to unveil its grandest plan yet to rebuild supply chains of critical minerals needed for everything from jet engines to smartphones, likely through purchase agreements with partners on top of creating a $12 billion U.S. strategic reserve to help counter China’s dominance.Vice President JD Vance is set to deliver a keynote address Wednesday at a meeting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is hosting with officials from several dozen European, Asian and African nations. The U.S. is expected to sign deals on supply chain logistics, though details have not been revealed. Rubio met Tuesday with foreign ministers from South Korea and India to discuss critical minerals mining and processing.The meeting and expected agreements will come just two days after Trump announced Project Vault, or a stockpile of critical minerals to be funded with a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and nearly $1.67 billion in private capital.Trump’s Republican administration is making such bold moves after China, which controls 70% of the world’s rare earths mining and 90% of the processing, choked off the flow of the elements in response to Trump’s tariff war. The two superpowers are in a one-year truce after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in October and agreed to pull back on high tariffs and stepped-up rare earth restrictions.But China’s limits remain tighter than they were before Trump took office.“We don’t want to ever go through what we went through a year ago,” Trump said on Monday when announcing Project Vault. Countering China’s dominance on critical minerals Other countries might join with the Trump administration in buying up critical minerals and taking other steps to spur industry development because the trade war revealed how vulnerable Western countries are to China, said Pini Althaus, who founded Oklahoma rare earth miner USA Rare Earth in 2019.“They’re looking at setting up sort of a buyers’ club, if you will,” said Althaus, who now is working to develop new mines in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as CEO of Cove Capital. “The key producers and key consumers of critical minerals will sort of get together and work on pricing structures, floor pricing and other things.”The government last week also made its fourth direct investment in an American critical minerals producer when it extended $1.6 billion to USA Rare Earth in exchange for stock and a repayment agreement.Seeking government funding these days is like meeting with private equity investors because officials are scrutinizing companies to ensure anyone they invest in can deliver, Althaus said. And the government is demanding terms designed to generate a return for taxpayers as loans are repaid and stock prices increase, he said. The stockpile strategy Meanwhile, the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s board this week approved the $10 billion loan the largest in its history to help finance the setup of the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. It is tasked with ensuring access to critical minerals and related products for manufacturers, including battery maker Clarios, energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova, digital storage company Western Digital and aerospace giant Boeing, according to the policy bank.Bank President and Chairman John Jovanovic told CNBC that the project creates a public-private partnership formula that “is uniquely suited and puts America’s best foot forward.”“What it does is it creates a scenario where there are no free riders. Everybody pitches in to solve this huge problem,” he said.Manufacturers, which benefit the most from the reserve, are making a long-term financial commitment, Jovanovic said, while the government loan spurs private investments.The stockpile strategy may help spark a “more organic” pricing model that excludes China, which has used its dominance to flood the market with lower-priced products to squeeze out competitors, said Wade Senti, president of the U.S. permanent magnet company AML.The Trump administration also has injected public money directly into the sector. The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China. Efforts get some bipartisan support A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals. The lawmakers applauded the steps by the Trump administration.“It’s a clear sign that there is bipartisan support for securing a robust domestic supply of critical minerals that both reduces our reliance on China and stabilizes the market,” Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Todd Young, R-Ind., said in a joint statement Tuesday.Building up a stockpile will help American companies weather future rare earth supply disruptions, but that will likely be a long-term effort because the materials are still scarce right now with China’s restrictions, said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”The Trump administration has focused on reinvigorating critical minerals production, but Abraham said it’s also important to encourage development of manufacturing that will use them. He noted that Trump’s decisions to cut incentives for electric vehicles and wind turbines have undercut demand for these elements in America. Didi Tang, Josh Funk and Matthew Lee, Associated Press
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The footage was real, verified, and delightful: a security camera clip of a coyote bouncing on a backyard trampoline in Los Angeles. Days after the video went viral, near-identical kangaroos, bears, and rabbits began circulating too, all generated by AI. Millions shared them, believing theyd captured another glimpse of animals behaving hilariously. It was an amusing mix-up, but it was also a warning. AI-generated video tools have moved far beyond producing surreal or obviously manipulated clips. They are now convincingly imitating the formats we instinctively trust most: CCTV, dashcams, police bodycams, wildlife cameras, and handheld eyewitness footage. These are the clips that shape public understanding during protests, disasters, violence, and emergencies. And the fake ones are becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. AI-generated realism has already entered the news cycle At Storyful, we verify thousands of real-world videos for newsrooms and brands worldwide. This year we ran a test: we fed real breaking-news headlines from our own platform into one of the newest AI video models. In seconds, we got clips that mimicked the texture and perspective of eyewitness reporting. Not glossy AI experiments, news-like footage that could plausibly land in a newsroom inbox during a breaking story. Side by side with the original real clips, even trained journalists needed to slow down and scrutinize the details. Consider this example, inspired by a verified authentic video posted to social media in the wake of heavy monsoon rains in India: Firefighters Save Man Clinging to Pole Amid Raging Indian Floods A man was rescued on Tuesday, September 16, in Indias Uttarakhand state after spending more than four hours clinging onto an electricity pole as deadly floodwaters raged around him, local media reported. Real: And this fully synthetic video, created by prompting OpenAIs video generator app Sora with the title of the first video. Fake: This is no longer a theoretical future. It is happening right now. Guardrails are already slipping. Tutorials circulate openly on Reddit explaining how to remove the watermark on videos created by one of the most popular AI-video generators, OpenAIs Sora. Restrictions on certain AI prompts can be bypassedwhen they existor models can be run locally without curbs on highly realistic content. And because these tools can create fake CCTV or disaster footage on demand, the question isnt whether AI can generate convincing videos of things that never happened. Its how far will a convincing fake spread before anyone checks it? Why AI-generated videos feel believable The most significant shift in AI-generated video is not just its appearance, but also its behavior. Real eyewitness footage contains the rough edges that come with real life: a shaky hand, the camera pointed at the ground before the action begins, long stretches of nothing happening, imperfect angles and missed details. AI does not yet replicate these moments. It goes straight to the action, framed center-perfect, lit cleanly, and paced like a scene built for maximum impact. It offers the moment we expect to see, without the messy human lead-up that usually surrounds it. The reason is simple. Most models are still trained heavily on cinematic material rather than chaotic, handheld user-generated content. They understand drama better than they understand reality. That gap is what allows verification teams to spot the differencefor now. As models evolve and prompt-writing improves, these behavioral tells will fade. The training data for these video foundation models includes both shaky bystander videos and slick documentaries, allowing them to ably imitate their style and sense of realism. Public confidence is already eroding The Reuters Digital News Report finds that 58% of global audiences fear they can no longer tell real from fake online. That fear used to apply mainly to politics and propaganda. Now it applies to harmless backyard videos. This marks a deeper psychological shift. Once a viewer starts doubting everyday videos, they dont toggle that skepticism on and off. If they question a dog rescue, they will question a protest. If they question a prank, they will question a war zone. Trust doesnt collapse in a single dramatic moment. It erodes drip by drip, through thousands of small uncertainties. And as AI-generated video becomes abundant, authentic footage becomes scarce. How to tell when a video is AI-generated AI detection tools can be a useful part of your workflow, but they are not a replacement for human verification. According to Storyfuls analysis, current tools achieve 6575% accuracy under ideal conditions, but that accuracy drops below 50% within weeks of a new AI model release. These are the signals Storyful’s verification teams use daily, cues the public can learn to recognize quickly. AI starts at the climax.Real footage almost always includes dead time or fumbling before the action. Subjects sit perfectly in the center of the frame.Eyewitnesses rarely capture the chaos of breaking news like cinematographers. Motion is too smoothReal user-generated content stutters, shakes, refocuses, and slips. Timestamps, signage, and license plates break down under scrutinyAI often approximates these details instead of rendering thm accurately. Disaster and wildlife clips look too composed.Real life is uncertain. AI often looks staged. These cues wont hold forever, but right now they offer critical protection. Authenticity is now an asset Tech platforms can add more guardrails to their video generator tools, regulators can update frameworks, detection tools can improve, and so can our own critical faculties. And as newsrooms help audiences navigate through the morass of fakery, the most impactful way they can rebuild trust is to be transparent. Audiences no longer trust sources say. They want to see how a journalist or a newsroom knows something is real. More news organizations are adopting verification-forward formats, including BBC Verify and CBS News Confirmed, which integrate open-source and forensic checks into reporting, examining provenance, imagery, metadata patterns, and geolocation when relevant. Storyful Newswire equips all of our partners with these basic but essential details about every video on our platform. This transparency is becoming the primary differentiator in an environment where AI-generated video is cheap, fast, and everywhere. The more AI-generated footage floods the ecosystem, the more credibility belongs to organizations that make showing their work a key part of the story. The internet’s most unforgettable videos were never perfect. They were unpredictable, flawed, and human, the kinds of moments AI still struggles to imagine. AI-generated footage can now mimic the visual language of truth. But it cannot yet reproduce the randomness of real life. What’s at stake when it does isn’t simply misinformation. It’s the public’s ability to trust what it sees in the moments that matter most. James Law is Editor in Chief of Storyful, a news agency used by 70 percent of the top 20 global newsrooms specializing in verifying breaking news and viral video.
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