May 25, 2017
NASA Just Fast-Tracked Its Mission to Explore a $10,000 Quadrillion Metal Asteroid
Posted by Dan Kummer in categories: economics, space
The science community just figured out why we wont actually be doing space mining, until capitalism is no longer a factor anyways.
It might have just pushed back its manned mission to Mars, but NASA just fast-tracked a planned journey to 16 Psyche — an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal.
Estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion in iron alone, if we could somehow mine Psyche’s minerals and bring them back to Earth, it would collapse our comparatively puny global economy of $78 trillion many times over. Fortunately for the economic stability of our planet, NASA plans on looking but not extracting.