NASA is Fast-Tracking Plans to Explore a Metal Asteroid Worth $10,000 Quadrillion

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 05/29/17

Karla Lant reports that NASA is fast-tracking a planned trip to 16 Psyche, an asteroid that almost completely consists of nickel-iron metal, and probably platinum, cobalt, and other metals. The iron in 16 Psyche alone is estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion (at current market prices), if humans were able to bring it down to Earth, which sounds great, until you realize that the entire global economy is only worth $78 trillion. Injecting that much worth into the world economy would crash that metals market, in a totally different kind of asteroid impact than most people think about. Same with the price of platinum, cobalt, etc. Fortunately, actually mining minerals from 16 Psyche is not in NASA plans. NASA lead scientist for the mission, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, posed some fascinating questions to Global News Canada in January 2017 that even if we could grab a big metal piece and drag it back here? Could you control the global resource, like diamonds are controlled corporately, and protect your market? What if you decided you were going to bring it back and you were going to solve the metal resource needs for a hundred years? 16 Psyche will allow humans their first shot at exploring a world made of metals rather than ice or rock if NASA succeeds. The mission was originally set to begin in 2023, but now the agency is planning on starting in 2022 and making contact in 2026, thanks to a more efficient, lower-cost trajectory of the asteroid discovered by the team. Given the extreme distances in space, it seems likely that we will depend on our ability to mine resources in space as we travel further from Earth — and an exciting experience on 16 Psyche may be what the majority of humanity needs to be convinced that space mining is possible. See Chapter 9 and others of the EMD Memoir 101 for a sober look at the issues: http://www.i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/Memoir101-T0fC2016.pdf