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.
“It’s such a strange object,” Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead scientist on the NASA mission and the director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Global News Canada back in January.
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