NASA to explore space rock worth so much money it would DESTROY world economy

Daily Star ^ | 16th January 2017 | Peter Truman

[COBOL2Java]

THE American space agency is planning to send a spacecraft to a lump of metal in space worth quadrillions of dollars.

The 200km-wide asteroid is currently orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

It is made up of various precious metals such as iron, nickel and gold.

Experts believe the iron alone in the rock would be worth $10,000 quadrillion – enough to cause the world’s economy, worth $73.7 trillion, to promptly collapse altogether.

[pa_dweller]

This? Golden Meteor

[Arlis]

Boy, you got that right.

[Fhios]

Drill down and build an underground space station. Then build a a giant rail gun that shoots cargo to and fro.

[BitWielder1]

It won't destroy the word economy, it will add to it.
Or the Solar System's economy, once we get there.

[Axenolith]

I.e power on board :-).

[Axenolith]

You wouldn’t USE anything except maybe a few wildly exotic isotopes found there, on earth. You would use that rock as a ready made mine/factory for building stuff out there.

[montag813]

Short gold tomorrow. Will be worth $100 by 2117

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Delivery cost for the metals currently prohibitive.

[Dead Corpse]

Planetray Resources and Deep Space I dustries are planning on doing exactly that. Right now...

[Dead Corpse]

Scale that up/ There’s a billion dollars buried in Antarctica. You have the gps coordinates. All you gotta do is go get it...

[Dead Corpse]

2025. Possibly sooner if Shawyer’s Em Drive works as adverized...

[MHGinTN]

You’re confusing it with Phobos.

[from occupied ga]

Can’t scale it up. Should scale it down. Not sure if you’re unaware of the costs or are ignoring the because science fiction appeals to you
Scale it up to a billion but then you have to scale up the cost of getting there to about $100,000,000,000,000

[from occupied ga]

A little economic education:

Cost of the Apollo pgm in today's dollars $110 billion Total weight brought back 861 lb Now that's from the moon our CLOSEST neighbor but it still cost $127,758,420/pound returned. Now multiply that by 1600 distance ratio asteroid to moon and you get $204,413,472,706 per pound transportation cost. Something the space kadets gloss over.

[AndyTheBear]

Not so sure. The cost of getting of getting a small amount would be too high. But the larger the total amount one is after, the less it will cost per unit with industrious engineering.

I would not go to Antarctica for a single $500 dollar buried gem. But if there were billions of these gems it might at some point be cost effective to get some kind of enterprise going to efficiently find and extract them.

Of course, this presumes a plan to make it cost effective at scale would be conceived and competently implemented...and NASA is a government agency....

[Dead Corpse]

In a maned craft, yes. In an unmanned miner robot, much... much... much cheaper.

[Dead Corpse]

That’s government doing it. Planetary Resources and DSI are private companies.

You are also thinking in terms of 60’s technology. My iPhone has more computing power than all of the computers used in Apollo combined...

And then there is this...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster

Game changer...

[oldasrocks]

Bring it home? the dinosaurs tried that and look how it worked out for them.

[JoeProBono]

[Empireoftheatom48]

Wow can you imagin the smell! Whew!!