Decades ago, I watched a tv show about some guy making a living in an ultralight flying over the deserts of Arizona, finding meteor impact areas and selling them for a pretty penny.
It can be used for building materials, shielding, may produce oxygen or hydrogen for fuel, or could be used for reaction mass or for projectile weapons.
I suppose it would depend on what it is composed of.
Meteorites are quite valuable, worth as much as $1,000 per gram, according to the LiveScience website. Kellyco Metal Detectors posted on eBay that it can sell for $300 per gram or more — meaning 1 pound could be worth $1 million. "Meteorites are rarer than gold, platinum, diamonds or emeralds.
You kill the value of the rock first of all. Go on eBay. People pay big money for asteroids. But the metal composition is essentially the same, u less it’s something unknown to earth.
Anything that survives entry is pretty well baked.
You’ve never seen that Stephen King movie, have you?
o.O
With the Kryptonite in it, you can make Superman your bitch. So, that’s gotta be worth something.
Cement on Earth has become so advanced they don’t even make tall buildings with a steel frame anymore.
I’m not sure you understand just how valuable water is, off Earth. No way you’d ever use it for something like cement.
Some folks smoke them.
It does little good to mine something if the cost of getting it to where it will be used is high. One reason we are able to make mining pay is we have extensive means to move meaningful quantities at low cost; barges, trains and trucks. The cost of getting miners, equipment and supplies to an asteroid would pale before the cost of getting the mined material someplace where it would be useful. Unless of course you are living on an asteroid. If so, for what purpose? Living someplace profitably is all about location, location, location.
“Scientists answer first that the asteroids are composed of iron, nickel, platinum, and other metals, as well as sulfur, aluminum oxide, carbon compounds, and other minerals. …”
It is unlikely that a technology that could extract the elements above will have more need for them than can be met right here on Earth.
The technology to do that would make you wealthy....
I recall a trip to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)...there was an exhibit of meterioites and along with it was a wrench fashioned from a meterioite.
It was a beautiful metal, somewhat blueish with silver veins in it. It had a wrench on each end...what made it even odder was that there was NO offset — it was just straight.
Must have been made from a rather large meterioite. As I recall it came from somewhere in South America.
Depends on what it is. Some meteors are just light elements and molecules, water, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, … Some are metallic or rocky. Others can be strange combinations.
Consider that all, or nearly all, of the metals on the earth’s surface like iron, gold, silver, platinum, aluminum, etc., were deposited by meteors.