In the sci-fi film Armageddon, a bunch of miners will go into space to save Earth from impacting a devastating asteroid. Now a similar story in a changed guard is slowly looming: “The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter hides huge platinum bearings for catalysts, cobalt for batteries, iron for steel and gold for electronics,” writes Oilprice.com. And so the Earthlings may go among the stars to make one such asteroid completely.
NASA’s psyche mission is on the way to the asteroid of the same name, metals to understand its composition.
Housing 16 Psyche, named after the ancient Greek personification of the human soul, psyche, the youngest and most beautiful of the three daughters of the King of Anatol, is, according to scientists, an exposed core of an ancient protoplanet.
It contains a huge amount of iron, nickel and rare metals, the value of which is expressed in the amount of fifteen zeros, says Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the Arizona State University.
If this mineral wealth managed to get a mere fraction, it would be a revolution in global supplier chains of critical minerals.
NASA estimates indicate that mining of only 10 such bodies could generate $ 100 million per capita, a total of $ 1.5 trillion.
The psyche mission began in October 2023 aboard the Falcon Heavy Society of SpaceX. The probe should have a space space to the asteroid by the end of July 2029. From its orbit, the next two years will map the body composition.
The American Space Agency itself calls the cosmic object “one of the most interesting in the asteroid belt”. Even more engaging is for the whole cavalry of earth startups, which are already developing technologies, how to make similar space bodies to make and monetize.
California transastra tests so -called optical mining: the asteroid is wrapped with a polyamide case and the concentrated sun rays evaporate volatile substances while metals remain.
The head of the company Joel Sercel compares the process to controlling the Sun as a huge interplanetary burner.
The same society almost first tried its method last year. Just just missed the opportunity with the miniature month of 2024 PT5, which was about 60 days near the ground.
“Such opportunities are sporadically, only once a year, or even in a decade,” says Rob Hot, co -founder of Tethers Unlimited.
By the way, it once designed nets and ropes for capturing and towing asteroids into the Earth’s orbit for their robotic disassembly. She was inspired by the late sci-fi writer Robert L. Forward.
However, experts warn that cosmic mining can also bring immense problems in addition to immense wealth. On the one hand, you can suddenly have so much platinum, gold and metals of rare soils to finance your wildest dreams (and anyone else you know), but at the same time you can slightly sink the global economy overnight.
“The excessive offer of rare soils that are vital to iPhones, electric vehicles and defense technologies could cause prices similar to those that occur in surplus oil. Ground miners would suffer,” says Oilprice.com.
In any case, attempts at cosmic mining are not new. Already in 2012, Planetary Resources was established, followed by director James Cameron, author Terminator, Intruders or Avatara. Together with him, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt co -founders involved in the company.
Although the company eventually went bankrupt, it laid the foundations of the whole field. Now they are trying to build on the new generation of startups that want to turn sci-fi dreams into reality.
