Asteroid Near Earth, Found to be Worth Trillions

What is it that makes gold worth so much? It’s the goin’ and the gettin’ of it. As precious metals of all sort get harder to find here on Earth, the goin’ and a gettin’ is a whole lot further and harder. On the upside, the rewards are a whole lot bigger too! One single asteroid has already been assayed as worth $11.65 trillion. Yesterday’s science fiction is on today’s drawing board.

Gold rush in the asteroid belt

A whole new gold rush is on. There are fortunes to be made out past Mars in the asteroid belt. The thing about these sorts of discoveries is that you have to get in on the ground floor. Latecomers to the scene end up fighting over the scraps.

A motherlode of gold and platinum is sitting right out in plain sight and there’s already a plan on the drawing boards which could be used to mine it. Along with the iron, nickel, cobalt, and copper it’s mixed in with.

To put it in perspective, the yield from one single lump of cosmic debris called 1986 DA “would exceed the total metal reserves on Earth.” It’s not part of the asteroid belt but it’s eccentric orbit crosses the orbit of Mars once every 4.75 years.

Sooner or later, Mother Earth will run out of the materials humans use to build things from skyscrapers to smartphones with. We don’t quite have the technology yet to start space mining operations but we’re getting real close.

Scientists have already started estimating the potential worth of what they see in the telescopes. As detailed in The Planetary Science Journal, “harvesting the precious metal-rich asteroid named 1986 DA” looks really promising. It’s “85% metallic” and they’re all the best ones.

To figure out how much it’s worth, they factored in such things as “market deflation that would occur if the materials were transported back to Earth and sold.” Over 50 years, mining the rock “for its metals would yield $233 billion a year.” In total, “1986 DA was estimated to be worth $11.65 trillion.” When they get done with that one, it has a twin. Dubbed “2016 ED85,” they both “have a similar composition” to the famous space rock Psyche.

How do we get it?

According to the glossy brochures passed around by NASA publicists, “Apis is a breakthrough mission and flight system architecture designed to revolutionize NASA’s human exploration of deep space and to enable massive space industrialization and human settlement.”

They know all about the wealth of the asteroid belt and plan to exploit it in a huge way. The best part about it is that its a privatized endeavor. If you start investing early, your kids can blast off for the mining colonies.

According to the TransAstra Corp website, named “for the genus of honeybees, the Apis™ family of spacecraft are a fleet of OTVs and mining vehicles that will supply and service cislunar orbits.”

“The Worker Bees will fly first to become the backbone of a vital new transportation and service network in space. Mini Bee, Honey Bee, and Queen Bee are specialized Worker Bee spacecraft equipped with asteroid capture and mining equipment.”

They use what’s called “Optical Mining™ Technology” as a “method of asteroid resource harvesting.” Their “Omnivore™ solar thermal thruster,” permits “a spacecraft architecture that uses highly concentrated sunlight as a far lighter, less expensive, and higher performing alternative to electric power in space.”

There are still a few bugs to be worked out, At least, it seems after a couple decades of backwards steps, the manifest destiny for the human race to expand into the solar system is finally moving forward again.