There’s a 173 mile wide asteroid floating around just past Mars that could be worth 10 quadrillion dollars. That’s a 10 with 15 zeros behind it. We’ve known about it a couple years. What’s new is that NASA is going to send a craft to check it out. It’s supposed to be full of valuable metals like nickel, iron, and gold. If someone can get a hold of all that, it’d be worth more than the yearly Gross National Product of every country on Earth combined.
But don’t start planning on how the US can spend it just yet. The craft NASA is sending with take 6 years just to reach it. Then it’ll spend a couple years studying it. I’m sure they’re thinking of ways to get all the goods out of it, but nobody’s has made any public. In my head, I can see us sending machines to mine it there and then bring it back, which would cost a whoooooole lot of money to do. But it would probably be safer than the other option which would be to move the asteroid closer to Earth. Or, maybe we can crash it into the moon. I bet that’s being discussed as “safer”, more cost effective compromise. Or, maybe the government can finally admit that we have alien technology and we can finally just use the transporter devices.
The probe craft is schedule to take of October 6th.