Asteroid Mining

As we know, the Earth’s resources are finite. There are only so many materials and metals that we can extract from Earth before it runs out. To help combat this problem, a new solution was envisioned, asteroid mining. What asteroid mining would do is collect precious metals from asteroids near Earth. Some of these include platinum and other minerals.

An important aspect to this is the cost. The cost to send the infrastructure to the asteroid would be around 2.6 billion USD. The infrastructure itself would have a steep cost, which would cost hundreds of millions if not billions to develop. Would this cost be worth it? Well according to a case study, there could be 25-50 billion dollars’ worth of platinum on platinum rich asteroids. Although this may seem worth it, at any point during the flight the shuttle could fail and all that money that was invested is lost. So, only time will tell if asteroid mining could be a viable option.

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