Reminder: any such numbers are purely theoretical, and based on an infinite market capable of absorbing infinite amounts of product at current pricing levels. That is not the world we live in.
16 Psyche is far to big to move anywhere.<p>16 Psyche's mass is 2.27·10^19 kg and its orbital speed is 17.34 km/s.<p>Earth's orbital speed is 29.78 km/s.<p>So a perfect orbital transfer (not even possible) to get 16 Psyche into Earth's orbit would take an impulse of at least (29780.0 m/s - 17340.0 m/s) · 2.27·10^19 kg = 2.82388·10^23 kg·m/s.<p>A Saturn V rocket produces 3.51·10^7 N of thrust.<p>So it would take one Saturn V rocket 8.0452·10^15 seconds to move 16 Psyche, or 2.5511·10^08 years.<p>If we had 1 million Saturn V rockets, it would take just over 255 years.
What rubbish! A commodity only has value in a form and location where it is under demand. There is no way iron will ever be delivered to the surface of the Earth from an asteroid in a way cost-competitive to terrestrial mining. So the effective value with existing markets is zero.
Or just drag it into orbit under the guise of space mining, then drop large chunks of it on governments you don't like. Unstoppable once nudged into a drop. Completely annihilate your enemies.
Don't get me wrong -- I liked the asteroid recovery mission concept.<p>But this asteroid has radius of ~250km, so getting that into earth orbit was a bit out of the scope of the mission to begin with.
<i>[...] many others were worried about the absolute collapse in commodity prices that would have occurred if it were suddenly easy to get all the iron and nickel we’d need for centuries.</i><p>Worried? Because of falling prices? Looks like someone didn't pay attention during economics 101 or is afraid of going out of business.
What, is someone suggesting moving a 200KM asteroid closer to the earth? With what? A really big H-bomb?<p>It might be nice to go take a look, and it may be useful someday, but short of fusion drives, we're not going to be moving asteroid-sized hunks of iron around the Solar System.
Relevant might be Paul Krugman's college thesis at Princeton, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade"[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf</a>
Imagine how powerful whoever controlled this would be. In one stroke they could decimate economies that either have a lot of gold or whose central bank has a lot of gold. I'm just surprised the military, Cia or some other deep state agency isn't already on good.
Okay I have an important question about mineral rights. If something is in space, who do the mineral rights belong to? Whoever nabbed it? Or is that just uncharted and untested?
Let's hope Elon Musk doesn't find out about this. With his ambition and penchant for moon(mars?)shots he might just try redirecting this asteroid. Plus he owns a rocket company, so he's got more means to pursue such a goal than anyone else. But I'd sleep better knowing there isn't a 200km wide chunk of solid iron being redirected in our general direction by programmers who maybe fat-fingered a critical part of the data/algorithm somewhere.