NASA planning mission to an asteroid worth $10,000 quadrillion

usatoday.com

12 points·vezycash··7 comments

Because USA Today is driving me insane with its "relatable" dollar figure without talking about size or composition...

"16 Psyche is one of the ten most-massive asteroids in the asteroid belt. It is over 200 kilometers in diameter and contains a little less than 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. It is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet...

Radar observations indicate that Psyche has a fairly pure iron–nickel composition."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche

The purity of it seems like it would allow for easier manufacturing in space. Thus you can build components, especially the larger bigs, without having to expensively send them up from the earth's surface.

The staggering supposed worth is beacause of the shear size of the asteroid, not the preciousness of its contents. Iron ore is only worth about 4 cents per pound on earth. There's just a lot of it.

And they forget what would happen to the price of iron if the supply went up 100000x .

Yeah exactly. That's why I hate articles like this.

NASA sending probe to Earth, a planet that is worth roughly (All of the money ever). They plan to exploit it for resources that will be used, in part, for space exploration.

You're on a trajectory beyond a 64 bit number of dollars there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com