This is a really exciting mission, imho - probably one of the most exciting of all current space missions.
The reason is that 16 Psyche is hypothesized to be a very, very rich ball of metal. A million times the material wealth we have here on Earth, in fact. More gold, silver, platinum, iron, zinc, etc. than we can even fathom exists, accessible on our surface here on Earth.
If we arrive and find it full of gold and other valuable metals, I'd imagine the following 10 years afterwards, humans are going to be on a race to get there, set up shop, and start 3D-printing Starships.
Its far-fetched and fantastic, but I could imagine a scenario where this race really takes off. 10 years from now, we might very well have the technology to exploit this gigantic ball of materials in super interesting ways. (Assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion, obviously. Lets just put that aside.)
Imagine, we start moving heavy-metal industries to space. 3D Printers set up shop on the 16 Psyche surface, and starts churning out Starships (which by then should be perfected for human-rated travel around our star system, hopefully).
One can dream. I sure hope I'm alive to see the first pictures of arrival.
Gold as a store of value would probably be worse off than bitcoin in this case but personally I hope it's either that or copper - would mean a lot for world electrification.
It would affect the market for gold as a store of value, certainly. But for actual useful economic purposes, the cost of getting those metals back to the surface of the Earth would be so eye-wateringly expensive that I don't know if it would even make sense.
A single SpaceX Starship claims to have a reusable payload of 150 tons. Current annual mining operations extract 21 million tons of copper, 3,000 tons of gold, and 300 tons of platinum. So let's focus on platinum. You'd need two starships per year to match current platinum production. But it's a 12-year round trip, so you'd need 24 starships in continuous operation just to haul the metals (let's ignore where they're getting their fuel from for the return trip). And that's before you get to the actual costs of the mining operation itself; bootstrapping fully autonomous robotic space mining on a rock 200 million miles away is going to take more money that anyone has lying around. And the final result of this is that you've spent a trillion dollars just to crash the market for platinum.
You need to consider the costs associated with in-orbit mining and then de-orbiting the material before declaring terrestrial mining dead. Those are big unknowns at the moment.
It might only be useful for in-orbit manufacturing, which is also a near complete unknown at this point. Pretty exciting for anybody contemplating building massive orbital stations.
The reason is that 16 Psyche is hypothesized to be a very, very rich ball of metal. A million times the material wealth we have here on Earth, in fact. More gold, silver, platinum, iron, zinc, etc. than we can even fathom exists, accessible on our surface here on Earth.
If we arrive and find it full of gold and other valuable metals, I'd imagine the following 10 years afterwards, humans are going to be on a race to get there, set up shop, and start 3D-printing Starships.
Its far-fetched and fantastic, but I could imagine a scenario where this race really takes off. 10 years from now, we might very well have the technology to exploit this gigantic ball of materials in super interesting ways. (Assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion, obviously. Lets just put that aside.)
Imagine, we start moving heavy-metal industries to space. 3D Printers set up shop on the 16 Psyche surface, and starts churning out Starships (which by then should be perfected for human-rated travel around our star system, hopefully).
One can dream. I sure hope I'm alive to see the first pictures of arrival.