The math is astounding: A 140-mile-wide metal-rich asteroid is estimated to have a commercial value of quadrillions of dollars, a total that exceeds the entire global economy.
Investors like all those zeroes, as evidenced by space startups around the world having raised tens of millions of dollars to back the developing and testing of asteroid-mining technologies. Their ambition is to cull from those stellar bodies some rare and precious metals, including cobalt, gallium, gold, iridium, magnesium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium and others.
Still, some in the scientific community are rife with misgivings about whether the private sector can afford asteroid mining. Consider that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, the first U.S. mission to collect an asteroid sample and bring it back to Earth, cost millions of dollars while returning a trifling 122 grams of material. Despite the paltry take, that mission stands as the largest asteroid samp