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The Biggest Economic Bootstrap Ever
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Quartz looked at the value of 10 meter asteroids of pure metal
Pure 10 meter Platinum Asteroid would be worth $12 billion
The density of platinum is 21.45 grams per cubic centimeter. (Okay fine, science nerds—that’s at room temperature, but in space we’re going to assume it’s still a solid and therefore reasonably similar. Deal with it.) If we assume that an entire spherical asteroid with a 10 meter diameter (about 523 cubic meters) is made of platinum, and that one of these asteroid miners could harvest the whole thing, then they’d get about 11.2 million kg of platinum. At current market rates, that comes out to $12.1 billion.
10% Ten meter Nickel Asteroids are worth $8.1 million
Although asteroids of pure metal exist, they’re most likely to be mixes of roughly 90% iron and 10% nickel. A tenth of our asteroid (52.3 cu m, or 466,000 kg) made of nickel would be worth about $8.1 million at last month’s market rates. The iron—well, iron ore is so cheap that it hardly adds anything.
Earth Imaging and Space imaging Data and Space Telescopes are multi-billion dollar markets
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2013-01-26 14:00:49 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/01/the-biggest-economic-bootstrap-ever.html
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