[Rockhounds] How much are asteroids really worth?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Popular media love talking about asteroid mining using big numbers. Many
articles talk about a mission to Psyche, the largest metallic asteroid in
the asteroid belt, as visiting a body worth $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,
presumably because their authors like hitting the "0" key on their
keyboards a lot. But how realistic is that valuation? And what does it
actually mean?

A paper
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063322001945?ref=pdf_download&fr=RR-2&rr=8ea31ff4da9d43aa>
funded
by Astroforge, an asteroid mining
<https://phys.org/tags/asteroid+mining/> start-up
based in Huntington Beach, and written by a professor at the Colorado
School of Mine's Space Resources Program takes a good hard look at what
metals are available on asteroids and whether they'd genuinely be worth as
much as the simple calculations say that would be.

The paper divides metals on asteroids into two distinct types—those that
would be worth returning to Earth and those that wouldn't. Really, the only
metals judged to be worthy of returning to Earth are the platinum-group
metals (PGMs), which are known for their extraordinarily high cost,
relatively low supply, and high usefulness in a variety of modern-day
technology. That includes catalytic converters
<https://phys.org/tags/catalytic+converters/>, which is why they are
commonly the target of thieves.

The other category would be metals used for in-space construction, such as
iron, aluminum, and magnesium. While these might not be economically viable
to send back to Earth because of their relatively low prices on our home
planet, they are useful up in space for constructing large structures
<https://phys.org/tags/large+structures/>, such as space stations or solar
power arrays.
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-asteroids-worth.html