An asteroid with an astonishing estimated value of $10 quintillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000), which NASA is actively working to reach, could have profound and surprising consequences.
In 2023, the U.S. space agency announced its plan to launch a mission toward the highly valuable asteroid known as 16 Psyche. Believed to contain massive quantities of precious metals including gold, iron, and nickel, NASA is particularly eager to study – and possibly retrieve – this cosmic treasure.
“Engineering and technical teams have been working almost non-stop to ensure that the orbiter is ready for its 2.5-billion-mile journey toward a metal-rich asteroid that could teach us more about planetary cores and how planets are formed,” NASA said in a statement in July 2023.
The mission officially launched in October 2023, when the spacecraft was lifted from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Traveling at a speed of roughly 84,000 mph through space, the probe is expected to arrive at 16 Psyche in August 2029.
Although 16 Psyche has long been known to scientists, new insights are continually being discovered about this uniquely valuable asteroid. According to Newsweek, the asteroid’s predicted value is 100,000 times greater than the current global GDP, estimated at $100 trillion, due to its abundant stores of gold, platinum, and cobalt. Theoretically, such wealth could make every human on Earth a billionaire.
However, not everyone sees this as good news. Many have expressed concern that retrieving such massive amounts of gold and other metals could cause a complete collapse in their market value, leading to devastating economic consequences for many investors. One person commented:
“It wouldn’t make everyone a billionaire — it would turn many billionaires into zero. Gold would lose all its value.”
Another added:
“The price of gold would crash, and nobody would become a billionaire. It’s just supply and demand.”
NASA estimates that the asteroid — which has a surface area of roughly 64,000 square miles (165,800 km²) — is composed of 30 to 60 percent metal. It may also contain the exposed iron-nickel core of an early planet, thought to be one of the building blocks of our solar system.
If the materials on 16 Psyche are indeed worth $10 quintillion, and that wealth were somehow distributed equally among Earth’s population, every person alive today could, in theory, become incredibly rich.
