So, China is considering temporarily capturing an asteroid in earth’s orbit and then mining it for all it’s valuable metals. Mining from a mile long asteroid could be worth something like 25 trillion dollars. Good thing we still have that space shuttle program..oh wait..
“At first glance, nudging an asteroid closer to Earth seems like one of those “what could possible go wrong” scenarios that we generally try and avoid, and for good reason: large asteroid impacts are bad times. The Chinese, though, seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon. The orbit would be unstable, and eventually (after a few years) the asteroid would head back out into space from whence it came, but it would stick there long enough for us to poke around on it.
While the Chinese are likely going to start small (the prime candidate right now is a 30-foot-wide rock), they’re thinking bigger. Much bigger. Like, over a mile bigger, since a metallic asteroid that size would be worth an absolutely staggering amount of money. Now, were something to get screwed up and that mile-wide metallic asteroid hit Earth instead, we’d be looking at something like a 24-mile-wide crater and a fireball so large that trees 200 miles away would spontaneously burst into flames.”
Sounds like a great idea, except for that 24 mile crater and the apocalypse..
From: Dvice and Geekologie
