What Mineral Resources Exist in Space?
Outer space has extremely rich mineral resources, especially in the form of nickel and iron from iron-nickel asteroids. The asteroid 16 Psyche, a 200 km (125 mi) wide asteroid that makes up 1% of the material in the asteroid belt, contains 1.7 x 1019 kilograms of ore, enough to supply the 2007 world production requirement for millions of years. A more modest asteroid, just a kilometer in size, could contain billions of tonnes of iron-nickel ore. For reference, the annual world production of iron ore is about a billion tonnes. About 800 billion tonnes of iron ore resources exist worldwide, which seems like a lot, but if consumption rates continue to grow exponentially, it might be completely dug up in under a century, necessitating iron from elsewhere.
