Comment by jmyeet
2 days ago
If there were infinite gold bars just sitting on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go collect them and bring them back to Earth. No matter how expensive you think any metals are here on Earth, the cost of launching vehicles, rendezvousing with said metals and bringing them back to Earth makes it uneconomical.
An asteroid is much, much further than that but more important than distance is the delta-V required for change its orbit to reach an Earth orbit. So you not only need to get there, which, as discussed, requires in-orbit refuelling with Starship (or any vehicle), but you have to carry all the fuel you need for the orbital burn to bring it back. The rocket equation just kills this immediately.
You really hope you have to get incredibly lucky that an metallic asteroid is on a near-intercept course with Earth that is just shy or going into orbit. The odds for that are, well, astronomical.
That depends on how much a unit of delta-v costs. If you can do the whole mission for $100/kg, quite a few things become economical.
If we ever mine for gold in space, I suspect it would be more economical to leave the gold there than to bring it down to earth. Most gold ownership never results in delivery, people just own receipts for gold stored elsewhere.
I’ve always found it amusing that so much effort goes into extracting gold from the Earth when such a substantial amount of it goes right back underground into some vault.
Matt Levine has discussed similar theme for sub surface gold on earth[1]. NatGold is the company mentioned which tokenizes that.
Obviously pre-mined should trade lower than earth mined gold. Price should be something like Earth gold pricing- mining cost - cost to transport back to earth (or location based prcing, we are some time away from space based economics). Basically you will be trading rights for mining for a particular space mine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-11-24/lea... (paywalled)